My experiment in memory encoding

[rdearman (Rick Dearman)]

I did consider this. I’m just putting the additional information in the place where the country name is. At the moment I’m just doing Capital, Language, Currency. So in my memory palace I just think CLC. FOr some countries I’ve pictured a scene. For example, Indonesia the capital is Jakarta, so I picture a go-cart track and a guy in the cart screaming “rupiah” which is the currency. I’ve also done some rhyming things with other countries.

Many of them I already know, so I don’t actually need any sort of mnemonic to remember.

@Hari-P

I tried stacking up words on in an alphabetic memory palace (because my niece wants to play “the petit bac” in german and I kept losing), wanting to see after how many added information the system would “break”, more than 4 items per station doesn’t work well for me if I don’t organise it in some way (maybe a munx? I haven’t exprimented that much more, it’s not really a project high on my priority list…).

My plan is to stack it up using a sort of peg list, so CLCGF. At the moment I just think CLC. I think if I had more information to stack I would probably use a proper peg list.

I was reading Advanced Memory Palaces: The second book you should read on your memory Paperback – 15 Sept. 2021

by Joe Reddington

In this situation he was recommending Classes, but I couldn’t really see anyway to apply it to what I needed to know.

DOn’t know if that answered your question or not. But thanks for reading.

[thinkaboutthebible (Doug)]

@rdearman, if you are interested in implementing an OO data structure like a class, you can see my implementation progression with different basic data structures starting with the discussison of an abstract data type moving to the abstract peg list and finally the abstract story. I’ve taught OO principles enough to see where the overlap is but a solution has never been put forward except me here on the forum and in more detail in my books.

I haven’t had any feedback from Joe but this kind of complex data structure is very useful because it solves a common complex real life problem. The most recent implementation of this OO style structure was with car “objects” needing repairs.

Doug

[rdearman (Rick Dearman)]

I doubt I will introduce anything like Classes into my memorisation. Once upon a time a programmer had a problem, so he introduced OOP, now the programmer has two problems…

What I have here in reality is a two-dimensional array. (Technically an associative array)

countries[name][information]

So for example:
countries[china][capital] = “Beijing”
countries[china][language] = “Mandarin”
countries[china][currency] = “Yuan”

When I review them, mentally, I’m just doing this loop:

for(int name=0; name<countries; name++)
{
  for (int info=0; info <3; info++)
  {
    printf("%s", countries[name][info]);
  }
}

If the amount of information to be stored was a lot larger, e.g. more than the 6 bits of information I’m likely to memorise, I would probably look at some other type of storage, or a better peg list.

I did like your link to the abstract story type of peg list, I can see this being useful where there is more information. Although, I was a little confused about how it would be used with multiple examples. One of the links you explained so someone how to remember car/insurance information and gave an example. But I couldn’t really see how the example was fitting into the overall task. If we use my array example and your car explanation together.

|Location|Data|Mnemonic|
|Driver’s seat|Donaldson|Donald Duck|
|Passenger’s seat|1560|Outlaw making dinner reservations on cell phone (Jewess, it’s a joke “what does a Jewish American princess make for dinner?”|
|Front hood|Jeep Grand Cherokee|Jeep, the cartoon character or Egyptian and his wooden chair that breaks when he sits in it.|
|Back seat|8Z01|UFO, (zebra) flying in to jail bars in the back seat, and turned into pita bread by a Saudi baker.|
|Digital panel between seats|0226|Swan, (wench) tempting other by flashing her knees in a ruffled skirt|

If we try to insert this into my array, car[???][Data] I couldn’t figure out what your first index was. So I couldn’t really work out how the OP of the other question was going to keep track of where these stories were.

I’m assuming in my case I would still walk my memory palace, and when I happen upon the loci, I use the story.

[thinkaboutthebible (Doug)]

@rdearman,

It’s great to talk code and mnemonics together. It makes things much clearer in my head.

We aren’t really talking about classes even though it makes a nice touchpoint for most people without the background running up to the OO revolution with Smalltalk and so on. Classes didn’t just appear on the scene. We’re really talking about consts, structs, compound data structures, early JavaScript objects, ADTs, and so on. Classes are unique in that they are organized around behavior, have encapsulated their own behavior so other data structures can’t use them, and provided ways to share their behavior to subsets of other data structures. But no one really agreed on any one group so that’s a moot point.

I prefer to think of mnemonic structures as reference by association or reference by index. If you have an array of any kind, then it’s indexed. But is your index navigable? Why does currency follow language? What comes after China? Most likely you need another structure to traverse the index because it doesn’t have a natural sort order like a numeric or string datatype so you have to provide one. That’s how sort routines work. Your code assumes that the storage order is the sort order but retrieval order is not guaranteed. You might get mixed up. Peg lists need order to traverse.

Probably it’s hard to figure out my car example because it wasn’t indexed. It was individual references by association. They are all cued by any one piece of information in the “object.” Then the story array index provides the rest of the info. So really it’s just car[car-specific field]. The cars weren’t iteratable so he wouldn’t have been able to list all the open repair orders of the day. That wasn’t worth it. In programming, they would have been swept away by garbage collection and that was my intention as over time and completion of the repair, he would want to forget the old stories.

You can use your memory palace, a peg system of locations, as a way to retrieve your stories, yes. But the data would have to be more of a permanent nature. Then you would have not a second dimension in the array but a nested array like so: palace of cars[car[car-specific field]].

I like having this comparison of terms because the programming world is much more well-defined than the mnemonic world so I think this is very productive to discuss with people like you who understand coding. Thanks.

Doug

[rdearman (Rick Dearman)]

Ok. Long time since I posted. I have a new goal now. But not sure if I am going about it in the right way but it seems to be working. I have a lonely planet phrasebook for Korean which has a small English to Korean dictionary. It is 31 pages and has about 3000 words. I plan to memorise them all. I have decided that I will have 26 palaces and each place will contain 13 separate journeys which are AB, CD, EF, etc. so palace one is A, first journey is words starting with AA, or AB.

That was the original plan however the journey has morphed in stories rather than loci. (Can’t remember what this type of mnemonic is called off top of my head) But these linked stories are easier than trying to come up with so many loci. Plus the longest chain of words is about 30, the smallest is 2.

Anyway it seems like it works. All passive learning but I don’t mind I have a deadline and I need to expand my vocabulary quickly. I also stick the words in anki as I practice the journey and the story in order to reinforce everything.