i usually have 2 problems with my memory palace and hoping someone can shed some light:
linking images to a certain locus which is the ground{the path you walk towards before you reach my front door}. usually the images are already the ground, but because i cant see a link with the ground, when i try to remember, i remember the ground but cant remember what happened on it so i loose the link and forget the images i placed there. It happens with words like fighting, visitor, sweep and pretty much most of the words.
2.The images are confined to a certain locus so i cant put memorable events cause its too small or it might spill over to other loci and this hinders my creative imagination. events like images/actions like blowing up, a town, a huge wave, reaching to the sky, battlefield, etc.
i don’t have this problem when linking but in linking i might forget a dobe which causes me to break the link unlike the palace with many bases. Does anyone encounter similar problems? Thanks.
Brief advice for both questions: learn how to make images memorable by making them funny, erotic or weird. That should be your main goal in creating images.
Images stick the best if you can have them interact dynamically with the locus. You can have Bruce Lee sitting on a bench, or you can have Bruce Lee breaking the bench with a karate chop while hearing him yell a loud “HYYAA!” like he always yells. The second will stick way better. With the ground, you could have Muhammed Ali fighting with the ground, and the ground throws a brick against his head, making him fall down K.O. Or someone is sweeping the floor in front of your feet, but not in a normal way, rather in the way like you see with curling. A ground is a very hard locus, and you need to be very creative to make good use of it.
When something would be blowing up, just have a crazy scientist experiment with something, and it blows up your locus. You really feel the shrapnel on your face. I could put a town on a bar of soap, literaly. All I do, is just grab the bar of soap and I hear screaming, coming from the bar of soap. Then I grab a magnification glass and look at it, spotting a village full of small creatures. For a huge wave I could grab the locus, triggering a switch which makes a huge wafe come out of that object. All the water then flows away again as I head to the next locus. For reaching to the sky, I’d just make the locus alive, with legs and arms, and it reaches to the sky as if praying. A battlefield would be very easy, ever had those small toy soldiers?
Nothing is impossible, as long as you dare to be creative enough to think of the most weird images you can imagine (erotic and funny work insanely good, just like images that are weird in a way that makes you doubt your own sanity). Don’t be afraid to end up ■■■■■■■ a supermodel on top of a piano (do imagine all the sounds with it as well), grilling a living elephant on a barbeque (don’t forget to really smell the elephant) or having your pet chihuahua dance the tango with a bouquet of flowers. Don’t be afraid, no one can look inside your mind, so be dirty and be extreme
Thanks, I guess am not as creative as I thought I was. FYI, those Bruce lee and Muhammad Ali scenes were really funny. Well now I know where needs work.
I second everything Mayarra mentioned. It’s all about making the images memorable. It sounds like, from your question, that you are trying to memorize words, is that correct? Are you putting just one word on each locus, or multiple words per locus? You may want to start with just one word/locus until you get comfortable with doing that. And don’t worry about speed at first. Concentrate on getting that image sharp and clear, and then have it firmly placed on your locus. Maybe start with ten words, and once you can comfortably remember those ten, up it to fifteen, then twenty, etc.
And I do think that Method of Loci (Memory Palaces) is the way to go. Linking is OK, but I always prefer the memory palaces, because you’ll be able to remember items 8, 9 and 10, even if you forget 6 and 7. It’ll also be easier to remember them backwards. When I first made my palaces, I was using ten loci per palace, always ending with the floor and ceiling. I found that I was having trouble with the images on the floor and ceiling for some reason, and ended up dropping these in favor of more tangible structures, such as desks, beds, drawers, closets, etc. I suppose in my mind the floor and ceiling were not distinct enough in appearance. Really work hard at making your loci easy to see in your mind.
I discovered that it was MUCH more important to have distinct and memorable loci that it is to have an consistent, arbitrary number of loci per palace.
And if you are dealing with a large images, like “volcano”, try it shrink it down in your mind so that it fits into that locus and doesn’t spill over into others.
True, it’s random words and I usually use 3 images per locus and plus I was going at 20 words. I usually spend around 8 minutes for 20 words and have 1-7 errors depending on the time I take to structure my images. I guess I should start small and not look at speed for now, the time I take to complete usually discourages me as a matter of fact as I read others completing theirs in like 2 minutes.
