Hello everyone, I have only recently come to know the method of the memory palace, and I am starting to put it into practice. I still have trouble creating suggestive interactions between the images that correspond to the keyword and the ‘loci’. Does anyone have any tips for me to improve and speed up with time? Thanks in advance to who will answer. < 3
There are several threads where people have been thinking about how make loci / items memorable.
Like Benchmark of memorable image qualities
As for you becoming better and quicker at it, well it’s like (almost) everything in life: practice, practice, practice… 
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Yes, what I do when I am assigned large amounts of information to memorize (and I use a memory palace) is to first alphabetize the list of things. If I have 150 recipes to memorize I only alphabetize the drink name, not the ingredients or anything else, and I use one single memory palace location for the entire drink recipe, not one station for each ingredient (as some people suggest).
By alphabetizing the drinks I find it easy to recall which drink comes next in the memory palace based on what first letter and order of vowels come next.
Sometimes though it’s almost impossible to associate one station with a particular term. So in those cases I’ll either skip the station or create a new station object that isn’t there to attach my drink name to, and record it in my memory journal and on my palace map, where the image invokes the term I need to recall more intuitively.
Are you using an actual place you know well as your memory palace(s)? That’s what I do exclusively, and I don’t believe I’ve ever had an issue looking at a location in my mind and recalling the main image I’ve placed there. (I occasionally do need to refresh myself on additional information associated with the main image.)
For me, there’s rarely any kind of “interaction” between the location and item I’ve placed there. The item is simply “there”—on top of, under, or in place of the item that exists in that location in the real world.
Bob
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Of course… I know what you’re saying and agree as I mostly do the same thing, but some locations require a bit of finagle. One side of a long oak paneled hallway with four identical brass lighting sconces… each one a station. A main doorway with a breezeway overhead. Some of them don’t make very good platforms to put an image on - like a table, so I like to do a little PAO - put a person there performing an action so now it becomes part of the name of the drink. The Ginger Grove for instance (an alcohol free mocktail). I put Grover from Sesame Street and Ralph Cramden of the Honeymooners (for cranberry juice) up there. Etc. I think in a different location it would “pop” a lot better. But I will tell you, memorizing mocktails is the most boring thing in the world to me, like learning esperanto.
One other observation though is this. Gaugan and Van Gogh (both impressionists) lived in the House of Friends for a time. Van Gogh sat at a scene and painted. Gaugan visited a scene, and then went back home and painted it there.
Gaugan and Van Gogh had many arguments about which way was right, because Gaugan actually tried to make Van Gogh do it his way.
So I think we just have different ways of doing things, and I like that everyone employs different methods, because if I pay attention, I learn something new every day.
Thanks for your interactions. 
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I think the question about interactions or not depends how well you know the locus and how distinctive it is.
If, as you say, it’s a place you know well much less interaction is necessary.
But if the locus is a bit more “vague” in my mind and I don’t really have much “emotional attachement” to it, I have to be more careful.
Also for stations who are similar to each other, either I choose to have three in a row (because my brain can distinguish easily “first, middle, end”) or I need to pay attention especially and choose a distinctive detail (real or imagined).
For example, in my PAO palace I have a zone with “fluffy tree”, “reddish tree” and “spiky tree” (for 345, 346, 347).
Or I have a part of street with five similar house entrances in a row, and I wanted to try to keep all of them (to see if I could use more than three and maintain it), so for each I picked up a defining detail: “first door”, “bike leaning on wall”, “trash can”, “frieze around the door”, “square awning”. It’s not that the other doors don’t have an awning, but I just decided it was special for THIS door so I built it up in my mind and make the people placed there notice it or interact with it, or I use it for something else, like I imagine it’s the starting point of a futuristic lift / teleportation device, because the owners don’t want to travel with an old fashioned car, etc.
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Yes! Regardless of how many shelves that bookcase may have in real life, or how many bookcases there actually are beside one another, I usually make it three. For me, that’s a great aid to knowing exactly where I am and exactly how much information I should be remembering at that location.
Bob
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I like that. An added benefit and pre-formatted rule reducing guesswork and assuring certainty.
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