Are you seeing superiority among the songlines as opposed to just memory palaces by themselves? Could you ever see yourself giving up memory palaces alone and taking up songlines? Of course, songlines are memory palaces that you’re physically with and attaching things to while incorporating a musical element, but I hope you understand my question.
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Well, I’m not exactly doing a songline for Hamlet - I have not incorporated a musical element. I’m basically just doing a memory palace with physical presence.
I’m continuing onward with it, but I’m kinda realizing that I do want to memorize it verbatim. The image of it in my memory is mostly a summary of what happens, in my own words, with a few memorized monologues, but it’s really not enough.
As for giving up memory palaces and taking up songlines - if I were less of a homebody, I totally would. As it is, I don’t think I would have enough memory palaces if I did that. I work at home and the only time I ever go outside is on my daily walk, which is not all that long. I am sure it works much better if you are an Australian Aborigine and cover a huge distance every day.
The long Russian poem I’m memorizing now is not in a songline - it’s in the old apartment I used to live in, so I can’t physically go there. So it’s a straightforward memory palace.
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Tried the number memory training on this site. Eep. I could manage 24 digits, but 30 was (and still is) beyond me.
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I am also training number memory, but in the multiplication table about squares. Now, can barely name out any random 2 digits square in 3 sec.
Soon, @meepster you can overcome your 30 digits, need to be so familiar with your digit system.
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I am still a bit confused about the difference. I agree that Songlines are mapped out in a physical space, but I am not sure if the musical element is essential. That is part of the research which is just starting - now involving academics, students and Indigenous Australians at 4 universities!
I think that using the terms a bit interchangeably at this stage is fine. I’d never give up my memory palaces that don’t involve music! I don’t do imagined memory palaces, but that may be because I have aphantasia and can’t visualise them well enough. I can ‘walk’ my physical palaces / songlines in memory though.
I have a feeling the edges in the definitions of memory palaces and songlines may remain blurry as people do memory palaces differently and Aboriginal cultures also vary in they implementation of songlines. There are over 300 language groups (seen as individual cultures) and lots more dialects among Indigenous Australians. All so complicated!
So interesting to read your progress and ideas!
Lynne
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I can’t visualize well enough for memory palaces either, and I am finding it a serious limitation - the only memory palaces I can use very well are my house, my old apartment, and the park where I walk every day.
I’d love to find out what your research on Songlines comes out to, because I guess I am confused about this as well, and I am not sure if I’m doing this right at all. What I’m ending up with, for Hamlet, is a detailed synopsis of each scene with a few memorized monologues. Each feature in the walk is an event happening in the scene, and for some places along the walk, I stop and mentally recite a monologue. I’d love to do a verbatim representation of each scene instead, but I’m not sure how to encode that in the landscape.
Oh - and I got 30 memorized digits today! I only managed the feat once, but I am still proud of myself.
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If it is working for you, then you are doing it ‘right’. We won’t all have the same ‘right’ because we are not all the same people in terms of our brains nor our experience.
You are doing so well and entertaining us all beautifully.
The research will not be available for years, I suspect. It is to be a fully rigorous academic research program. I have another meeting tomorrow and we will plan further and look more formally at the way the various universities - and departments within them - will be working together. All good fun!
Lynne
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I’m kinda curious now if there are any Indigenous Australian people on this forum; are there? Or anyone else from an oral culture who has grown up using this sort of memory techniques the way they were originally intended to be used? It would be interesting to just flat-out ask someone from such a culture how they’d encode a long story with a lot of monologues and other verbatim bits.
I added a few dates to the History Walk, and noticed that they are all staying where I put them. Also, Hamlet Act 3 is now fully encoded.
As for the long Russian poem, the 5 stanzas of it I’ve already got appear to be sticking, but I’m just using rote memorization for it. I’m not sure what memory palace to stick it into, and I may just go with a simple peg list instead.
I added an exercise to my training regimen to specifically train attention and visual memory - every day, I note one thing in my immediate environment that I want to remember in detail. The next day, I attempt to recall the thing in as much detail as I can. I’m very bad at this; I think it’ll do my brain some good to practice it until it gets better.
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Wish I had thought to ask that question.
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They relied (or rely?) on these methods because no writing, so no verbatim or monologues, I guess.
But not sure. 
There were songs, and those are typically remembered verbatim. Looking at old fairy tales, there typically are poems or incantations or songs involved that would most likely be recited verbatim, so I’m sure this was part of preliterate culture.
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Ah, you’re right. Then the only advantage I see in songs to help remember the “lyrics”, is following the known melody and even rhythm. 
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Oh, one more thing to brag about. I had a client meeting today. The client was telling me about his case and describing his legal needs. I effortlessly remembered the 6 points he made, without taking notes, simply by “attaching” each point to a finger. I still remember the points quite easily.
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Are you learning it in Russian? And do share what it is. Is it Pushkin? Tatiana’s letter?
I assumed it was English and then I remembered that ‘un-stupiding yourself’ was understatement of the century. So it’s probably something more worthy.
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It is Pushkin - The Song of Wise Oleg (Песнь о вещем Олеге). I told my kid the story in question not too long ago, and figured the poem might be a fun memory exercise. But Tatiana’s letter sounds like a good thing to memorize as well - that may be next on the list.
Today’s number memory scores are 28/30 and 26/30. Sigh. There is plenty of un-stupiding to do.
I have decided that the next “story” memorization project after Hamlet will be a kid-friendly sort of story. I have always been very bad at telling stories to my kid. I don’t have a good memory for stories (hence the trouble I’m having with Hamlet), I’m bad at telling things in order, and so on and so forth. Which sounds like a wonderful application for some “un-stupiding”. I still have 1.5 acts of Hamlet left to encode, and then I’ll pick something that I can re-tell to a 5-year-old and go at it.
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I am afraid you are asking for a miracle. If there were people who could answer these questions directly from experience, it wouldn’t have taken me years of academic research to distill the memory methods from the complexity of oral tradition research. I could have just asked them. I have a bibliography of over 800 items for the PhD - a large proportion of which I needed to see the patterns and make the links.
There may be people from Indigenous cultures on this forum, but to have grown up with the extensive ‘deep knowledge’ of Songlines would be unlikely in anyone used to using writing as their primary archival method.
The ‘deep knowledge’ bit, which I will be thinking about much more now, comes from talking with Aboriginal academic and author, Tyson Yunkaporta, in discussions we were having about the inter-university research project, now with the working title ‘memory trails project’. The discussion was about the differences, if there are any, between songlines and memory palaces. The overlap is huge. Tyson was talking about ‘deep knowledge’ and the way knowledge is layered over repeated use of the songline(s). He was talking about the emotional link and personal relationship you have to the physical space, something I really identify with and why I tend to use only physical palaces which I visit regularly.
Tyson was also talking about the connective narrative to keep the songlines in order, which I certainly use for the bird-lukasa, but not as much as I could (should?) in other memory palaces/songlines.
One other thing he talked about was a bit of a revelation. He said for Aboriginal cultures, songlines are also about relationships and connectivity with other people. Aboriginal people don’t walk a songline alone. Which means mine are really effectively all memory palaces, if that was taken as a definitive factor - which it is not yet - we are still at ‘defining the research project’ stage.
But this human interaction is an interesting point. I had not considered it before our conversation yesterday. Most of my memory trails (I am inconsistent in my terminology at the moment, so don’t read anything into that) - most of the trails are through the neighbourhood in my rural town. If there are people in the gardens, I stop and tell them that I am not ‘casing the joint’ - I think that is a global term, but if not - I tell them that I am not staring at their house to come back and rob it. I tell them what I am doing. They often comment that they have noticed me. In many cases the conversation continues into the topic of what I am memorising and they almost invariably have some kind of story which they relate about Chinese or French or countries or history … I tell them which character, concept, country or an event in history their house encodes. That encounter becomes part of the memory trail added to the relevant location. I am always conscious of those people now, looking to nod a greeting or even chat again. I wonder if that is far more significant than I had realised.
Mind you, the guy at the unit where the Maya Classic era flourished asked me what I was doing. When I tried to explain, he dashed inside and shut his door behind him. He has avoided this memory nutter ever since.
I don’t know of much that is verbatim in oral tradition. My Aboriginal co-author on “Songlines: the power and promise”, Margo Neale, describes the performances in terms of the human body. The encoded knowledge is like the skeleton, varying slightly between individuals but still always composed of the same bones in the same positions. The performances, however, are like the flesh and each performer adds their own individual presentation. So apart from very common songs, you are not going to get anything verbatim. Why would you? What purpose would that serve? It is the knowledge, the skeleton, which must be kept intact, not the exact words used to keep it so.
Hope all that makes sense. The more I am involved in this research, the more I know that I need to learn. Pity about time limits!
Lynne
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Aw dope! You gave each finger a personality and had its descriptors be one of the points! Thats friggin dope
I’m geakin out
I love practical like that
Harumph.
His loss.
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It wasn’t that - the ideas related to an invention (I’m a patent attorney), and I imagined each idea happening to a finger. (As a made up example, imagining one finger filling up with water, then imagining another finger being heated up to 350 degrees, and so on).
It worked really well, maybe because the images weren’t visual.
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My kid loves (and I love) Vassilisa and BabaYaga. It’s SUCH a memory palace of a story. And so open to customisation for the parts that the kid relishes. The comb, the ribbon etc.
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