So my whole life I would always get lost, remembering streets is virtually impossible unless I have been down in hundreds of times. I can hardly find my way around the county I was born in and lived for 18 years there. It’s not that I can’t remember a location and use the method of loci, it’s just that I can’t remember places and connect them in my memories. It’s also worse when driving as I never really know where I am even if someone tells me what street it is, I would have to manually remember every street to make sense of locations. My sister also has the same problem just worse so I’m sure it’s genetic.
I haven’t tried it yet myself but I also read Dominic’s book where he talks about driving directions. Memorizing maps may be my best bet.
If I read correctly, you CAN remember loci within a memory palace but you can’t recall locations / direction in “real” life?
I mean remembering places is fine and so is memory palaces, just directions and connecting locations is bad. It’s like a broken internal compass if that makes sense. When in a large area like an amusement park, I easily forget where I am and what direction booths are at for example. It’s difficult for me to explain sort of.
Have you ever tried to cultivate your sense of direction? It might be useful to go into the woods and mark a tree. Then walk away drawing a map and keeping compass marks, trying to see if you feel things are in the “right” place.
Generally I think places like fairgrounds / amusement parks are confusing due to the amount of stimuli and so much looks and feels the same - food carts spotted about, moving vendors, the same people wondering about, all the noise and rides…
A few years ago I went for a meandering walk in the New Forest and despite walking for a couple of hours knew precisely where the car was when it was time to turn back and took us directly to it despite the protestations of my partner and her friend that I was wrong!
Anyway, as I say perhaps you could try having a fixed point to return to and walk away mapping the area and using a compass and try to develop the feel for knowing where you are. As you get better stop with the mapping, and eventually the compass.
I guess it does take some practice and sometimes when I try I can make sense of where things are and what direction it is. Walking through a forest sounds intimidating to me lol.
I’ve always had a miserable sense of direction. My reasoning is that I have very poor vision (I’ve had corrective surgery, but it doesn’t get better for me). Basically everyone else sees the world in HD while I don’t. So poor vision leads to fewer details I can take in.
I was intrigued to read about the taxi drivers who could train their sense of direction, and have been unrealistically toying with the idea of being a part time cab/uber driver.
London Taxi drivers have had their brains scanned and the part of the brain that deals with location increases in size with all the practice they do.
They tend to learn the main routes in two ways which compliment each other. First they know the a number of given routes from various set points. There are 320 of these runs for central London. Then at each destination and start point they need to know all the “points” within a quarter mile radius. These are the shops, hotels, named buildings, pubs etc.
They then complete real routes by knowing both the “runs” involved and the points on the run with the sets of knowledge complimenting one another.
Hm, as far as I can tell, here in Malaysia they just open up Waze (a map application for smartphones).
Yeah that kind of defeats the purpose of the whole thread lol.
I don’t know where you are located Shadow but I was thinking it would be worth opening Google Maps * and pick a few points North of your neighbourhood / town and a few South. Then have the mapping app create routes these should be about 10 roads each, so not too much to recall. Now list these all down and start to learn them and do the same for East / West.
When you have a few routes sorted out that make sense start to learn them using memory palaces. Then once you’ve got those memorised try to learn a few key points on the map, the libraries, pubs, cinemas, named buildings and such like.
Anyway, just a little idea…
- Bing is okay too but Google tends to me better with the mapping, at least in the UK.