Shorthand and Memory palaces

General Memory Chat
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I have been toying with this idea for quite long (years), but I never got around to it because of my studies.

  1. Has anyone tried memorizing long texts verbatim by visualizing the words in shorthand?

Basically the idea is the same as that of a memory palace. However, since words such as sentence connectors are often hard to visualize, by replacing that word with its shorthand version, one can easily visualize the word.

I tried to pick up gregg shorthand but it was too time consuming. Recently I stumbled across this: http://home.tu-clausthal.de/~rzsjs/steno/Gregg.php It’s a text to gregg translator.

My theory was that since some words are not easily visualized, one can visualize its Gregg shorthand counterpart instead. In addition, some gregg shorthand forms are very distinctive and I was thinking perhaps it might be possible to group certain words together to form an image.

i-like-sweets-in-shorthand.jpg

I like sweets

For example the above phrase looks like a smiley face looking down on the Gregg outline of the word ‘sweet’. In this case, a classic sweet image would serve a better purpose in the use of memorizing this phrase ‘I like sweets’

Gregg shorthand outlines get more complex with an increase in number of syllables, so perhaps attempts at memorizing text verbatim may not be possible, but it might be possible to convert the text into sentences with connectors that have easy to visualize Gregg outlines first, and then memorize using a memory palace.

Now, I know the answer to my original question is probably no but it doesn’t hurt to ask! I also hope that anyone who is adept at shorthand and familiar with mnemonic systems can aid with suggestions. I initially tried to use this system to memorize paragraphs of text for academic purposes but I got stuck at trying to pick up shorthand. I will try to pick up where I last stopped, please aid in giving me advice about how to go about doing this, and what you think about it :slight_smile:

In summary, I just hope this will be a useful contribution to anyone, including me, who wants to be able to use this method to study, not just to memorize shopping lists.

I have a two other questions:
2. What about the memory palace method might be useful in storing information? I once used color coding to memorize male and female French nouns (yellow and red) with the chain method but it seems to limit the imagination considerably. I read in the forum that someone imagined he was very small so his memory palace was bigger and could store more items… which is very cool and useful! As far as I know, the only aspects of the memory palace that are useful are that loci can store items which are easily visualized, and the route you take can determine the order in which they are to be recalled. Am I missing anything?

  1. Has anyone else tried memorizing text verbatim before? What problems did you face other than the ones I mentioned? How far did you get and do you have any tips to share?
1 Like
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Very interesting idea. I’ve added a link to this page from the memory techniques wiki’s Gregg Shorthand page. Feel free to edit that page if you would like. I would like to learn Gregg Shorthand, but I don’t know exactly how it works.

Have you tried using a memory palace yet? Even if you don’t want to learn how to memorize cards or binary digits, try this tutorial, because it will give you a foundation in the basic idea behind memory palaces and a demonstration of what it can do. :slight_smile:

For the text verbatim memorization question, see how to memorize a book.

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Gregg Shorthand has very similar strokes for many (most) words. The visualization of these strokes, especially considering their lack of depth and other sensory information, would be so hard to make distinct…maybe a combination of the two would work better? It is an awesome idea… For poetry, I have images for phrases such as “all of the” “in all the,” etc. That might be a little bit easier for some, since only about 100 of these covers an enormous amount of grammatical possibilities.

There is one more useful element of the memory palace that comes to mind that you didn’t mention. Our notoriously malleable memories might be tricked into thinking that the events pictured, to some degree, actually happened at some point in your past. That is my theory for why it is so effective overall.

My girlfriend and I are learning Gregg. We can check each others’ progress in PM if you’d like :slight_smile: