As you may be aware Yanjaa demonstrated her memory powers with memorizing IKEA catalogue which is also mentioned in this forum: Yanjaa Memorizing the IKEA Catalog
I am wondering what system would one use to memorize a catalogue with lots of images. This has multiple skills involved:
Ability to memorize an image/picture with all the details.
Note that she is able to both retrieve by “page” numbers and by image description. This suggests some kind of peg method or some super-human ability to scan across the palace! Though “page number” could mean using the images corresponding to her number as pegs, how would one remember images by description? Do you see any method for this?
So, the question is how would you do it? What system would you come up with for this task?
If you have a room full of furniture, you could try describing it. The description should be able to tell you what the room looks like: three paper lanterns of various shapes hanging from the ceiling, beige and dark raw umber1 colored wood, four books and a glass on the table, etc.
You might also be interested in these discussions:
Thanks! Do you have any method to “sweep” in certain direction over the photograph so that no details are missed? Do you think that just trying to describe is sufficient to be able to retrieve by description?
Describing it would be enough for me, but if you find that you’re missing things, you could draw a grid over the image and then carefully scan each grid for details. If you go in a specific order, then you can be sure you didn’t miss any sections.
I also was wondering how would she go about this and found out she explains how she did it (in broad strokes) at ikeahumancatalogue.com, in the video about “rote memory vs creative memory”
Its actually quite easy to pull of, using an efficient technique of course. I used to perform a trick for my siblings where I’ll pretend to memorize a book and then tell them to read from any page and I’ll then provide the page number. I learned this from reading Dominic O’Brien’s book," You can have an amazing memory".
I did this by converting words in the book to images that were then placed in loci in the memory palace which represented pages. I imagine she’s using a similar system or she could even convert the catalogue into a memory palace of it’s own. I think the feat is easily achievable by anyone with the right techniques, motivation and time.
Kenneth Higbee also describes performing such a feat in his book “Your memory”.
