Hello everyone, what do you do when memorizing non-sequential information? For instance, I suppose you pin the information itself to an image. Could you explain a bit about how you do this? Also, I assume you review these images using flashcards or similar tools. After all, even if you associate the information with something, aren’t we still throwing it into a random part of the brain? What are your thoughts? Thanks.
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do you mind giving an example?
Sequential - this is really useful to use your number image system as the framework / scaffold, or a journey
Non sequential information - this can be done by way of linking or joining them in some way. Eg I want to know all the characters from My Brilliant Friend which I am reading at the moment. Great book, by the way. Pinnucia is a character who works at the grocer’s family, so I imagine I am shopping for pins when I think of her. So that helps me remember that is the family she belongs to. But you can also then place that linked chunk of information in a location as well, if that will help you remember. Eg I could make a little memory palace for the characters
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Anything nonsequential can be represented sequentially, I think.
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For example, suppose I encountered a concept related to the subject I’m studying and didn’t find it worth placing into a memory palace, because understanding it when I see it is enough for me. Take the concept of “hydrolysis” in biology, for instance. If you memorize this as a single group, concepts like it double the amount of things you need to memorize. However, if you know that “hydro” means water and “lysis” means breaking down, you’ll also be able to decipher many future terms in the textbook.
Now, returning to the example, let’s say when I see “hydro” and “lysis,” I consider it something I just need to translate and comprehend, and I decide: “I won’t put this into my memory palace,” so I simply attach an image to the word itself and leave it at that.
In other words, you seem to be suggesting that it’s better not to treat information as completely non-sequential, because even in the book you’re reading, you connect the things you want to know and create a certain sequence. You mentioned, “I could make a little memory palace for the characters.” I would be grateful if you could give me an example regarding this. How do you place those pieces of information you want to know from a book into a memory palace?
Could you give an example?
This is my favorite type of information 
Non-sequential information (NSI) can be thought of as a holistic, big-picture, or gestalt type of task. It is more about knowing where every bit of information fits into the whole than trying to find some sort of logical order between each bit.
For me, NSI is intuitive because I can think to myself, “Where in the whole does this detail occur?” i.e. “What is its absolute position?” I have two strategies for memorizing NSI.
First, I try to develop an absolute sense of where things are. Example: I can picture Kansas as being right in the middle of the contiguous USA.
Second, I make stories to link different pieces of information to each other without needing some sort of sequence. For instance, let’s suppose I know the shapes of Mississippi and Alabama, but I forget which one is which. The shape in the west/left has an intricate western border, while the shape on the right is mostly made of straight lines. I then remember that the Mississippi River flows in a wavy pattern, which forms the western edge of what can only be Mississippi. Meanwhile, the straight lines create a state that looks like the letter A for Alabama.
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I feel like it depends on the person. Some people are naturally better at assigning some sort of order or sequence to definitions/concepts, so that everything links together logically. Others would rather—like you are suggesting—place a concept in the ether, so to speak.
My personal strategy, when faced with, say, 25 concepts in biology, would be to draw images or write the words for these concepts on a piece of paper. Naturally, definition recall (you are given the term and have to remember its definition) is not a problem. The difference between full-picture and sequential comes in how you would list all 25 concepts without prompting (which is harder because you might forget the two remaining concepts after having listed 23). Sequence-type people would traverse their memory palace one by one. Holistic-type people, like I, try to think: “When I jotted down the concepts on that piece of paper, where on the paper was that concept positioned?” I can also use relative coordinates, like left/right/up/down, to navigate.
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Everyone would do this a bit differently but if i were to make a palace / journey for the characters i would:
- Create a very small area or location for each family. for example- There is the grocers family and the shoe makers family. So i would think of a grocery store or shoe shop and then i would turn the character names into something i can associate to a feature or part of the grocery store/ shoe shop
- Create a sequetial journey and do the family members one by one
I havent needed to do this for this book as i just used other faster ways (such as a brother and sister having first names that start with A, making a little story with parts of the names of the other characters, to remember they go together, and so on)