Was trying to memorize a grocery list for Walmart. Seems easy: use memory palace as usual.
But no! There is a new thing I noticed.
Instead of imagining each grocery object in a memory palace, Walmart itself was used, and nothing needed to be imagined except for a line overlaying the Walmart dollhouse, connecting all the places where I’d find the items.
For tomatoes, imagine where in the Walmart Dollhouse the tomatoes would be
For cheese, draw a line from tomatoes to cheese
For milk, draw a line from cheese to milk
I seems like “line drawing” has its own special machinery in working memory and maybe we can additionally make use of it.
Compactification – instead of imagining 3 items in 3 loci, you’d imagine a single zig-zag with 1 vertex and 2 line segments over a single image
It can work for shopping lists, list of places to go (imagine a map of your city and then draw lines over it). It’s highly practical and takes almost no prep-work
In conclusion, idea here is that keeping an overarching “line” over a dollhouse you already know can help for fast shopping list / to-do-list memorization.
Edit: it seems that simply imagining the body movements from place to place can also solidify the list in memory
For the groceries you could also make a dollhouse of your own where you place the items you usually buy, so it’s independent of what store you’ll end up going to or if they re-arrange it (this has the drawback that it won’t necessarily coincide with the most efficient path through the store. Although most supermarkets are arranged similarly anyway)
BTW FYI this method was briefly mentioned also here in another thread (that is about something else). I like it when different people come up with similar conclusions independently: it feels like they’re on to something.
Also the name you gave it sounds just right
I can see that would work for me. It’s an automatic visual like the children’s “connect the dots” drawing books. It feels like a street-map within the store (if I’m understanding correctly) seems fast and easy. Thanks.
Welcome to this memory place. I’ve learned a lot here. I have several different memory places, 10 rooms in my house (with 10 locations in each room). One room of the house is the 30’s another room is the 40’s and so forth. The path in any room is always the same (I learned this from someone who posted here): Walk in and the corner to the left is #1, moving clockwise the middle of the wall is #2, then the next corner is #3… Until I reach #8 which is the door I entered through. #9 is the ceiling and #10 is the floor. TaDa! So the 10 rooms of my home are an easy and convenient 100 place location map.
My MAIN memory system, however, consists of buildings along a journey (I want to remember 6 digit numbers). Each building has a person and each person has an item that naturally associates with them. If person #45 has the item that belongs to person #19 then that’s 4519. Easy. I then tag on a third item from the major system and I have an unmistakable image for a 6 digit number that cannot get swapped-around into the wrong number. Each 6 digit can only be ONE easy, logical picture.
For instance, “Ronald Reagan” swatting at a blue bird with a mop can ONLY be 440239. 394402 would be “Mr. Bean” using an ink pen to draw a picture of the sun. Obviously very different pictures for the two related numbers. The first two digits = the person, the middle two digits, are an item related to a person, and the third two-digits are just “major system” items.
Perhaps you gleaned that Ronald Reagan’s item is an inkpen? Mr. Bean using an ink pen as a mop would be 394439. Follow me?
I have a reason to want to remember 6 digit numbers, so that’s the system I came up with.
I’m not sure if any of this matters to you, but I thought I’d throw it out there as a veeeery long way to say hello ;-).
This book from the free memory techniques books section might also be interesting in that context. One of its main messages is that line, point, angle and proportion memory can be systematically trained. The process is described at p.140f
