Compact and versatile memorization: how to fill a single room with the loci equivalent of 10 streets.
Before i start, please, forgive my poor choice of words in case it happens.
I’ve discovered something that revolutionized my learning technique and for sure can help you with yours.
We’ve all been said that the loci method is great and it really is But I’ve always had problems with size . Imagining normal sized things near streets and avenues always made me feel that I was “wasting space” in the loci, that is ridiculous and i for sure know. However that feeling made me develop my learning method “without wastes” that i found magnificent.
I own a small shop and work in it every single day. Besides being small, i know with my eyes closed the location of every single shelf. With that in mind I’ve made an loci that consists in just the shop from inside , with all the shelfs empty. Now that’s where the fun starts… I’ve discovered that with size adaptation i can imagine myself on the perspective of a single Lego man and with that i can fill Each Shelf completely with any loci i want resizing myself to investigate deeper each one if needed… AND , from my normal perspective i can see each topic organized in front of me in each and every shelf of the shop , no loses, no wastes.
It’s for me a humongous discovery , that revolutionized my way of learning and stocking memories, my practical way of doing the shelfs consists in "create a small street full of tiny buildings to house each topic related info. As i walk through the street in my lego size i know instinctively what building represents and if i want to unravel the information may i just enter the front door. Small information can be stored as people in the street making weird things. Normal information with normal houses and bigger information can be kept as multiple floored buildings and everyone is happy. The cool thing about it is that since the shelf represents a common theme among the locis on it, for many times some “people” can reappear when needed and the process of memory making is simplified (for example: ive created a person that represents the definition of some theme. That person will reappear each time that same theme is cited among the other locis and the neural network in your coconut will be strengthed.
Could you please edit this post and fix the formatting? Its nearly unreadable on mobile with everything in single lines in the text box. Just put it in as normal text.
(Antonio feel free to correct me if I understood wrong, the format is indeed a pain to read).
What I don’t understand is why you have cleared out the shelves in order to put memories on it. Doesn’t it make them less distinctive from each other? (And so more difficult to distinguish between stations?) Empty shelves one after another feel kind of boring to work with…
I’m genuinely curious of the reason behind this choice because it seems so counter intuitive to me.
The big takeaway is the mental change in self-size-perpective.
I can zoom in/out by imagining myself big or small compared to other things.
It’s pretty useful.
What makes loci memorable, that I noticed, is at least two things:
how familiar I am with the loci, how much I’ve used that loci for other things
the level of visual imagery detail (can remember specific irregular textural details clearly vs. pure-flat-color-background)
how “unique” that loci is. (for example, are all my loci in similar “grass” or “dirt” or “wood floor” or “white-painted wall” for which I’ve not deeply differentiated from each other?)
I think the “zooming out” can really help with seeing a dollhouse overview of so you can easily “skip” to the loci you want (basically specific-level-loci within category-level-loci).
The “zooming in” helpful because you will likely recall more textural detail for each loci, making it more effective and memorable. If I “zoom in” and make myself like an ant on the floor, I’ll naturally start to remember very fine details of the floor (color and texture of the kitchen tiles, scratches, scrapes, dents, irregularities). Might even remember dust the accumulates in the corners, etc. So that extra level of “detail” is giving more fuel to making either more loci (use each fine detail as a loci), or just using a combo of those details as a more composite and memorable single loci
Sorry for the format , i shall edit the post in the moment i discover how.
About the empty shelves allow me to clarify,
my shop has its merchandise changed so
frequently that i cannot think one particular shelve
full of something in particular, but i can remember
each specific shelve for its location, absolute height
, details on the wall behind it and identification (like
a1, b3 etc) my merchandise change place and
moves very frequently but my shelves are always
there for me
Btw I didn’t knew about Snillsparv post , thanks for sharing.
YES EXACTLY! When i discovered this “feature” i was
in awe for the possibilities.
About the texture at first i had the same problems
as you “blank color floor makes my monkey brain
confuse”. That’s when we had the same idea
“Why i don’t use weird textures for this topic?”
My list of textures is endless (sand , snow, rust ,
metal , cardboard, sponge, bones , pearls, etc.)
about the colors i developed a personal method
(That probably someone wiser than me already posted and I didn’t find to quote in here) that’s basically follows an arbitrary “correct order” of the
colors of the rainbow , beginning in red and ending
in purple. Following that order i can connect 7
topics using only the colors as links , i can also use
fruits or objects or textures related to the colors
to link the topics together. And it gets better if i use
the story method alongside ( the x info is planting
his tomatoes when y info trows at him a carrot ,
they fight and fall under z’s yellow lemon tree etc…)
And with the zoom i can put multiple levels of
information on top of each other (in X’s gardener hat has a mini event that brings more information
and the monkey brain is happy to keep forever that weird memory)
If we allow our imaginations to play, there’s no limit to the amount or depth of knowledge we can “save” in any area.
Personally I usually refer to this as “dream logic.”
Some of my favorite applications are memorizing TMUX keyboard shortcuts on my living room windows, essential programming concepts on the guitars hanging above my cozy chair, and the arguments taken by Python’s open() function as a journey of the major scale on the fretboard of a guitar, which has both my fingers playing and me at one point catching binoculars and standing on the 5th scale degree peering further up and down the fretboard.