Thank you - I’ll check it out.
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I was also searching for the difference between Ancestors and Rapscallions whilst listening to the audiobook, and now I’m curious to know Lynne if you brought them to life by painting or making, or are some of them purely conjured and retained in your mind?
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I guess that in my mind, the Ancestors are real people who I want to know more about in reality. The Rapscallions are creatures / toys who I have coerced into my imaginary worlds, but the difference isn’t really defined given I use the Ancestors for memorising other stuff as well.
For the Ancestors, I collected images from the Internet for those who were not already familiar. For the Rapscallions, it varies hugely. For multiplication tables, it’s two toys, a bear and a rabbit-like character. I also have various dolls and bears who I talk to in either Chinese or French - they are less judgemental than a real person would be.
I have lots of bears and dolls in my studio. Writing is a solitary activity, so I have an entire toy community around me. The dolls are currently acting as models for turning Shakespeare plays into narrative scrolls. My bears and dolls are hard-working critters.
For Chinese and for names/words, I use mostly animals in medieval style bestiaries. I have painted them. I have a bestiary for French vocabulary, animals to represent all the first two letter combinations, but I haven’t had time to paint it yet. So they exist in my head, but I will paint them one day.
Some are purely in my mind. I can’t remember what I had for 70 originally, but she morphed into Tootsie (70 is TO for me) and she has never existed except in my imagination. As others won’t be using my Dominic system characters, there is no need to paint them. I do that partly because I have aphantasia, and so my visual imagination is really weak. And also, because others are using my sets of characters either as they are, or as examples for developing their own.
Over time, I have relaxed my rules and whatever my brain does, then that is what I run with. So it isn’t always clear cut.
I hope that makes sense.
Lynne
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That really opens it up, thanks Lynne
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Wow - what fascinating things have happened here since I’ve been gone! 
I may have something to report, Cloud. I hope you’re still interested.
San Soo has five levels, each level teaching a particularly useful item. Level 1 (the Ah Soos), for example, teaches shifting and regeneration of force. I assigned a color to each level that reflects the belt that, in my mind, is associated with that series of techniques. That immediately broke the 240 individual techniques into two panels of 45 and three of 50.
The techniques in each color group originally come numbered (ex: 14 Choi Li Ho, which is our Jiu Jitsu), so it was easy to impose a name for each technique (ex: 14 equals TIRE). I then imagine myself in the appropriately colored gi (Choi Li Ho is our third level, so the gi would be green) interacting with the tire.
Going from my old class notes, it has been taking something over one month to assimilate any given level. That comes to thirty days of study at about one hour / day, done when time permits.
Cordially,
Fedora
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One of the really interesting things is how often the same moves repeat in different arts.
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Indeed, Minotaur. San Soo is a southern Chinese art, and as such incorporates a bit of (Indonesian) Silat.
So I’m going to do another check in for this memory training journal - this April 4, I passed the milestone of 1000 days recorded in memory. This is pretty much the only memory training I’ve been doing, but it’s been absolutely priceless in how much it’s added to my life and I intend to continue it for a lifetime in some shape or form. I’ve been able to see patterns in my life that I would not be able to see otherwise.
The data bank isn’t perfect - I’ve had to restore more than a few days from old photos or emails, and change quite a few images when my recall failed - but I figure any sort of living memory is going to be malleable and changeable anyway, and as long as the data bank is accurate (i.e. each day’s image is what happened on that actual day), I’m fine with it.
I’m reaching the point at which twice-daily review at the scale at which I’m doing it is getting a bit unwieldy, so I know I’m going to have to make some changes to make it sustainable. At this point, I review the most recent month every day, the next most recent month every other day, and the month after that every third day; then I go to twice-weekly reviews for a few months and then once-weekly reviews for a few months. After that, it goes to monthly reviews. I go through all the designated days once in the morning and once in the evening. It’s getting to be way too much, and at some point soon, I may need to sit down and restructure the memory-maintenance ritual so that it doesn’t take quite that long. At this point, the morning review frequently slips into afternoon because I simply don’t have the time.
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And here is the latest update on the daily memory diary - I am throwing in the towel on this project, but modifying it to make it sustainable as a true “prosthetic autobiographical memory” that I can use for a lifetime. At present, the daily review takes me an hour and a half each day, and I’m only 3.5 years in. Also, I’m losing days, and they are harder and harder to recover.
I went to Lembran Sar’s blog to see if he had any insights (his memory project is what inspired me to do it). Apparently, he threw in the towel entirely after 10 years.
And so, I’ve been thinking about what I need from this project and what I don’t need. I love the “prosthetic autobiographical memory” aspect of it - at present, I can pass for a person with a very good memory, rather than a person who just can’t remember stuff at all. I can remember our vacations, I can remember the names of people I’ve met, I can remember what movies we watched, that sort of thing. I want to keep that going, and I’m sure it’ll keep me sharper as I head into old age. I also really want to keep some of the more important sensory memories - as my parents age and as my child grows, these will become more and more precious. But at the same time, I am not sure I need to know what I had for dinner on some random date. I can let that go.
I’ve decided to go with a monthly “winter count” rather than a daily one, and to remember a few things from each month from July 2021 to the present. I’m also setting up a memory palace based system to store the data - I have been trying to brute-force the data into my brain by rote repetition, and as we all know, it does not work so well. What I’m going with is a room in my house for each year, with 12 loci in each room for each month, and a few key images attached to each locus. That will keep the most important data from the “mental diary,” and presumably store it more securely than I have been storing it.
I’ll update the group on how that goes once I get everything restructured and set up.
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So, here is how I am setting up the ritual and memory storage system. I review three months of data day by day, the way I’ve been doing before - every day for the most recent month, every other day for the month before that, every third day for the month before. For all the months preceding that, I pick out a few key events/images and attach them to a locus in the room dedicated to that year. I’m setting up the memory palaces for that - right now, I’ve got 2021 and half of 2022 placed reasonably solidly. I’m taking it gradually so that each locus and each image are solid. Eventually, I hope that once the memory structure is set up, I won’t have to spend a lot of time on maintenance, and will only need to add one locus a month, which seems doable.
I’m finding that this works much better as a mental diary, because now I can review the entire thing in my head rather than continuing to use the calendar as a lukasa. Also, it really highlights to me just how much easier it is to use memory palaces than spaced repetition. I should have made this transition a long time ago.
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I do spaced repetition of my memory palaces.
Have you tried it?
Each palace’s “review” gets spaced further and further away to the point where many palaces I won’t review for months to years again (and then potentially for decades once those are reviewed again one or two more times). Thoughts?
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That’s probably what I’ll end up doing. I haven’t decided quite yet just how often I’ll review the memory palace data. Right now, it’s daily, but I’m still populating the memory palaces and it’ll need some time to settle in. Eventually, I hope to go to less frequent reviews and still retain the data in my head.
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I’ve read your diary when my baby was sick and couldnt sleep for entire weeks. It made me jump into the memory art as I saw you experimenting and I told myself I can do it too. I wanted to thank you for that.
If I understand you dont want to loose the data you will put in your palace. Since its not an information you can easily find on a book, I was thinking you can link the image of each month together. Like the image of june is doing something that start the story of july. This can help you retrieve a month thanks to the month around and add redundancy in your data.
A second idea is you can have a dedicated person that is assigned to each month and guide you toward the story of the same month each year. Same idea it remove some strain as you reuse the same image to build those memory. You can use the person you want to remember the most so they are always with you during those reviews (I do this often for personal memory it make it like I spend time with them).
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I like this.
To borrow from the information sciences, what you’re describing are methods of “indexing” data for more efficient storage and retrieval.
And I suspect that people, in a way, are mnemonic indexes.
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So the autobiographical memory palace diary is going great - the information is all sticking, and it’s actually a much more useful thing in everyday life than the day-by-day stuff I had been doing. I’m done with 2021 and 2022, and starting in on encoding 2023.
I’m messing around with Dual N-Back again; I did a “20-day challenge” on an app, and found that even that short time improved my focus and mental alertness in a noticeable way. It’s also been a reminder to me that my auditory / verbal memory is much much stronger than my visual memory - for the dual N-back, the audio part of it is effortless and the visual part of it is very very hard. I’m trying triple N-back now, with all three modalities being visual, just to give my brain more of a workout.
This also inspired me to revisit my number system. The Dominic system is mostly visual, and I have to admit that it does not come naturally to me. I can do it, and I have found it useful, but it is effortful. Yesterday, I decided to try my homegrown “Major System” for memorizing a parking space number, just for fun. It made a nonsense word and that nonsense word stuck in my head much better than the PAO would have, and it was very easy. I think I might switch over to the Major System and play to my strengths, and see what happens. (Which may be a challenge because my number-sound correspondences are different from the standard Major System ones, so I can’t use the word generators out there)
I recently read “Advanced Memory Palaces” by Joe Reddington, which was intriguing in its own way (and which also pushed me toward the Major System, which he uses). He uses computer science concepts in data structures to structure memory. For example, he uses a three-dimensional memory palace to structure an array with multiple properties for each data item, or class identifiers to add further data to each data item, or skip lists to make long lists of items more usable. I’m planning to experiment a bit with some of these things and see what happens.
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A fun thing to do is to put in a memory palace the major system. Another one I need to do more is to take a number and find all the possible word I can.
Happy New Year to all! My New Year’s resolution is to memorize all my passwords, once and for all. I’ve had to change my passwords an embarrassing amount of times because I just can’t remember them. I know I’ve tried to address the password issue before, but I’m going to make another attempt at it.
As for other things, I love love love the Major system for numbers. I’ve switched over to it almost exclusively. It is a lot easier to use for the stuff I need it for; typically, I need to remember 8-9 digit numbers for my work, and it’s a lot easier to think of them as nonsense words than as cartoon characters doing random things. I’m kinda curious to see how it would work for longer numbers.
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I’ve started reading Marilu Henner’s “Total Memory Makeover”. She says that individuals with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory can recall about 200 events from any given year, while a normal person can do 8-10.
I think my recall of years prior to 2021 is probably about 1-2 events a year, if that. After 2021, I am retaining about 60-100 events each year in my memory palace diary, with vivid memories attached. Not too bad for progress.
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I’ve been having some fun with that, too. My homegrown Major System allows for quite a few words, so I am usually able to find plenty. I haven’t tried my Major System numbers in a memory palace - the opportunity hasn’t come up yet - but I find that I can retain credit card numbers pretty easily without it.
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