Hi folks, this is my first post here and I’m a beginner on memory technics. I’ve read about different memory technics, and when it comes to remembering more when I’m reading non-fiction ”, or why not when reading news.
What is the best way to do this, as I’ve understood I can use Memory palace for this ans also Story Method. But what is the real use of the Memory palace? Say that I whould want to remember 20 Swedish kings and Queens sucessing each other. Is there a point in using locis?
Absolutely.
This type of task is perfectly suited to the memory palace technique.
You can create a 20 loci journey and at each one, place images that represent the names of the king and queen interacting with each other and the loci.
You’ll be amazed at how easy it will be to recall and retain this info using this approach!
As says @TheHumanTim, I too say yes, you can use loci to help remember a list of people.
As an example … I used the journey through my home to memorize the presidents of the United States, and sometimes reinforce images using my major number peg system. Here is a small sample:
Etcetera up until the current president 46. Hopefully you can see how this is going. Before I had gone through this exercise, I had heard of most of the presidents’ names but not all of them, and I had no idea in what order. I primarily wanted to fill in the gaps and know what order they were in. Now that I have done this, if someone asks who the 27th president is, I can reverse-lookup 27 which is kNiFe in the major number system, which is the cabinet where I store videos (old school DVDs and Blu-rays), and Woodrow Wilson is slicing up the videos with a knife.
A lot of memorization techniques involve building up some kind of parallel scaffolding to the thing you want to remember to make memorizing it easier. But it takes effort to build that scaffolding. For each thing you want to remember, it is best to take a few minutes to take a step back and decide what technique you will want to use to memorize the information.
Note that you should not shy away from using other memorization techniques if they help you … acronyms/acrostics, simple association, flashcards and spaced repetition, etc. They can have a place, as well.
Before learning anything about memorization techniques, I had hoped memory techniques would let me be able to scoop up all information as I came across it. This was naive, but we can improve a lot over brute force. It still takes effort and lots of practice to get good at it. Our minds are limited, and our lives are finite. You can learn anything you want, but you cannot learn everything you want. What you learn and memorize in part defines who you are. Becoming more efficient at learning will let you be a little more of who you want to be.
He’s riding a SeaL (05) in mine… 
Thank you! If I use my home when applying Memory palace, how should I think egen portioning out the locis? Is it better to ha e 20 of them in one rom then let’s say spread them over all my 4 rooms + hallway +balchony?
Only you can answer that question for yourself!
Some people have no problem cramming a ton of loci in a small space, others need some separation between them. Play around and see what works best for you.
It may depend on the type of memorizing you’re doing. If you are working on a project designed to stay in your long term memory with an unchanging set of data, it may not be a problem to have a larger number of loci per area since you can take the time to craft each scene fully.
If you ever try to go for speed, competition style, you may find that it gets too cluttered and when creating and placing imagery very quickly you need more space between loci to avoid swapping and skipping issues during recall.
I use both styles depending on the application. My speed card palaces are much more spread out, only a couple loci per “room,” but for long term projects like presidents or table of the elements that I can spend much more time on, I have many loci clustered in a smaller space.
Thanks a lot! That helps, I will try this the next time I read a factbook.
I like your notion about memory and how it kind of enhances your ”you”.
I wonder is there is reasonable to use these methods also in real time, as I read? Or is it much better to sum up after one chapter and than use the technics to get it structured? Maybe both?
I mean, I like to read non-fiction a mot and I also di a great deal of reading for work. I don’t have to score on any examen or likewise, but it would be nice to remember a lot more of what I read even if it takes a bit of extra effort. But maybe there is a way to store the information in the memory on the fly, kind of like making images of the ”narrative” or so?
Given my level of experience, I have no chance of memorizing as I read. My approach is to read, summarize (not quite the Feynman technique), give it a structure I can relate to (outline, diagram, etc.), and then figure out a strategy to memorize the information.
It would be interesting to find out if more experienced memorizers on the forum can take in information efficiently as they read.
I feel like you’d almost have to do the encoding after reading some specified chunk of text (paragraph, page, sub-topic… Not entirely sure where the dividing line would be, it would all depend on the context of the subject and the verbosity of the author.) Reason being, not every word, sentence, or even possibly paragraph or page would be necessarily relevant to your overall understanding of the subject as a whole.
If you tried to encode every word or even each sentence as you went, you’d end up with a ton of irrelevant stuff clogging your palaces.
Possibly the only scenario I could see needing the 1-to-1 approach or close to verbatim memorization would be poetry or religious texts where total accuracy is important.
Actively thinking about and working with the information PRIOR to memorization makes for much more effective memorization because you can then sift through and identify the important parts for encoding and retention. I feel like even though you’d be pausing and reviewing and THEN memorizing, you’d still be saving time in the long run because you’d only be encoding what really matters so when you go to review later on, it’s focused and relevant.
Cool, got it. Do you peps always have the the habit of using memory technics while reading?