On organizing memory palaces and finding your way

General Memory Chat
1

So, been putting some thought on laying the groundwork, since I want to be able to use the system to memorize all sorts of relevant long-term information. Song chords, technical tidbits, language words, all sorts of unrelated stuff. That means multiple palaces, because I don’t want to mix up things and want to be able to find what i want too. This means that the system will eventually expand, but I don’t really want to change things.

So, what I was thinking is that the main palace would be a central hub of sorts. It doesn’t contain any information itself but works as an index. It could be an airport, for example.

For example, let’s imagine in the security check there could be a foreigner having a hissy fit and throwing books at the airport staff. Foreigner points to foreign language and books point to a location, thus I know to look for foreign language words from a library.

David Attenborough is putting potted plants on the baggage conveyor, thus plant biology is located in the garden.

Elvis is giving his fingerprints in a locked room to the airport police, thus musical chords are stored in the palace that’s on your hand.

Attractive Thai flight attendant is handing over a ticket to a drag show on LK Metro complex, because human biology is… you know, let’s just skip that one.

What I’m thinking of is a sort of ever-expanding system for life, where in the index person points to the topic and the action points to where the information actually is. They never need to change, because I can just keep adding a new pointer whenever a new palace is needed.

So, am I overdesigning, is this sort of stuff useless in practice because the information is trivial to find anyway (most people don’t have that many palaces anyway) or do people already do so?

My other idea for memorizing musical chords for example would be kind of like a palace within palace. Let’s say in my childhood bedroom I would store chords. Different chords would be represented by different people. For example, C is represented by Clint Eastwood in his old western attire. Then, to remember C, Cm, C7, Cmaj7 and Cm7, instead of putting Clint in different situations I would use him (hat, cigar, poncho, gunbelt, boots) as a minimap to store all the different chord variations. I could even make every character consistent in a way that for example the left hand would always point to the maj7 variation of the character’s chord, not exceptions.

Any thoughts? In your experiences, does anything I think of make any sense in practice or am I just making things more complicated than they need to be?

Is this the memory equivalent of the type of people who keep designing the “perfect” workout routine but never actually get to the gym?

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Have you tried indexing based on the alphabet or numbers or both?. Anthony Metivier talks about using alphabet a lot, I’m beginning to agree with him.

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I second that (alphabetical/numerical). Don’t create an indexing system that you will need to learn instead of something that exists, giving you more work on top on what you’re already learning.

Also is it a priority? I have 29 memory palaces and still don’t feel like I need a master memory palace to tell me in which one I should go to find this or that subject. I know where things are the same way I know in which drawer to look to find my socks or which street to walk to go to the pharmacy. (That’s the whole point of using location based mnemonics really)

Nothing stops you to add it later if you see that you need it - and by then you will know more clearly of what exactly you need for an index and how to structure it.

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Maybe it’s an overkill, but in my mind it sort of feels more intuitive than alphabetical or numerical. And let’s say I have 20 palaces or so. That would mean 20 tidbits to remind me where is what, so in comparison to what is crammed into those 20 palaces, 20 reminders added over time, possibly over the years, doesn’t seem like too much of an extra effort.

Maybe that’s just me, what feels natural to someone is not that for another.

But yeah, maybe it’s not needed at all, using the palaces over time probably sears into the mind anyway.

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I mean what’s the worst that can happen? If you don’t need it after all then it will fall into disuse and no harm done.

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