This is wonderful. And really has great potential for the way I want to create something in collaboration with other teachers and students. It’s clear to me that the parts of the periodic table I co-create or share with my kids are more robust. I really like the analogy of bones and flesh. I haven’t read Songlines yet, on my summer holiday list.
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This is an interesting journal!
Have you had a struggle with decoding and verbalising the information.
For example, you think of the rat (41) in English, and then when you try to encode it back you may wonder if there мышь (36) in Russian, or rat in English?
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This is absolutely fascinating. I can totally understand how recalling a thing together with other people would work better than recalling it alone. I’ve done my memory training alone for the most part, but I share my history journey with my daughter - and it’s sticking in my mind a lot better, because I can also remember her reactions to the different landmarks. It must be such a powerful thing to engage in a group ceremony involving some sort of memorized story, especially in a landscape that’s emotionally relevant and that you love. (I can’t test out that part, alas - I move so frequently that I’ve never become emotionally attached to a place…)
I’m really excited that you’re doing this research and that all this stuff is actually being studied and becoming at least somewhat accessible to the uninitiated. It’s really amazing.
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I don’t really use the Major System consistently, in either language, so I haven’t had that problem. My memory characters are all in English, even if the original idea came from Russian letters. I find that this means my peg list is unusable for memorizing a Russian poem, though - I may need a separate visual alphabet in Russian for that purpose.
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@meepster, formal sharing experiences like ceremonies would seem critical and informal relating of narratives are both great ways to enhance and strengthen my memory images. I found that when I started to tell my wife about the odd ways that I was composing a story that was helping me to learn scriptures, I started to enhance the story in a good way. The details and motivations for why the story line elements were connected became more real and encouraged me to provide a better experience for the listener and made me visualize the images more clearly.
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Only 22/30 this time on number memory. I’m apparently quite slow at generating the images; I ran out of time on every attempt.
I didn’t sleep well last night and noticed that this affected both my Dual N-back performance and my number memory performance. Hoping I can catch up on sleep tonight.
111 digits of pi memorized so far. I don’t know why I am continuing, but I am.
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Are you getting better with making / recalling images since you began your memory journey? It seems like it.
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Not really, unfortunately. That’s the next thing to practice and work on. I can make images, but they don’t seem to stick very well as far as number-images are concerned. Maybe the problem is that I’m slow at it and need more time to encode. I think that if I had twice as much time to encode the 30 digit number, I’d do better at it.
I think I might add a routine to my training regimen for that specifically, so I can practice forming memorable images and placing them. I am catching myself just using rote memory for the latest poem, and that’s not what I want to be practicing. (It’s working fine, though - I’m about halfway through and the poem is there)
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Got a 30/30 and a 28/30 today. My Dual N-Back scores were better today too - yesterday I couldn’t even manage 3-Back very well, but today I even got up to 6 once, and 5 felt comfortable. I guess I finally caught up on sleep.
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I wandered through the forum and came across a book called “Mug Shots: a Police Artist’s Guide to Remembering Faces”. I think this may be what I need to get over my prosopagnosia, at least somewhat. I’ve read some of it and it seems to be a good analytical way to look at a face.
The way my face-recognition problem works is that I am never quite sure that a person I am looking at is the same person I saw earlier - I can recognize people in pictures, but real-world identification is hard for me because people do not obligingly pose the exact same way every time I see them. Maybe training myself to look at the important facial features analytically will help me be more sure.
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Embarrassing 10/30 on the number memory result. I was absolutely confident I remembered everything correctly. Turns out I was remembering the 6-digit groups out of order, and then screwed up a couple of other digits as well. Sigh. My other attempt was 26/30, which is at least decent.
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I decided to abandon the recommended “PAO in a memory palace” idea for number memory, and went with the method I’d intuitively stumbled on for memorizing pi. I used PAO for each group of six digits, and then used a brief 4-note melody to link each group. They were not in a memory palace at all - the linking mechanism was the melody. I got 28/30 three times. It felt a lot more solid and required a lot less effort.
Interestingly, when I use memory palaces to memorize shopping lists, it’s very easy and they stick like glue. But apparently, numbers don’t work that way in my brain.
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I’ve never really been attracted to PAO systems, for the reason that it tends to limit the possible interactions with the locus itself.
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OK, I think I’m on to something. My homegrown method for number memorizing got me two 30/30 results today. I did not use loci at all - just PAO groups linked by four-note melodies. I found that during retrieval, I remembered either the PAO or the melody or both, and the two things complemented each other nicely. Also, retrieval was a lot faster than with loci. I was done way before the clock ran out.
I’m curious how far I can take this. Tomorrow I’m planning to try 40 digits. I’m also realizing that some of my PAO numbers are no good and I probably need to swap them out, but I guess I can take my time with that and see what comes to mind.
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This is still intriguing, @meepster. What is it about the melody that allows you to associate it with a particular PAO image? Song title? Composer?
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It’s not a recognized song - it’s 4 random notes that form a random “tune”. For some reason, that random 4-note “tune” sticks in my head (I have a very good auditory memory). Then, when I enter the first two notes of that 4-note “tune” (because it’s the O of the PAO group), it jogs my memory for the rest of the 4-note “tune”, and then I have the P of the next PAO group. It didn’t work every time when I tried it, but it worked enough times to help me recall everything.
So the process for something like 293443458013 would be:
29 - dentist
34 - writing a novel about
43 - cheese
then recall the 4345 “melody” - F-E-F-G - and get that the next number is 45, and go:
45 - Donald Trump
80 - giving a Christmas present to
13 - a Bar Mitzvah boy
and so on.
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That’s finally clear for me, thanks!
I have played piano since I was very young so I hear notes easily like your four note melody, but I would have to know that it was in the key of C and remember it with a C note for each digit note. But I can hear the “melody” from cheese to Trump easily.
Do you just keep going up the scale for 8 through 0 then ending on the E an octave higher? I suppose a 12-tone scale wouldn’t sound as melodic.
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Yeah, it keeps going. 0 is the B below middle C, and then it keeps going up so that 9 is the D of the second octave above middle C. This way I can add sharps and flats as needed to make the melody more memorable, which is what I did in high school to memorize phone numbers. It’s harder to do that at speed for number memorization, so I just use the notes as they are with no sharps and flats.
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Apparently, I cannot do 40 digits. Alas. Maybe it’s just an off day today.
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Still cannot do 40 digits. I managed maybe 20 out of 40. I have a headache today and the brain just doesn’t feel entirely right, so maybe it’s that.
The Hamlet memorizing has gotten through Act 4 and seems pretty stable - and every time I walk by that area, I remember the events in the play in a fair amount of detail with some verbatim text. Just Act 5 left to go.
After going down a few Internet rabbit holes, I’ve decided to see if inducing synesthesia would help my performance (and do other interesting things for my brain in general). I put a colorized-text extension on my web browser and I’ll keep it there for a while just to see what would happen.
My pi memorization app already has colored text, but I don’t use it enough to get an effect.
I think I already have a synesthetic brain to some extent - I “hear” musical notes as their names (in the European naming system - do, re, mi, etc.) and the vowel sound is very clearly imprinted on the note - I can’t not hear it. Never noticed I did this until I started researching synesthesia. My brain also appears to accept new quasi-synesthetic associations readily. When the lockdown started and I grew out my hair, I got a bunch of different Scrunchie hair ties in different bright colors. I wear a different one on each day of the week. I now have a pretty solid association between colors and days of the week. Today is yellow. I don’t use the color-weekday association in my mental calendar, but I probably should.
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