So, I’ve been tinkering with things and making some memory palaces. You know, the usual stuff like childhood home, garden, grandpa’s house and so on. And while thinking about what else is usable with unique loci I happened to think about maps. Not landmarks, not local shops, none of that. Just maps and the areas I am familiar with or not and I’ve been pondering how to make use of them without having to deal with things like shops that might move or close.
So, one of my ideas would be to take some random area of a hometown, with a bunch of streets and cross streets. For example I could follow a street, derive a unique theme from the street name and every cross street would then be the loci. The cross street name would then also contribute something to the scene to make it unique. If for example the area had 5 streets in parallel with 5 cross streets, I could mentally travel them in two different directions and that’s 50 loci right there. I don’t have to know what’s there or what the area even looks like. If the area is familiar, it’s not even that much of a work to remember them. And if it’s not, it’s just 10 streets to learn by heart.
Of course this method assumes that you don’t live in a country where half the streets are named like “10th street” or something equally boring.
I thought about using street numbers too, but not really sure how to go about. Thought about making every number a character or a prop for the setting provided by the street name, but I’m not really sure if they can be unique enough to not mix things up. Easy to learn though if you have 10 of them and always assign them to some street, but I’m not really sure about this.
The other thing I was thinking were road trips. Towns usually don’t go anywhere. A straightest route from city A to city B and see what loci all the smaller town, villages and settlements along the way can provide, what unique setting could derived from their names. But then I’m not sure how to tell all the highways apart. If the road itself is not memorable enough, maybe start and finish town might provide a memorable theme for the palace and loci towns act as unique props?
Anyone do something like this? Good way to learn geography on the side or just a tried and failed idea?
And something just occurred to me. I think I had just accidentally invented a sort of modern day Bruno’s wheel with my city grid memory palace. Basically I could just replace street with a grid of items that provide themes and props and it would be functionally the same thing as Bruno’s wheel. As a grid it’s just basically just a two-way Bruno’s wheel made up of familiar streets. Grid, discs, same thing in different format.
I’m not sure if I should feel dumb or not, talk about very literally reinventing the wheel.
You can use maps but I recommend that if it’s a topographical map (ie. hill, mountain range, etc.) you should “place” imaginary items on it to help you remember OR the topographical area will be meaningless to you.
If it’s not a topo map, you should still “place” imaginary items on it too so that you remember what you need to.
Finally, if it’s a place that you frequent often, you can then make a “journey” out of it by doing the above beforehand so that you retain the information first.
No, not topographical. Just a normal street map of a familiar area. My thinking is that the names could elicit some of the imagery for the loci and familiarity with the place would help to keep everything in order.
Harry Lorrayne has a chapter in one his books called Memory Graph. The idea is that you create X by Y rows / columns. X is a letter, Y is a number. For example A2, C3 (Ate, Camera) provides a code word for whatever thing you put in that box. He suggested this could be used to superimpose on a geographical or structure based piece of information (anatomy) to assist with its memorisation. Haven’t tried this as an experiment. He mentioned a student of his using this to memorise all the post codes ad boundaries of areas in Manhattan. You sound like you have no shortage of ideas to experiment with
Yeah. I feel like I got all sorts of concepts that I want to try out. Not because I think they are necessarily all that brilliant, but because I can.
Most of what I’m thinking of have probably already been tried over the centuries. Some of them were either discarded or are in use by different name and I’m reinventing the wheel again. But as long as I’m happy with what I’m doing, get to do some interesting (to me) experiments and get the feeling that I might be on to something, that’s all that matters to me.
