This is an excerpt of an simplified version of all mnemonics and art of memory ideas for memorization and metamemorization (memorizing peg list to later use to memorize new ideas, memory palaces), that I’m writting on the go:
Principle of Imagination
The same process your brain uses for remembering is used for imagination, in other worlds, to imagine comes from memory then you can’t imagine what you haven’t seen.
Huge amounts of data from everything you have acquired from your senses is in your brain. As in the principle of association, your brain uses new pathways for neuronal connections when you modify your memories, when you imagine, so new memories are created by the mere act of imagination. That’s how you memorize with pictures. But creating a memory is not the same as accessing a memory, recalling, that’s why we need the principle of location (new neural pathways, different routes for the brain to seek the memories).
What constitutes a good image, depends on you. What’s a very memorable image as you want to know? Well, if you read the part about association, there is your answer. Follow these steps:
- When creating a picture you need focus and to be detailed.
- For beginners the recommendation is to imagine by connotation with respect to what you want to memorize: it is related to, seems like, sounds like, smells like, feels like.
Example:
Idea third strofe poem Invictus:
-Beyond this place of wrath and tears.
-Looms but the horror of the shade.
-And yet the menace of the years
-Find, and shall find me, unafraid.
Images by connotation:
-An staircase towards the sky, two “giant” faces of theater mask: one angry and the other crying “bursting in tears”
-A grey(shade) bed sheet with a big scary face (horror). Look at the ghost slowly from bottom to top and see the big teeth of a smile. (Cheshire Cat)
-See a man rapidly going from peak years to old age to dust while he takes a look at his wristwatch.
-A detective is looking at big screens and he sees the smug smile of an Anonymous sympathizer.
For the image to be memorized, you need to see or establish the connection with the idea and image, as you visualize, read and connect. This is the hardest part to explain. With time you will recognize the "feeling of association”, and you won’t need to do the second step, good for abstract words or difficult ideas and technical terms, to those just give a random image and mingle with the “feeling of association”. That’s how I memorize memory pegs.
Three exercises for recognizing your imagination, try until you see detailed what you want to imagine, if you think of a face and blue eyes, get close the eyes and make them blue, imagination is not wanting to see, it is more like drawing in your mind world, you need to give the command to twist things. Do these with increasing speed:
First, test your memory (just remember, don’t affect the memories):
- Recall your life, the most you can; this way you activate your episodic memory. Recall places you’ve been and imagine a place you’d like to be in, as vague or detailed as they come, it is just an exercise. And see the pictures and see what you can recall.
- See what you remember the most, do you recall, think why you remember those things, hints: importances, emotions, vividness, your attention was there, you were constantly thinking about it. That’s how things get naturally memorized.
- Remember art: movies, books, videos, anime, anything.
- Take a note of all the details of the places you see.
Second, test your memory twisting (imagination):
- Visualize people you know, famous people you have not met, objects you don’t have in your reach.
- Change clothes, sizes, skin, transform, transmute. Can you see a face of someone you know on a wall? Can you see them as giants? Can you see them as anthropomorphic animals?
- Now modify movie scenes and animation you’ve seen. Or the pictures of books or what you imagined when reading. If you don’t read or then just try the next exercise.
Third, test your memory and imagination:
- Imagine a landscape, inside or outside, make it as unreal as possible.
- Imagine a creature or alien.
- Take a baseline of a person or animal, will it be anthropomorphic? Or animal like? Fish? Insect like? Make a decision, or imagine them all.
- Give them fantastical features: they can fly without wings, they don’t need to breathe, they are slender or chubby… you name it.
- For the previous features, imagine the biological mechanism that allows them to have those. So they can fly without wings? Maybe they have orifices and through them absorb light gases in the atmosphere, visualize that process and so for each feature.
Keep doing imagination exercises, maybe more complex than these, it’ll help you detect your mechanisms of recalling and imagining, so that way you distinguish memory from imagination, and thus when imagination becomes memory.