Hi folks… I just wanted to ask if anybody else is metastructuring their memory palaces from time to time. Simply put, what I mean by this, make the memory palace fit the information rather than the other way around.
We’re all familiar with memorizing a standard deck of cards. You go through the deck, form your images, and place them in whatever palace you are using at the time. It doesn’t matter if that’s somewhere on your old college campus, your office, or the house you live in. I suppose the only “structure” you’d consider here is the size (in terms of loci), so that you don’t need to switch to a new memory palace in the middle of the deck.
But how about information where you’d benefit from the memory palace itself doing some of the heavy lifting for you? If I gave you the terms dart board and roulette wheel and asked you to match them to the picture of a British flag and a French flag, which one would you naturally associate with which? Surely, you’ll find James Bond closer to a roulette table in a casino in Monaco (rather than Blackpool) than you’d see him playing darts at the local pub… and even though he’s British, I’d say “rien ne va plus” is not.
Now where am I going with this? Basically, I’m just giving a rational as to why I want to use a memory palace somewhere in France to memorise the layout (not just the number sequence) of the roulette wheel. So let’s have a look at what the information to memorize looks like.
If you’re familiar with roulette, you know that you can place bets on whether the number will come up odd or even, black or red, etc. In France you can additionally place bets on Orphelins and the other funny terms above that you might not necessarily be familiar with. You can play them also on a regular European table; however, you’ll have to place them on the numbers themselves as there is no extra area for the bet, like there is for black/red, odd/even, etc.
As you can see, by placing six jetons on the splits 5/8, 10/11, 13/16, 23/34, 27/30, and 33/36 you are covering all the number from 27 to 33 (clockwise) that are called Tiers du Cylindre on the wheel above. The idea with these bets is that one area of the wheel might show up more often then others; maybe due to mechanical failures but realistically it’s the same as a red/black or odd/even bet as far as your odds of winning.
Anyway, suffice it to say, since you have to place these bets “manually” if you’re not playing in France, it’s useful information to know, so we’d like to have it encoded as well… NOW, FINALLY… on to the memory palace and what I mean by “metastructuring”…
So then, I wanted a memory palace in France… how about a map of Paris then? Well, the two parks (or bois) on the left and right almost line up with the two areas for the Orphelins, you just have to mentally rotate the map a little. Good start! The river Seine divides Paris into rive gauche (left bank) and rive droite (right bank) and matches the Tiers du Cylindre and the Voisins du Zero, respectively.
I can even use the major system to translate “Jeu 0” into “Jeu S” remove the space and add the missing “s” for “JeSuS” and let that quite naturally match up with Sacré-Cœur in the North. Opposite of 0 on the wheel you’ll find 10 and 5, which is the only time that two low numbers are next to each other. Otherwise it’s always low (1-18) next to high (19-36). Opposite Sacré-Cœur in the south, you have the Tour Montparnasse which is the only skyscraper in Paris, so the exceptions also match.
I prefer to use the two bois only as alignment points and will instead choose the Cathédrale Notre-Dame as my sub-memory palace for Orphelins on the right. The logic here that it’s on a island and not really gauche or droite and therefore kind of orphaned. On the left, I’ll choose the Place du Trocadéro on the right bank opposite the Tour Eiffel on the left bank. Makes sense to me because the 16th district is really geographically south but since the Seine take a hard left it’s on the right bank; kind of orphaned too in a way.
For some more metastructure, I’ll argue that the Tour Eiffel (33) is right next to the 1 on the wheel because it is the number 1 landmark of Paris. On the right, I’ll pick the Sorbonne Université particularly the Campus Pierre et Marie Curie (27) which used to be called “Paris 6” (I believe the bus stop still is) and is right across from the 6 on the wheel. So I got my starting and end points for the Cylindre linked to the start and end numbers of the Orphelins.
For the left portion of the Voisins du Zero, I’ll pick the Arc de Triomphe to the left of Sacré-Cœur and since I can’t really think of anything good on the right of Sacré-Cœur, I’ll take the Musée du Louvre north of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame instead.
In the end, 6 sub palaces to form one large memory palace. The structure of the wheel finds itself in the landmarks picked to store the information. Some numbers are already soft pinned to a location, such as 0, 1, and 6 so now it’s just a matter of placing your images for the numbers. You can use your PAO images of what-have-you. If you feel super ambitious, you can come up with French words to match the numbers according to the major system… just to stick with the overall Frenchness of the memory palace.
There are a few more meta details that I didn’t mention because I don’t know how well known these references would be. Just want to add that I don’t place the 7 numbers for Jeu 0 inside of Sacré-Cœur, but rather tread the entrance door as 0 and the 12, 35, 3, 26 as approaching from the left and 32 on the steps leading down and then 15 walking further south. That way the geography follows the wheel even closer.
Hope this made sense to some and gave others some new ideas. If you have a memory palace yourself that you’ve chosen based on the data you wanted to memorize please share with others… or if anybody would like to use London to memorize the layout of a dart board…
