I need a space for calculating. I use the resistor color codes on my fingers. Right pinky is a black pitch covered hut. Thumb is a banana. Left pinky is a snowy landscape. I place numbers, or partly evaluated expressions on them to keep every thing coherent.
Color is just one quality. I find images are “real” when they are rich. Each finger has a flavor, a smell, a song, a texture, a story, a pet animal, friends who visit.. and each finger has an opinion about the others. If a number gets dropped. That finger gets a talking to.
Sometimes I need several pairs of hands. In this case the arms are colored. Yes, at times I am Shiva Destroyer of Worlds… good thing nobody is watching.
I have found very difficult to associate flavours or smells because I cannot actually imagine them, or recreate them. May I ask the experience regarding this aspect of those participating in this post? Thanks.
Yeah, everybody’s made a little different. You have to play on your own strengths. Those are mine and just there as a suggestion, not a prescription. I do urge the principle though, find ways to deepen the image beyond the visual.
I cook. I’m tuned into that stuff. I can mentally stick my finger in an orange and smell it. Some people have a very fine memory for music and musical sounds. Mine is weak. I can remember songs because of the words. But what do you tune into?
Perhaps your memories are almost entirely visual? I don’t know. I can’t speak with authority about anybody else’s brain :). But I suspect there’s more going on. Strong memories are held in place by a number of hooks and they may not all be sensory. What sort of activities or topics are you drawn to? There will be clues there.
Perhaps spend time with one of your solid memories from life and examine it. How much can you find in it? Is there a history, a feeling? Is it related to something else important? I think, if you spend some time, you will find it quite rich in connections and this is what has held it in place. You can do the same for contrived memories but you have to know what flavors your brain likes.
Yes, I have a very visual memory.
I study and teach philosophy, and I am very much into painting and drawing. I read a lot. I like music very much, but I have below zero music abilities, and also under developed kinesthetic abilities (clumsy).
Your suggestion is very interesting, I had never thought about it. A bit like travelling into Pixar’s Inside Out. It might be a good way to discover how to create connections for learning and memorization. At the same time, since I share often memory methods with students, it is a good way to help them to find their own way.
Hope we are not deviating from the main topic of this post.
Upto that point, we have a lot in common except my work was in Math. As a result, my mental “furniture” includes a lot of abstractions that are very real and important to me. You might find similar.
1000 brownie points for that. I wish there were more like you.
And I’m fresh from a hot topic fight in another thread. LOL. I have ideas on this subject thatI want to explore. I will start another thread when I’ve organized my thoughts.
I have almost no imagination for smells. I can’t do music other than very strong tunes. I don’t hear anyone else singing them but sort of me in my head doing it and I can tell that I am out of tune but not fix it. I have almost no visual memory. I have aphantasia, although I only found out that existed a few months ago. I didn’t realise others actually visualised images in their ‘mind’s eye’. I see only grey but have a concept of images somewhere out the back of my brain. I find it impossible to explain.
But I have very strong logic and can construct links and little stories / actions very easily. The only subjects I was any good at when at school were maths and physics.
I think with a really poor visual memory I am limited in the speed I can do competitions. But for long term things, I create stories which are like images, if that makes any sense, and memory palaces work really well - as long as I have a logical connection between locations. I use characters a lot and can become very involved with my characters quickly. So my palaces are full of characters who act out stuff for me.
I have heard of others who have no capacity for mental visualization. One person only discovered at the age of 40 that others around him formed mental images. To me it’s very strange that people can’t do that. But then there are people who conjure up tunes of their own making and I can barely recall a few songs.
I think the value of stories is greatly underappreciated. IMO a story form is the natural data structure for the brain. I imagine that as our cognitive powers emerged, stories were the first way of encoding complex information. Stories, especially stories about people stick easily to our memory. We have this technique in the form of the Journey which is a spatial narrative.
And yes I make up a lot of little stories about things. I am partly Aspergers and people arent that welcome in my head but I have social feeling for things and animals, so they are my players. Humans appear only as narrating voices.
I am very verbal. When I work with abstractions, they form, as you say a narrative flow of logical connections. It’s actually a web of relationships but I traverse each one in a kind of verbal narrative. There are image and I can stop and develop one clearly but they are mostly like pictures in a book, auxiliary.
My primary method of working through ideas is to lecture myself as if I were both teacher and student. I hear my explanations and spot holes and rework. I keep these as mini lessons. A recording of my voice explaining it to myself.
Years ago I spend some time teaching technical drawing and Autocad. It was incredible for me to discover that some people lack imagination. Not in the sense of creating fantastic things, but of mentally visualizing objects. This was especially clear for 3D. Some students were totally unable to imagine a 3D object and transform it
into 2D (like pieces of machinery, or other objects).
We tend to make very parochial assumptions about other people’s heads. I like to do woodwork, joinery by hand and I’m not bad with 3D visualization but I miss things. I never realized this until I stared working with mech engineers my drawings were rejected because they were impossible to assemble or some such conflict. They would spot these things almost out of the corners of their eyes and I’d been working the design for some time.
I was also shocked that other people’s brains work so differently to mine in terms of visualisation and memory when I first read about aphantasia. I hadn’t thought about Aspergers people preferring animals and objects to humans. I use animals a lot in my stories, and dolls and bears who I have collected purely for the purpose of offering characters with different interests. But inanimate objects offer very little for stories unless someone is doing something with them. So PAO works very well for me. I think that may be why I prefer the Dominic System for numbers which is all person based, to the Major System which uses objects. I hadn’t thought of that before. I need the character action.
English was my mother tongue but I spent a lot of my adult hood living and speaking a very different language. When I came to the US at age 30, for a while, I had to translate my thoughts into English. It’s fascinating when your brain does this. Kind of like switching the furniture around.
This is absolutely fascinating. Music has always been clear in my head. I hear it in my mind exactly as if I was listening to it on the radio. My parents were both musicians, maybe it is genetic? Visualization was virtually non-existent until I started practicing memory palaces. (Zero visualization ability until my early 30s) I still have a weak visual memory.
By the by, can’t wait for your new book @LynneKelly!
IMO it’s probably both. If you have a natural aptitude for something then you are likely to find it fun or profitable and do a lot of it. And if you’re in a household where it’s already present…
I have three adult sons. Two turned out very much like me in their range of aptitudes and one quite different - a very fine set of abilities but definitely different. So I think nature beat nurture there.
Wow, thanks to everyone who has contributed to this very fascinating and far-stretching thread!
In the beginning there were many references to the Lukasa, but after reading through it all it is still not clear to me if it is really used as a memory palace in the usual sense of the word.
Reading on Wikipedia it seems to me as if the boards are pre-made for specific stories and not as general loci to put any kind of information on.
From Wikipedia: “Culture heroes are identifiable by beads whose colors have a fan of connotations triggering remembrance of their deeds and exploits, as well as their qualities and physical appearance. For example, Nkongolo Mwamba, the tyrannical anti-hero of the Luba charter, is always represented by a red bead, for he is the red-skinned rainbow-serpent associated with bloody violence. Blue beads (considered “black”) stand for Mbidi Kiluwe, the protagonist and culture-bearer of kingship whose skin is shiningly black like that of a bull buffalo, symbol of ambivalent power and secret potential. The paths of Luba migration and significant events and relationships are indicated by lines and clusters of beads. Chiefs and their counselors, sacred enclosures, and defined places are shown by circles of beads.”
Do you see what I mean?
This would then more resemble some kind of symbolic note-taking then actual memory palaces, right? But maybe this is not the case. I would be happy to hear more about this!
I wonder if the stories themsleves were used as a substrate for storing memories? An iconic story might be “decorated” with one’s own peculiar information. We do this natually to some extent. There is a tendency to compare our experiences with events in these myths or iconic lives. Or to frame them in those terms. Could one take say, the Tortoise and the Hare and use it as a kind of Journey to hold one’s own images?
My understanding is that they were designed for specific information - the history and kinglines, others for different information, - but that encodes layer upon layer of complex links - much as zvuv speculates. My academic research shows that all oral traditions work that way. Genealogies are indexes to complex knowledge. Mythology is a mnemonic technology which stores lots of pragmatic information in sequences often linked to landscape memory palaces.
I wouldn’t use a lukasa for an empty memory palace for competition. But then again, I haven’t tried it. I don’t imagine it would work very well for that.
This article quotes Thomas Reefe’s 1977 article which is where I first came across lukasa in my PhD research. Unfortunately the original article is behind a paywall. I was in contact with Reefe and discussed these issues.
“However, as was admitted by Reefe (1977, 50), there are much more information concealed in the lukasa, which heavily depends on the interpreter’s level of access to the multiple layers of knowledge.”
I also corresponded with Mary Nooter Roberts and adore her gorgeous book: Memory: Luba art and the making of history.
I find using my lukasas (technically, the plural is nkasa) very much like using a memory palace in miniature. My first lukasa was just a board with shells and beads made before I decided what to encode. The second was designed for purpose and was even easier to encode. I encode for permanent use, not temporary, though.
About 20 years ago there was a very interesting Sci American article on human evolution which proposed that human intelligence and linguistic ability had at some point been driven by sexual selection on the part of women. That women were sexually attracted to displays of intelligence and linguistic ability and this forced a period of rapid advance.
I speculated on this that there might have been a period of intense warring that gave great advantage to any advance in communication or organization and planning. Or perhaps rapid climate change when suddenly vast amounts of knowledge needed to be transmitted and understood to deal with the complexity. Some initial kind of environmental pressure might have ignited this preference among the women - is my own speculation.
Anyway, they pointed out, very plausibly that in many cultures there are traditions of men serenading women, writing poetry to them etc. In our culture men are still the main joke tellers. And I have heard women say directly that intelligence is a turn on. They argued that at least vestiges of this were still operating. I won’t go on with glib examples but I’ve always felt there was a lot to that idea.
I am not shy to confess that I myself have wooed more than one woman that way and it felt natural. Whether that was resonating with some deep instinct or I was just lucky, I don’t really know
