I looked through some beginner guides, but I feel like there’s still a lot for me to learn before I ever get started. So I’m going to go ahead and ask all my questions and just hope someone can point me in the right direction? Sorry for being so long winded.
What are the best methods for remembering large amounts of data? Like for instance every capital, flag and language of every country in the world? How about if I wanted to remember the major events of every single day from now till I die? So I could go back one day and name what happened to me on Saturday, April 11th 2020? What about word for word quotes, or entire passages? I wouldn’t put that in a memory palace, would I? What if I want to remember the face and name of every single person I’ve ever met? How about information with a ton of visual data? Like if I wanted to memorize my entire local map? Or aromas, maybe I want a mental data base of what every herb, flower and perfume smells like? How about skills? What about languages?
These are all a means to an end for me, the memory competitions are interesting, but I’m really only interested in knowing stuff for personal use and for the long term. I am willing to use multiple methods and put in whatever work necessary. A lot of people use memory palaces, but to me that seems like too much. I would end up needing tens of thousands of loci, and I’m not sure if I would need to go through the palace just to remember one thing. I’m also not sure about how I would store a smell, or a sound or an entire play or speech etc. There’s so many techniques, what are some that I should focus on?
A lot of questions indeed. I would like to say that it is like riding a bike. Sure I can tell you everything about it, and sure I can answer any questions you have, but the only way to learn it is by doing it. Practice and discover. Half of the questions you asked are not just simple matters of knowing how it is done and then you are able to do it, you have to experiment and build a basis, so you can move from there and use systems that work for you, rather than those made by others.
Turning it into chunks, stories, or images. Putting them in palaces, peg lists, image clusters, whatever you like. you mentioned that you prefer to not use palaces because they seem to be too much. I would like to counter that by mentioning that mnemonics is in no way a shortcut. It is an alternative that requires you to put in a lot of work beforehand, so you don’t have to do all the work afterwards.
A pale looking Emir wearing black robes with a red sleeve and a green hat walks into a store. Behind him is a long line of arabs interlocking their arms to form a chain. Behind the counter, an arabic man. The emir buys a vacation for each of the arabs behind him. Each ticket he collects in a cup which he hands down the line.
There you got the United Arab Emirates, whose capital is Dubai and the flag is a vertical red line, with green, white and black bars next to it. Some of their biggest aspects of the economy are business and tourism. The country is located in the “cup” of the middle eastern countries.
Just make your image, repeat the image and the meaning a few times, and you got it burned in your mind.
Make a palace, list, or any other tool to help you run though a lot of bullet points in order. Each place is a day, and then you just make images for what you want to remember of that day. Or you can keep a journal, that works too, because in all my years on this globe I have never needed to recall exactly on which day I did something special.
If the exact words and order are important, yes, that is a good way to do it. If not, it still is a very good way.
Turn their face into a caricaturistic image, turn their name into an image, combine the images. Oh, and be genuinly interested and focussed on names. Don’t remember because you want to remember, do so because deep inside you feel as if their name is the most important bit of information in the world.
Turn it into one huge memory palace. Or see what others did. Here we have a topic with some information on The Knowledge required to be mastered by London cab drivers: London Taxi Drivers: Memorizing "The Knowledge"
Study smells, know what makes a smell unique. What aspects are there to a certain smell. Warmth, sweetness, sharpness, etc. And work with smells, a lot. Smell things when you get the chance. Walk through a plant store, go smell the mint and lavender to remember.
I take it you mean skills like drawing or skating. Go do them, that is how you best memorize them.
Been asked a lot here, I believe the beginners page also has a part dedicaded to how to start this.
But same as the previous: do it. If you want to speak a language, go out and speak it.
Again, there are no shortcuts. You have to put in the hours if you want to see the results. I feel you suffer from Analysis Paralysis at the moment, where you don’t feel like you are prepared enough to start. There is one way, and only one way, to get through that: start doing. You will never be prepared enough until you actually start doing.
Thank you for all the answers. You are right analysis paralysis is a good term for it. I want to memorize so much it is a bit overwhelming, I can certainly just start trying new things, that’s good advice. If you don’t mind I would like to ask a few more questions though.
You mentioned that a memory palace is a good way to remember the major events of a day, as well as a good way to memorize speeches and passages etc. The reason I thought it wouldn’t be is because it would take so much room. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of separate pieces of data. I don’t know how I could review that all in just one day, or do I need to?
Can you have more than one piece of data in a single loci, creating 50,000 different locations might require me to invent buildings I’ve never actually seen before?
When you go through the memory palace it’s always in the same order so, do you have to walk through the whole place to recall one memory or is it always there? I’ve read through a lot of forums but haven’t been able to find that information, or the info is contradictory.
Also, with the names and faces, I have a pretty good imagination, but I just looked at some celebrities and I have absolutely no ability to imagine them as caricatures whatsoever. But even if I could, it’s still a face, I’m kind of confused about that one.