Welcome!
The easiest way I’ve found to explain the memory palace technique is to liken it to giving directions based on landmarks or giving a tour of a place and highlighting interesting features as you go.
The idea is to pick out distinct “stations” that will form the context of little scenes in which certain elements will represent the information that you want to remember.
So the memory palace forms a spacial “list” of landmarks (or stations or loci or whatever you want to call them.) Once you are familiar with the journey and the stations, you can begin visualizing the representational imagery interacting at those stations.
When you wish to recall the information, you simply mentally navigate through each station along your journey and the stations should trigger memories od the scene you’ve created there. Then you decode the imagery to get to the info. This seems like many steps, but with a little practice, the associations become very quick.
You can base your “palaces” on actual locations you’re familiar with, fictional spaces like video game maps or buildings, or you can even make up your own palaces completely in your own mind.
A great starting point can be to take your current living space and physically walk through it, making a point of forward movement without retracing, zigzagging, or crossing your steps. This way you can consistently reproduce the path, and in doing so, consistently remember the information you’ll be storing in the correct order. As you map out your palace, try to find a few unique features of each room. Aim for 3 or 4 per room and look to end up with 15-20 or so total stations or loci. These can be things like front door, entryway rug, living room couch, television set, end table with lamp, kitchen counter, sink, stove, fridge, toilet, shower/tub, medicine cabinet, mirror, bed, closet, nightstand…etc.
Practice walking through and focusing on each of the landmark stations in order. Then try to mentally visualize taking that same path and try to envision each landmark. Its a great idea to start an excel or google sheet doc where you can jot down palace and loci ideas for review later. You can also sketch a “blueprint” birdseye view of the space and label each station. Engaging with your palaces in a variety of ways can help engrain it in your spacial memory. Practice navigating through each station forwards and backwards. Try jumping to every other loci. The better you know your space, the easier it will be to use it. Soon you may find you’re able to almost instantly “jump” between loci pretty effortlessly.
Then the fun begins. There are tons and tons of techniques for turning boring unmemorable abstract info into vivid representational imagery. The simplest may be the “soundalike method.” In this technique, you take a word that may be hard to visualize like “isotopes” and adjust it to something like “icy tops” which may give you the mental image of a bunch of kids tops that are covered in icy, flinging icicles and snow all around as they are spinning rapidly. You anchor this mental animation to your loci station. If the first location is your front door, you may imagine the tops crashing through the door, sending splinters and shards fling into your face.
Now, as you later try to recall what word you placed at the door, hopefully the image of the door itself will kickstart the memory of something smashing through it, and you’ll be able to get to the army of icy tops from there, giving you the word “isotopes.”
Thats pretty much all you need to get started! Build your journey and start animating simple representative animations that interact with each of your landmark loci!
As you browse the forum and keep learning, you’ll find ideas on how to turn very abstract things like numbers and playing cards into images as well. We’re all pretty happy to discuss things if you come up with specific questions. Looking forward to seeing how you progress!
