So cool, right? It almost feels like cheating.
@bjoern.gumboldt is exactly right. This is a very common occurrence usually referred to as “ghosting” or image interference. It’s caused when you review information enough times to start pushing it into your long term memory, or you don’t allow enough time to forget in between reviews, then when you try to put alternate imagery in the same loci, the “ghosts” of memories past show up and interfere with your recall.
There are a couple solutions…
The easiest is to not reuse palaces for unrelated content if you want to store long-term information there. Create separate palaces for each subject you’re trying to memorize and hold long term. If you only have one related data set of imagery in a palace, those visuals will be strong and accurate long-term. You can add more layers of detail and related info, but it will be complementary rather than contradictory. This is recommended when you’re trying to memorize things that you’ll access often and over the long term.
If you’re just trying to practice and build your skill, it’s fine to re-use palaces, but ideally you should be giving them time to “clear out” and allow yourself to forget the temporary imagery. There are a couple ways to do this. Obviously the less reviews you attempt of a specific image, the quicker it will fade from your loci. It’s tempting, especially at first, to practice memorizing a random list and then keep reviewing it, because honestly it’s a really cool feeling to be able to do it. Especially if you’re just discovering the technique.
The problem is, every time you go back and run through that random list again, you strengthen the image and create stronger neural connections between the image and the loci you’re using. If the info is just a random list to practice with, you should try to resist the urge to keep reviewing it. This isn’t information that you want to actually store for long-term retention, so you have to treat it that way. Review it once initially to check your accuracy, then don’t run it again.
The challenge here is that for ideal “forgetting time” you’ll need about twice as many palaces as the number of reviews you’d like to attempt per day. So if you have 6 palaces, you can run the first 3 on Sunday, then the second 3 on Monday, then on Tuesday, if you’ve let those first images fade enough, you can reuse those first 3 again, and so on.
Obviously you CAN do multiple runs per palace per day, and when you’re first starting out, you kind of don’t have a choice until your build more palaces, but if you experience this ghosting phenomenon consistently, try spacing palace use out more until you can get a few more palaces into the rotation.
As you’ll find with most techniques, there are exceptions and caveats… You CAN reuse palaces for multiple long term information sets, as long as you clearly formulate your imagery and are careful of avoiding the problem of “sameness.”
I thought of the analogy a while back of a palace being like a location in a movie or TV series that could be featured multiple times. If there are clearly different characters performing different actions there during distinctly different scenes, it’s pretty easy to isolate and recall the scenes individually without confusion. an example might be Owen Lars moisture farm on Tattooine in Star Wars. I can picture Luke standing watching the twin suns set, and I can also picture him and Obi-Wan returning to find the aftermath of the stormtrooper raid. I have no problem differentiating the scenes. I don’t picture a mashup of Luke watching the sunset next to the charred skeletons, I know those are two different scenes, even though they both exist in the same space. So as long as the content is distinct, it’s doable to reuse locations long term.
That may sound like I’m contradicting myself, but really it all comes down to you. If you can make it work, then it works! If you consistently run up against these issues, you may have to modify your use.
Creating more palaces can be challenging at first, and it may seem easier to just try to reuse them, but ultimately if you practice building new palaces and using them, you’ll see it get easier and you’ll quickly notice the advantages of keeping things separate and uncluttered.
When first learning, it’s natural to focus on strategies for improving your ability to remember, but it’s just as important to also learn how to forget!
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