Before I get into the meat of what I wanted to talk about, here is a bit of a preface.
Almost as soon as I found out about the method of Loci and visual association I began thinking about how I could incorporate it into everyday life. We all know that while memorising a deck of cards is fun it’s pretty useless at the end of the day.
On the other hand many methods are in fact very useful, such as building a peg list for numbers which lets you remember passwords, phone numbers and so on quite efficiently on the fly.
But really all the mnemonic methods seem to come down to just one thing: creating connections (in the brain).
If you start thinking less about techniques and about what you’re using them for, you can think of new methods on the fly and do cool little things like for example; I was listening to an internet radio station the other day and a song came on that I decided was worth finding on Youtube later. The song was ZZ Top - Under Pressure. Which, without any sort of “technique” I immediately visualised as a Man in a Top Hat Sleeping (ZZ Top) Deep Under the Sea (pressure).
While I’m sure the mnemonists on here have been doing these things for a while now, people who are new should find the above interesting. But it doesn’t end there.
What if you wanted to remind yourself of something, not memorise it per se, but set a trigger in the brain. This almost sounds like hypnosis now, and may very well be the basis for it. Say you’re leaving the house for a while, but you need to vacuum when you get back, people are a forgetful bunch especially when it’s something you don’t really want to do. You can use the method of Loci for this, put a vacuum next to the door of your house (what’s a vacuum cleaner doing outside your door anyway?) chances are when you get back home you’ll see your door and remember the vacuum cleaner, and in turn to vacuum.
And there is one more thing I have just recently started to experiment with, it started off as just an idea but now it’s turning into something that may actually work.
If you’re not sure what Lucid Dreaming is, I highly recommend finding out.
I won’t go through what it is here, so if uninitiated, go to the above link before continuing on.
Basically the first thing we want to do is link a concept like Dream (it is a dream) to something less abstract. I personally just used the “sounds like” method.
DREAM → take out the vowels → DRM → DRUM
Now I tried to visualised drums in dreams for a while until I felt the new memory association was solid. Going backwards and forward between Dream and Drum eventually when I thought or saw a “drum” I thought “dream”. This only takes a few minutes to be “well enough” connected.
Next we need to actually place the drums into our dreams! This is where it helps to actually remember some of your dreams, you may find that each of your dreams is actually pretty much a memory palace that not only has been automatically constructed for you by your night time imagination, but (once you remember it in the morning) is very difficult to forget. So placing drums into some dream locations you’ve seen before isn’t very difficult.
To top it off, you may want to also associate drums with things you have seen in your dreams before (Dream Signs), just use your normal memory association such as if you see lots of Cars in your dreams you may think of yourself drumming on the hood of your car, or drums inside the car, or drums driving the car! Whatever you want, it’s your brain after all.
If my theory (I haven’t practised this for very long, but the day after I came up with the technique I had a LD in the morning, coincidence? Try it and let me know if it works for you!) is correct you should now have a solid connection between dreams, drums and dream locations in your memory. If you see a drum in your dreams, which you should since you’ve put the bloody things everywhere the brain should now keep following the chain until it hits Dream, probably reminding you that you’re in a dream.