Timed memory palace to remember every second of what happened during the day OR at least in an hour?

General Memory Chat
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I’m looking for comments here about building a fascinating memory palace

Suppose you had the number of seconds in a day, that’s 86,400 loci
Awake for 16 hours, 57,600 loci

Imagine that every waking second, you somehow link that second to each “second” of your huge daily memory palace what has a loci for each second to be stored…

I’m wondering about some steps toward working toward this goal.
Let’s say, alright, that’s a huge number of loci – could we somehow get 1 loci per minute?
that’s 60minutes by 16 hours, so 960 loci, I think that’s pretty big but I’ve heard people have big palaces around that size.

Alright, now one of the BIG cool things about this timed memory palace is that it would actually allow you to accurately keep track of time and the number of seconds that have passed, to a near-precision by keeping a constant 1-second mental metronome for each loci.

So you have your 1-second mental mentronome, going from loci-to-loci. I’ve already tried doing a “grid metronome”, not a real visual palace, but I imagined like, some kind of recursive grids or cubes in my head, maybe 3x3x3 cube, that’s 27 loci where I can count 27 seconds in some kind of linear path. That is COOL. Imagine if I had like, a 3600 second memory palace that could link every single hour?

What do you guys think of that?

ALSO, I’m wondering about the “attentional bandwidth” of practically accomplishing this task: for example, traversing the 1-second-metronome palace would be very easy, because switching between loci is faster than 1-second – but what about the quick linking process between the current moment, and the loci?

That means I’m not only constantly traversing my loci at 1-per-second, but linking the current moment itself. Well, I guess that’s how people memorize cards and stuff here anyway, and they do it at more than 1-per second – the big detail is that we are linking the Moment Itself, rather than a pre-determined system where, ok, I know how to encode a card. But this is encoding the present moment in itself, or at least part of it, every second.

So alright, here’s the idea – every 1 second, you take a “snapshot” of what you’re doing in the present moment, then plop it in your metronome palace, etc.

Has anyone tried this?

I’m ready to at least try doing like, how about a 60-second one for each minute? I’m going to do that. I’m fascinated. What do you guys think?

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@carljalal, you sound like an artist type. Great idea if you could do it.

I’m from the programming world. There we have a term called a stack overflow. If you fill up the computer’s memory with stuff to remember, it keeps it from doing anything else, and eventually it runs out of room and dies. The most common cause of that is a recursive process which means that it has to keep doing the same process over and over until it reaches a limit. If you don’t set a limit, you crash the computer with a stack overflow because it’s trying to keep track of all of the incomplete previous processes.

So that’s the reality of what you are proposing. Not a good outlook. Your time would likely be spent designing a mnemonic to store and then having to come up with a mnemonic for designing a mnemonic to store, and so on.

That’s very similar to memorizing verbatim text in that you have too many details. The solution would be to pick out keywords in the text you need to memorize and not worry about the insignificant parts. So, at the end of the day, it would be better to remember the important things that happened and commit those to memory if you’re looking to keep a mental diary of your life.

I don’t know what a metronome palace is but my peg systems can provide a storage place for a day at a time and then I could associate events to each of the days individually or with a story. That part I’ve done.

Try doing the system and I think you’ll have a different view of the practical side of it. Let me know because you might have a good idea that we could all use. Even thes sculptor of mega-projects Christo managed to get some of his ideas built.

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Related topic: I would like to be able to remember every day that passes

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Wow, that was an amazing and inspiring article on remembering every day of life!!

Yeah. I’m going to make a 1minute palace and see how much attentional ability I will be able to deal with this, trying to cycling through the loci.

I thought of a smaller but still amazing feat to try: keep a beat of 4 seconds per loci. That allows way more time. Another thing: no reviewing. I’m just mentally curious to see what will happen. So if we get 4 metronome-seconds per loci, and don’t review anything, that sounds far more doable.

This is a point which calls for some more thinking. Like yeah, after every 50 locations you take a “breather” to review. Or some kind of alternating between imagine-linking and reviewing. I think that’s a more advanced step, taking this idea to the next level. For now I think going without the reviewing is kind of like a baby-step to see what will happen. But if we do 4-seconds per loci, I think we might be able to do reviewing too!

So try it out: a 15-loci palace for 60 seconds. That’s nice. Each loci gets 4 taps, 1 second each.

For time tracking, you could use two other memory palaces. OK so you use a 24-loci palace for what hour it is – say you move a peg around, like an apple. So when it’s 8am, you move your apple from spot 7 to spot 8. Same for minutes. A 60-loci palace. Move around a fruit to the next minute-loci.

So three palaces – A 24-hour palace, a 60-minute palace, and your (15x4)-second palace

The immediate benefit is actually,

  1. enjoyment of consistently using imagination to link the current moment to a memory palace
  2. time tracking. Now that’s the real kicker. Imagine you tell someone, “I’ve been awake for 21,345 seconds now”. Well I’d be amazed.
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Guys I am trying it out right now and is it amazing!

Here’s what I did:

  1. I needed to be eased into it. Because keeping track of time, and keeping up with the present moment, and keeping up with visualizing the memory palace, is definitely a few things to juggle, but it is very very very rewarding and fairly simple to try.

  2. The way I eased myself into it is: actually we need a LOOP. Also, need less loci. I now have a 6-loci LOOP inside my house. When I used more loci, I didn’t think those loci were fast enough yet. So I just took 6 loci around the beginning, and started using them, and for sure they should get a bit faster and better with this over time, and maybe I can expand my 6-loci loop to be a bit longer. I noticed the loop was a better travel than going from end->restart_at_beginning. At each end of the journey, I felt a little bit confused. The loop where the end loci is close to the starting loci feels more comfortable.

  3. First thing I started to do with the 6-loci loop is not paying attention to anything else but just keeping it as a metronome I simply became very focused on keeping the pulse-flash-timing-of-each-next-loci extremely steady, and not necessarily on linking the present moment at first. As for BPM and timing, I noticed eventually that you can adjust your BPM rate according to how fast thoughts are and how comfortable you are. So if you have a lot of comfort and a lot of (little) thoughts, then you might spread those thoughts out quickly over many loci. If you’re not really mentally flowing with good concentration (keeping the “loci-loop-beat” steady and consistent), then what I do is a couple things:
    a) Slow down my thoughts, try to just pick one of all my thoughts or words at a time to link to the loci. Like, I will clear all the thoughts in my mind and “reset” and take the first thought/word/noticed_entity and link that to the next loci. After practicing the metronome loop, for a whole day, it should be come pretty natural to switch between loci and present thoughts and ideas to link. It’s very natural to trip up a bunch of times, but I just restart if I do.
    b) Start doing 4 beats per loci, repeating a thought 4 times before moving to the next loci. For example, while writing this message, I do each each each each word word word word four four four four times times times times at at at at each each each each loci loci loci loci as as as as I I I I switch switch switch switch. Or I could use 3 beats per loci, or 2, or whatever rhythm. It doesn’t have to be one word repeated, it could be like a phrase of words that gets repeated. It’s very meditative and helps me channel thoughts and keep the metronome consistent.
    c) Or I do the opposite. Instead of repeating a thought at the same loci many times before moving on to the next, I repeat the same thought but span it over multiple loci. I LOVE this one as well. It’s not as meditative as the first, but I think it helps me get used to switching loci consistently. Like I mentioned, you take a word like “apple” and then imagine eating an apple in each loci with the rhythm.
    d) I try to keep a “dollhouse” grid of my loci, so if I put an apple in the left 3 loci, then I can put like something else in the other 3, and that will just be 2 “entity types” in working memory that I can visualize on the dollhouse grid. Keeping a dollhouse/grid of the loop can help visualize repeats/patterns/counts in thoughts and ideas, leaving an easy-to-see trace and chunked pattern of what I’ve been thinking of.

Have fun!

It’s an incredible working memory exercise that can be practiced all day long, that makes the day exhilarating. I noticed especially if I deliberately try to put different thoughts and ideas into the loop at around 1-per-second, I end up really exhausting a lot of ideas and feel more creative and in tune with the variety of entities of life. For example, there are only 2800 words in the NGSL which makes up allegedly over 90% of common speech in English. If there are just 2800 “common” words, you’d exhaust all of those in your loop within 2800 seconds, which is less than an hour which has 3600 seconds. So the potential for consistently using imagination and linking varieties of thoughts to this loop at a consistent 1-per-second rate (or whichever rate), you can hopefully get tons of cognitive flexibility and priming of ideas. In a single day you might be awake for 50,000-60,000 seconds! Imagine all that linking – eventually you’re going to be more in tune with all the varieties of entities and understandings of life.

Let me know how your experiments run?

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Hey carljalal,

I’m wondering if you’re still active on this forum, and if yes, have you continued doing experiments for a timed MP [and if yes again, can you share some of your new insights on it]?

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Yikes, the thought of wanting to imagine every minute would drive me mad :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

I need to upgrade my life

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This reminds me of a Robyn Williams sci-fi film where a person’s life is video recorded
Particularly the recursion!

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Sure. So I did indeed try it. I set up a very small memory palace of 6 places (each place was a room/area of home). The reason for such a small palace is for speed/efficiency/simplicity. You could even do the same 1 room if you wanted (imagining tons of things over and over again in the same room). What I did was, for each 1 second moment I tried to store that moment as quickly as possible in a room. So first second, I imagined something about that moment in the first room. It was like a clockwise rotation of rooms, so you’d put 6 seconds of memories in 6 rooms, and then back at the 7th second you’d return to the 1st room and put something there again.

A couple of notes

  1. it was oddly euphoric
  2. I tried this over a year ago and I can STILL remember a huge amount of stuff from the few days/weeks that I tried imagining every 1 second moment in each of the rooms. It’s like a mini explosion/world that happens when I remember it. I remember all sorts of odd details such as what it looked like while driving the car, things I did at the computer, what the bedroom looked like (pretty funny – you put memories of being in the bedroom in the bedroom, kitchen memories will every 6 seconds be in the kitchen, etc). I remember the color of the sky driving from place to place, or the road, or even the feeling. Very unusual. Even the rooms themselves of the memory palace took root their own transformative “feeling” so to speak. The rooms feel “alive” a bit in my mind. For sure I don’t remember anywhere close to all 50-60K seconds of waking time. But what I can say is that time period is like a “lively explosion” of unusual “memoryful feeling” even if I can’t remember each detail clearly (although I can still remember a ton of things more than many other times of my life)
  3. You get a LOT faster the more you do it. it gets easier to pick things impromptu from each moment and throw them into memory, easier to move from room to room in memory palace.

Would I do it again? Well, I will say that it was EXTREMELY enjoyable and maybe even had pain-relieving properties and prevents boredom. But I did notice I felt a bit “detached” from the memories. I remember a lot but I didn’t really feel “at one” with my memories. There was a separation between my self and the memories I trying to make. Unless I imagine my “self” or, at least my own body, walking through a memory palace, I get a detached feeling as though I’m just looking at memories through a window. The memories are lively, but I’m not there with them. So I’d suggest something more immersive and integrative.

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This would be an excellent and functional mindfulness exercise in the proper scale. Say encoding once per waking hour, or once every two hours.

If you can link your most memorable occurrence of each hour of the day, then you could map the highlights of the day in 16 or so loci (depending on your sleeping habits) per day. If you dedicate one or two minutes at the end of each hour to review the hours events and memorably store them, this would probably be a very healthy habit to get into. If you create a palace for each day, you could cycle around each week.

At the end of each day, pick your best highlight and store it again in a dedicated palace for long term storage representing the week. 52 areas each with 7 loci… At the end of the year you have a palace of 365 impactful events.

This would possibly motivate you to create something memorable for yourself each hour of the day.

Using recurring palaces for the days of the week, some things would fade, some would get overwritten but I think that would be totally fine for this purpose.

I feel that as we age the perception of time passing us by accellerates, likely due to the fact that each day represents an ever shrinking percentage of our total life lived. For a 10 year old, each day is 1/3650th of their life experience. For a 40 year old each day is 1/14600th of theirs. Also children are constantly experiencing things that are new to them, forming standout memories around them. As we age we sometimes tend to have less of those unique experiences each day, month, year. The homogeny of our grownup routines can speed the perception of swiftly passing time.

By making those days lastingly memorable, it may increase our perceived “lifespan” and “slow” the passage of our mental time-sense.

This would be like having a journal, but one that’s alive and vibrant and visitable any time. I think taken at a realistic pace it would be very fulfilling and useful.

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I m thinking of logging hour wise . Mostly for improving productivity.

I feel like my view of time has been quite distorted and I can go into bouts of time wastage where I dissociate from any sense of time passing . Since I’m not bound by any professional obligations or by routine. the only break I find is another day .

But I don’t want to measure time in days , that’s so unproductive if I overlook a day just because something went wrong in the middle of it .

So I’m looking for a system to view hours as a new deadline . As in something that could remind me which hour is it .

And then every hour could be a new opportunity instead of every morning being a new opportunity.