Is the recommendation not to go over five ‘stations’ per room?
I’ve heard that, but more frequently I have read of people “flagging” the fifth in some specific way—being the first or last in a room would be one method among many. Being a tall lamp in the middle, another.
The rationale is to make the fives easy to skip through so you can be at the door of your memory palace and be able to quickly get to the 32nd: just count through fives to 30 and then two more.
As for me, sometimes I do 10 or 15 in a room depending on the room’s size and features. It helps if the room is subdivided naturally. For instance the local library I use is essentially a large room but many subdivisions.
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Well, we can bypass it by not using spatial loci, and instead some other peg system. I generally use the link method (as described in Harry Lorayne’s books) for unordered lists, and for short sequences (<=10 items) will use a rhyming peg system (especially when shopping with my youngest kid since we can make it a game).
When learning blindfolded Rubik’s cube, I did use loci to sequence the edges and corners; just walking a clockwise path around my sitting room:
- Entering through the hall door
- The window (either something outside, or smashing in through it)
- The TV (usually something coming out of it)
- Shelf with a printer (only added this recently; a bit of a weird thing with the method of loci being that there’s no hard and fast rule about which features should be included or skipped over)
- Piano
- Fireplace
- Mantelpiece above fireplace
- Clock above the mantelpiece
Etc etc. There’s maybe 15 or so loci I’ll use which is enough for my needs. But for much larger datasets, especially ones I’d need to recall based on its numeric position, then I’ll use the Major system and just link the number directly with the item to be memorised, instead of the method of loci.
The only way to really figure out what’s best is to experiment with multiple methods yourself. Pick a couple of methods and try them out on sequences of random words / objects. Each sequence should of course have the same number of objects. Time yourself doing the memorisation, make a cup of tea, then try recalling the sequence and record that time too, and rate them by difficulty / fun / recall percentage etc.
@metivier has a very good Youtube video where he points out that time spent considering and devising your encoding strategy is seldom wasted, and I agree with that – sometimes when I’m thinking about how to memorise something, I’ll sit down with pen and paper and write out some examples, which invariably reveals some missing or confusing step, necessitating adjustments. This took a long time when coming up with Rubik’s cube algorithm memorisation methods, but it’s always worth it.
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Memory palaces sound like a brilliant idea…but the plan never worked for me, no matter how hard I tried to visualize such a place. About a year ago, I became aware of the concept of aphantasia, and realized that it was a perfect description of my inability (not to say disability) to picture things.
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I believe you cando it anyway. It’s not only draw an image. It’s spatial memory. I believe you can put a concept there. I believe lynn kelly has that and use palace anyway.
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I would recommend you have a doctor verify that. I met a woman in a writing group that had doctor-verified aphantasia, and had not heard of it before. So she can’t visualize two men wrestling on a dock trying to gain control of a gold candelabra—but she can remember that information, and can use mnemonic devices to aid in that process.
The memory palace, and all other visual information are a great boon to memorization. But even without a visual angle, you know what objects are in your living room, bedroom, and kitchen. And those objects can be associated with secondary information. You already know where they are in the room, and how the rooms lay in relation to one another.
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Years ago, I worked with a very clever programmer who was also an artist in her spare time. One day I randomly tried an exercise of closing my eyes and trying to recall things I had just seen in the room – random stuff like “where exactly is the light switch? Is it closer to the window or the door?”… then I would open my eyes and discover that my visualisation was very inaccurate: the light switch wasn’t where I thought, or it looked different than it had in my mind.
I asked my colleague if she had the same difficulty, and she told me she had no imagery at all when she closed her eyes. Total aphantasia. This came as a surprise given how detailed her art was (although it was mostly abstract now that I think of it).
Anyway, although I agree with @Biondi1789 that spatial memory is probably still very powerful even with aphantasia, I suspect you might also have some success with a peg system instead. With those, rather than visualise objects in “places”, you imagine two objects interacting… for example, 28 in the Major system is “knife” for me, so if I wanted to put “spider” in slot 28, I would imagine a spider carrying a knife and threatening me (or… a knife on each leg, waving around).
With these kinds of images, I don’t think it is necessary to actually visualise them in your mind’s eye – just the concept of a spider waving a knife is quite memorable.
Perhaps worth a try if you haven’t done it before.
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I agree. Peg systems work better for me because I imagine/remember the story, rather than “picturing the players/places” in the story. I just didn’t know why the vaunted memory palace technique was such a failure for me until I heard about aphantasia.
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The layering of that secondary information doesn’t necessarily need to be visualised, but it needs to be associated in some way.
Its very attractive to me to use my peg list to remember things in order but it is much slower to me than using a memory palace.
Your post makes a nice distinction between the spatial aspects of the locations and the meaning elements of what you want to encode into that location.
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Peg systems have a lovely quality to them as well in that they are purely within your own mind and imagination. Of course a memory palace is too but peg lists have a sense of ownership to them, i think.
I invite you to search this forum with the keyword “aphantasia”… There are a ton of people who have it and use memory techniques. Also it can be possible to train visualisations (I think A. Metivier mentionned doing it).
It’s always worth it to look what other people are doing: nobody is wired so differently that for the first time in the whole history of humanity memory techniques universally used are impossible for them. Yes you may need to be creative and adapt, but that’s what we always should be doing anyway.
Don’t say it’s impossible, say “I don’t have figured out, how to make it work for me yet”. Very often something that didn’t seem possible/useful to me at one time, I find out how to use it later down the line. Never say never, maybe it’s just that I’m not ready!
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Happens that the palace isn’t the easier technique to learn. There are others if you have that. Anyway as people say here maybe you don’t need to visualize. You know where is the place. And you can relate it as an idea. Or a word game etc. Like when you hear a joke. You cannot visualize the things but you understand the joke because it’s a words game. But if it’s difficult you can use link, peg or others. The advantage of the palace is that is faster. But is not the unique technique.
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Interesting. When i saw your example of associating a spider with the knife, i immediately imagined chasing a spider while i was swinging a knife at it.
The action for me has to be more personally active. Ah, now that im thinking about it, more peoactive for me vs reactive. Defending myself from a knife-weilding spider doesnt stick in my head as well as hunting down the spider using a knife. Or throwing knives at a spider.
Mow the spider can have 8 knives to throw at me. Ouch
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I can usually memorize things pretty well, but I have never been able to create a memory palace. It’s not that I can’t envision one, I simply can’t retain the information within one. Although that idea about music and using your body as a memory palace seems like it might work.
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