Can someone explain how one creates nested memory palaces? I was reading an article (Gavino's Massive Memory Palace System - Practical Examples) and I did not understand what was being described. My main goal is to memorize thousands of lines of poetry.
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The problem you face is that there are almost too many ways to do this.
I suggest you master one of the standard Memory Palace techniques first before going after anything that belongs to the realm of conceptual mnemonics.
(I believe I picked up the term "conceptual mnemonics from Buzan, but if anyone else knows a source, please let me know. I don’t memorize everything, after all! But in this case, I’d love to track back where I got that, because I don’t think it emerged spontaneously.)
If your goal is verbatim recall, a standard horizontal Memory Palace structure is a great place to start. In many ways, it winds up emulating a sentence on a page in a book.
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If what you want is to nest it is not so difficult, it is simply to create images for this purpose, for example if you have a poem that deals with love and another one with anger in two different rooms, you will place an image in the center that represents the texts placed there, for example a man raising a bloody sword in the center of a room and in another one a woman dressed in white with red lips kissing a boy, now to connect I could place the boy that she kisses with a sword that crosses him or a dagger and the one that has the bloody sword with a woman at his feet… As you can imagine, you can do it however you want, but it is simply like the trunks of trees that are interconnected with the other trunks, remember that you can use the chain of association as well, it may be that from a room that there is a camel that emerges from a pool, for example.
These techniques are taken from Bruno’s methods.
There is a wide variety of techniques, so start experimenting and use what works best for you, don’t just try your imagination either, don’t be afraid to try.
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Part of my concern is whether or not I need hundreds, if not thousands, of palaces, one for each poem. Should I use large palaces for several poems if I link each loci to one distinct line?
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“Can I” questions almost always result in one answer:
There are no “Memory Palace Police” to stop you from trying.
If your experiments do not produce the results you want, come back to studying and practicing the training materials of the masters.
That’s always kept me in good stead, and masters there are aplenty.
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Unless one of your memory palaces happens to be a police station filled with police. But I think that only goes without saying.
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I recommend naming your standard memory palaces then layering them into an alphabetic network. I have A-Z from magnetic memory and mostly use the A-Z to remember the order of the palaces to chain them together.
For poetry I would do separate networks for distinct texts. For example have several networks A-H one for each item.
The first part of the text goes in the airport and when you run out of loci you start at the beginning of the baseball stadium then head to costco.
Making new palaces is no big deal so you should figure out the loci you need for your project then plan out networks accordingly to what you need.
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