Help with shifting memory palaces

When using a room as a memory palace, sometimes I may automatically jump to another room with the same orientation and start encoding there before I realize the shift, anyone else having this problem?, I need help!!!

About this, it still happens but I have decided it isn’t that bad after all :smiling_face:.

I am now more conscious of the ‘jumps’ and I notice the particular place(s) in a palace that cause this jumps during encoding or recall and can avoid them if need be or use them with extra focus. It also serves as a method of palace extension ( when two locations ‘naturally’ link, I can use the second location to encode more things).

I think the ‘problem’ came from a tendency to strip locations down to the minimum (this may have come due to memory training?:thinking:). I noticed that when reading novels or books that somehow stimulate ‘natural’ imagination, I imagine the events and they take place in a location that’s based on the novel’s description but when I think about the seemingly ‘new’ location, it turns out to be a real location just as many of my images for the characters turn out to seem based on people that I know. So my theory is that sometimes I perceive real new locations as other places with added ‘fluff’ and my brain wants to reduce them down.

Now my imagination even when reading novels is not as vivid, continous and natural. So I can consciously decide on and modify the images and locations.

This maybe better since with the ‘natural’ method I was using, my focus was on the story and I could end up using the same place from different views multiple times in a particular story or using the same place for lots of stories. I only noticed this when I started thinking in yerms of locations rather than stories, I find that thinking about a particular location brings along a number of story parts from novels and real memories as well (can be quite fun). I don’t think novels read for fun should be consciously stored anyway​:joy:. Maybe just special parts​:thinking:.

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Good morning :slight_smile:

To address your room jump issue:

An interesting little trick is to color each room individually!!
You could, if studying the elemental chart, color each room per element.

Try it and report back here with the results :slight_smile:
Stefos

Maybe the problem is not that the locations are “simple” but that their key characteristics are similar?

In one of my memory palaces I have a serie of five doors (house entrances) in a row and I chose and amplified one trait of these loci precisely with the aim to avoid mixing them up. First has a bike parked next to the door, second has a nice set of chairs and a coffee table along the wall, third has a garbage can, fourth is painted orange and the last has a modern awning compared to the others. The key is that the anchor for the memory is different from the other similar locations.

Edit: I’m not a fan of distinguishing by colour because, does it change anything? If it makes no difference to the story (the mnemonics) that it happens before a blue wall or before a red wall, my brain is going to ignore the colour as not significant.

Hi,

I would agree with this statement that if the characteristics are similar, confusion will set in. I had to memorize the planets & their zodiac signs…never fun when material is very similar :slight_smile:

In regards to using colour to distinguish rooms, that was just a simple experiment.
The real meat of the matter is creating a hard & clear Start/Stop point for each room…if needed, an interim room symbol (ie. separating room from room in the palaces hallway as an example before moving on) can be used.

Stefos

I do have a system with 10 “atmosphere” (which is similar to color), and it does work well but I’m always careful that it impacts what’s happening. For example, 9 is white/frozen and the people are cold, heavily clothed, slipping on the icy ground, doing their thing quickly and unlikely to tarry, etc.

It’s like shaper vs major, once it’s memorized it feels more natural and intuitive, but the work upfront to memorize/visualize is greater. (At least for me, it may be personal, I tend to be a more conceptual than visual memorizer).