I don’t have any problem with memorizing lists using mind palaces. I can do it relatively fast. My only problem emerges when I just want to memorize texts. I just want to know what your approach to this is? Do you create a mental image for each sentence (or small sections of text) and put mental images in your mind palace and then just repeat and practice until you can recall the text from your memory palace correctly?
Before I describe my problem and approach, I just encountered something bizarre. My first language isn’t English. I learned English by myself and I’m not fully fluent in it yet (My CEFR level is something between B1 and B2) but I found English passages to be much easier to memorize than passages in my native language and I don’t still know why but I guess it’s because I have an inner enthusiasm for English (I just like the English language even more than my native language) and this emotional connection with English might make its passages easier to memorize than my native language. Okay let’s explain my exact problem (Sorry if I am a little bit wordy and write with verbosity).
So when I started to memorize texts using mind palaces, the first thing I did was to imagine the written form of every word in the text on the walls of my memory palace, and it wasn’t bad but was time-consuming and required a lot of repetition (I couldn’t visualize the written form of words clearly). So I decided to create a mental image for each word as I go through the text. It was much better, but I had two main problems with this (And still have):
I needed a locus for each words which means I needed an overwhelmingly amount of loci if I want to memorize a rich lengthy article verbatim. It would just use all of memory palace for just one article let alone memorizing a complete book.
It was still time-consuming and somewhat frustrating. I just needed to think a lot for some words to come up with a proper mental image.
So I just decided to connect multiple mental images together and put every group of 3 or 4 words in each locus. This would reduce the number of loci needed but caused so much confusion. So I decided to do something else.
I understood this is essentially wrong to create mental images for individual words. So I decided to do something pretty different: Create a single mental image for each sentence of half of a sentence and put it in memory palace and then (after doing this for all sentences) repeat until I strengthened the connection between the mental images and sentences to a good extent. This can be done by first create a simple mental image for sentence. Then try to recall the sentence by just mental image and then if I get stuck on a specific word, I would just add more details to mental image or add a little cue to mental image to remember that specific word.
This was so much better, but I still need repetitions. Also, this happens a lot that I recall mental image but uh… I can’t recall the exact sentence verbatim. I recall a paraphrased version of the sentence (This happens more in my native language). So I want to know about your approach. Do you guys use my the same approach where creating mental image for small sections of text until strengthened the connection? I am a little bit confused is this the best approach to memorize texts using mind palaces or not. Thanks.
However, what I don’t do is disparage verbatim or lists.
This sentence is a list of the words in this sentence.
This new paragraph ends the list of one-sentence paragraphs in this post. The fact that it has two sentences does not change the fact that it is still a list of words and a list of sentences.
Injecting humor aside, this is a really important point that helps quite a few people in my experience. There is a strange tendency to think that lists are somehow a problem, when in fact recognizing time’s arrow guarantees just about everything we do and say compiles into or comes out of lists is the solution.
In terms of having fewer mnemonic associations project more words, that’s very doable and I have called it “compression” for many years. There’s a sentence in my TEDx Talk that has 17 words, all of which were compressed into 5 associations.
Most of the other sentences had perhaps 2-3 mnemonic associations.
Note that my associations are rarely one dimensional. They will tend to have 4-8 dimensions and sometimes more depending on the “resistance” to the information that might arise.
In my experience, information is never even or equal. One does best by compressing where possible, but just taking it all one section, syllable, or even individual letter at a time. If that’s what it takes, and often enough, it does.
I like to compress sentences in a single word and this word that represents the sentence becomes images, that is the word contains a number of letters and those letters are transformed into images and these images in turn contain other images that define the concept, each image that represents the letter or element has 4 things associated as could be person, action, object and assistant … remembering that you can add more to the formula as man, action, object, animal, woman, children, food and place… it also depends on the task in question, well although it is not so easy, I always add things and depending on the task requirement I use maps from videogames like assasin’s creed unity for basic to advanced mathematics… to make it easier you could use abstract pegs, i.e. use the letters of the word and transform each letter into a random image, these images in turn contain words, associate everything after you have the images and words associated with the elements (letters) e.g. actor = apple, clean, tiger, odor, rabbit. To each thing you add part of the words to memorize, you will only need a single loci for this main image that is the actor, you can also try to dress the actor with parts of the images, this single image will contain sentences… well it can be adapted to everyone.
So, in a nutshell, your method is this: we take a keyword from the sentence and use the letters of that keyword to remember different parts of the sentence. Is that right? We would link each letter to a word or section in the text. For instance, if we have the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” and I choose the word “brown” (or “BrownFox”), I would associate “b” with a banana and then visualize a quick banana that moves at lightning speed (for the part “The quick”). Then I would associate “r” with a rat and visualize a fox and a rat playing together (for the part “fox”). Then I would associate “o” with a ball (the letter “o” looks like a perfect round ball) and visualize a jumping ball (for the part “jumps over”). Finally, I would associate “w” with the word “wet” and visualize a wet lazy dog (for the part “the lazy dog”). Then I simply would put a brown fox in my memory palace. Whenever I see the brown fox, I decode it to get the sentence. This approach works well, but I’m not sure what to do with other sentences. We did make some associations for this sentence, but for other sentences, we should make different associations. For example, we associated “b” with banana, but we can’t do that again for other sentences because it might lead to confusion. We should come up with another association for the letter “b”. I think it’s difficult to come up with distinct associations for each sentence in a long text or article. Other than that, I think your method is really great.
If I want to differentiate an image from another one I have already used, I use the Aristotelian categories:
What Are Aristotle’s 10 Categories?
Aristotle developed a system of 10 categories in his work “Organon”, where he explores predicative logic. These categories are fundamental questions we can ask about any object or image to describe it completely. By applying these questions to our mnemonic images, we increase the specificity of the image, which makes it easier to remember. The categories are as follows:
Substance - What is it in essence - is it a person, an animal, an object?
Quantity - How much is there? How big or small is it?
Quality - What is it like? Is it smooth, rough, shiny, dark?
Relationship - How does it relate to other things? Is it bigger or smaller?
Place - Where is it? Is it inside or outside? Is it in a specific building?
Time - When does it occur? Is it day or night? Is it recent or a long time ago?
Position - How is he/she sitting, standing, lying down?
State/Condition - How is he/she equipped? Is he/she armed, protected, vulnerable?
Action - What is he/she doing? Is he/she running, writing, painting?
Affection - What is happening to him/her? What is he/she experiencing or suffering?
Let’s say we have a banana within a previous scene, let’s say it’s big by adding the category quantity, in the next one it explodes by adding the category affection, and so on.
You can also use words that cover the sentence as a whole, for example:
Beneath. Who sleep beneath the shadow of its branches by the waters Cover.
Taken from thirty seals of giordano bruno, seal of the tree.
This one is very simple to observe and memorize, so to memorize a text you would only have to place a man using a tree as an umbrella and around him a circle of water… Well just by observing the man underneath I will remember the quote or prayer… But if it is not something minimally representable I will break down a word that represents the subject and use it as an abstract peg, your example is correct.
although you will hardly run out of images for a letter and if you don’t find an image for a letter skip it and add two images to one letter.
Nice. I will put these 10 categories in a good place in my mind palace and refer to them later every time I memorize things in my mind palace to make my mental images clear. Thank you very much.
The title is “The Archer (Centaur).” I added the centaur to make it more memorable. The bow represents setting goals, and the acronym GTD forms an image that defines the location of the next representation of the method.
He captures some deer. His partner processes the meat in a grinder. His partner organizes the captured animals, prioritizing those with red fur. He checks that they are in good condition. The archer makes a fire to cook the meat.
