I don’t think this is helpful, but I’m also terrible at months and now I live in Hong Kong, I often use the Chinese month-name (yat yuet, yi yuet = month 1, month 2) which is linked in my mind to the English name! Because once you can count to 12 you can do everything in Chinese. Days of week, months, time. (time is usually counted in 5 minute blocks, so 3.45pm is 3-point to-9. (because 9 is at 45min).
I guess ‘learn Chinese’ is not a helpful idea, but who knows.
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This is how I’m setting up my project. As mentioned in the other thread ‘So why is this not in school etc’. Mostly because of the loop of ‘no time for a new system that doesn’t work’ > it’s impossible to believe how good [fun/effective] a memory palace is without trying it > it takes work to set one up and start using it > but what if it doesn’t work and I wasted my time.
Teachers in my school system are really resistant to yet another new thing to take on. Not unjustified. But also not enlivening.
So I learnt the first 20 Chem elements in Cantonese (incl. characters). Two things I’m weak at.
My experience was that the energy/effort advantage is all in the revision. The recall being easier, highly portable, and really fun.
The Chem teacher is delighted at how it worked and at the opportunity for bringing some creativity into her lessons. Also she prevented me from teaching Nitrogen as Ni. [facepalm].
My plan is that all kids in Form 3 (who already need to) learn 20 elements of the periodic table, so we teach it to them then. And once they have it down, only a handful will go on to take the elective in Form 4, but everyone will still be studying Chinese, and they can use the same loci for the Chinese Dynasties, as they can use that for Chinese language (a core subject) and the Literature and/ or History electives. Principal Li who currently represents the symbol of Lithium in his golden tracksuit can pivot to introducing the schools of Confucius, Legalism and Daoism in the Zhou dynasties.
This is my fun. Aiming for something very small and to this forum, unambitious, but hopefully widely accessible and inviting.
One thing I like a lot about this technique is that it doesn’t cost anything. There’s no physical or economic barrier for a low-income school or student. The only barriers are awareness and willingness to try.
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What’s going on, Meepster? How’s your short term reading memorizing going?
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Life has been rather intense lately, which is why the memory training has fallen by the wayside a bit. The only thing I’m doing these days is the day-memorizing project, which has crossed the one-year mark earlier this month. I can’t overstate how valuable I’m finding this exercise, and I intend to keep it going for as long as I can.
On the one-year anniversary, I went through every single day of the 365 days. It was a fascinating view of my year.
I really should get back into short-term reading memorizing and maybe get a few more poems in my head as well. Someday, when life is less crazy.
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Hi,
Read your post with interest. You may wish to consider being kinder to yourself. Isn’t life tough enough on each of us at times already?
Wishing you the best,
Robert
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Good job on the day memorizing project. It’s amazing that it’s been over a year. I remember when you started doing it.
On the one-year anniversary, when you did the 365 day review, how long did it take you?
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Hey I’m an Advocate too. I’m from Kenya and have been trying to memorize Legislation alongside cases for each section as applicable. Have you ever tried memorizing legislation before?
Any tips?
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So, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted here. Life has been rather chaotic and things have been happening. I’ve taken a long break from memory training, though the day memorizing project is still going strong. It’s getting to the point that the twice-daily reviews are a bit cumbersome - it takes me 15 minutes each time - but the value it is providing to my life is so high that I do not mind taking the time.
I’ve also gotten back into memorizing poems. I’m taking a “Poem of the Month” approach, where I live with one particular poem for a month and see if it just seeps into my brain on its own. It works well for me and encourages more analysis of the poem in question.
As for other unstupiding, I’m realizing that one thing that’s really holding me back in memory training (and in life, for that matter) is attention span and focus. It’s gotten so bad that I can’t go through the day-memorizing review without getting distracted. The Dual N-Back stuff really wasn’t helping. So, I’ve temporarily shelved all the other memory training, and gone into meditation training instead. I’m following the method outlined in “The Mind Illuminated” by Culadasa, which appears to be specifically directed at controlling attention and awareness and overcoming mind-wandering and distraction.
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Welcome! I actually haven’t tried memorizing legislation, though I am assuming the same memory techniques would apply as would apply to anything else. Memory palaces work for any type of material. Maybe I’ll give it a try, if only to impress my clients. 
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The 365 day review really didn’t take very long - maybe 20 minutes or so - but I’m noticing that the reviews take much longer when my mind is scattered and distracted.
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I’m back at it, and wishing everyone a happy 2023. After a very stressful and messy fall/winter, I’m now ready to come back to unstupiding. I’ve forgotten most of what I had tried to stuff into my memory (lack of regular review = bad), but the things that stuck with me did, in fact, stick. I’m now a year and a half into the mental diary, with no missing days. I went through the entire data collection on December 31, and it was all there. The “poem of the month” idea is doing great too. I also use the PAO number system every day for my work and find it great for short-term memory retention of numbers.
I failed miserably with the password retention system, and now I’m trying a different tack. All the passwords are locations in a memory palace (a real-world memory palace I have daily access to). Then, I do a letter-substitution rule that is common for all the passwords, so that I get some numbers and special characters in there (something like substituting a “35%” for every “g”). (I’d stolen that idea from Brad Zupp’s “Hack-Proof Password System”). Time will tell how well this system will work, but it seems more solid than the other ones I tried (including Brad Zupp’s idea). I haven’t yet converted all my passwords to this system, but I plan to.
I did the meditation for a while, and I guess it may have helped a bit with focus and attention span, but I’m not doing that anymore. It was just too much on top of everything else.
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Welcome back. The updates are fascinating and I look forward to future instalments.
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Thanks, Lynne! It’s nice to be back.
I am now up to three passwords in my password tracking system. Basically, every time I have to use the “Forgot Password” function, I convert it to my new system. I try to randomly visualize it when I walk past the location in question.
I’m also back to my mental to-do list and mental calendar. This time around, the mental to-do list is stored using my office as a memory palace. I don’t know why I didn’t do that last time.
My day-remembering project is getting big enough that I now need to differentiate by year - I started it on July 9, 2021. I’m trying to use the Chinese Zodiac as a differentiator - add on an image of a rabbit for this year’s days, an image of a tiger for last year’s, and an image of a bull for the year before. I figure this should at least keep me going for 12 years.
I’ve been reading Eran Katz’s “Where did Noah Park the Ark?”, which I highly recommend. None of it was tremendously new information (though there was some fascinating stuff on Jewish memorization techniques, which tended to be acronym-based rather than location-dependent, for cultural reasons), but it was highly geared to practical applications, which I like. Now I want to read more about Jewish memorization techniques and the history thereof, and I kinda wonder where I’d find this sort of thing. The Oral Torah was a memory-only document for a long long time, and it would be fascinating to find out just how it was memorized and transmitted.
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All sounds really interesting. I hope you will update us when you know more.
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Sounds interesting. I got that book recently but haven’t read it yet. I’m going to move it up my reading list.
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I don’t know anything about Culadesa, but ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy) might suit you better. No controlling or resisting anything, as that seems to cause persistence and it’s tiring. ACT is about awareness and letting it be in various ways, and the issues tend to go away themselves once they’ve been heard. That’s a super dumb summary. “The Happiness Trap” by Russ Harris is fab, and “The Reality Slap” is good if there’s some trauma messing things up. I’ve been reading them both with small groups of friends. Seems to work better than reading alone.
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Also glad you’re back, I love your updates. By the way I recently re-started learning Russian. No memory palace. Duolingo and Zoom classes. I have printed out sheets to try Metivier’s method but not got much further. It requires a lot of locations. And I’m also learning Cantonese so I dithered about deciding who gets which locations and then stopped. Metevier’s method is alphabetic loci, but verbs are all in pairs and then they have prefixes (but sometimes the pair is not just a prefix). So I’m stuck there too. If I get that into the water, I’ll start a thread for that.
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That sounds interesting. I’m kinda more interested in the focus/attention side of things rather than the trauma processing side of things, but this does sound intriguing.
Good luck with Russian, by the way. I’m honestly not sure how useful memory palaces are in the long-term for language learning. I think just exposure and repetition is much better. I’ve had pretty decent success in Spanish just watching Spanish TV shows on LingoPie with Spanish subtitles to help me along. Today, I found an app that does an interlinear translation of the Bible, and I worked through a bit of that and found that Biblical Hebrew is kinda sorta making sense even with this limited exposure. I think a memory palace would just slow down the process by introducing an extra step into the equation.
The password method actually works - I had to access one of the resources I’d converted to my new system the other day, and the password was 100% there and very solid. I try to think of the resource in question every time I pass by the location.
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Is it the Sefaria.org app? (Joshua Foer created it.)
I’m currently trying to learn enough Hebrew to read the Bible, mainly for historical interest.
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I don’t think memory palaces and exposure & repetition are mutually exclusive. I think both are of value. But I think it depends on what language you are learning and coming from, how useful memory palaces are. I have used them for both French and Chinese. The French palaces were useful, but I relied much mroe on reception, immersion, familiarity … For Chinese, I doubt I would have ever got over the massive initial hurdle without my huge memory palace. There were just no familiar hooks to grab on to.
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