As of my current understanding, the Art of Memory is based on our brain’s natural ability to remember certain things that it is already good at; those include images, links, places, and highly emotional experiences.
The more of these features we can include inside a memory, the more likely we are to remember it.
My question is: other than those mentioned above, what things do our brain remembers best?
Not sure if this is included in what you mentioned but I would say: stories.
My experience is that not only stories/anecdotes are easy to remember as a memory technique in itself, but they also help remembering things better while combined with other techniques (memory palaces, PAO, …).
For example, I have a memory palace that is about 1000 stations going through the neighborhood where I grew up. I have a lot of different banks in parks and slides in playing grounds and zebra crossings (before the school, before the supermarket, before the sports center, etc.). And yet I don’t mix them up, because for each one I imagine/remember what happened there.
I completely agree with you. To understand the mark that stories leave on us, look at the tales we read or listened to as children. I think the best method of learning in our childhood was imaginative fairy tales. And I find it strange that this has been forgotten and has become strange for adults. Everything that helps the imagination helps us to remember.
Maybe because we’re thinking about stories in a much too narrow sense.
The person who is watching an episode of their favorite TV show and then talking about it with their colleagues during lunch break is learning through stories (whether they are learning useful things is another question).
The person who is eating together with a friend who tells them about their last holidays is also learning through stories (and the friend is “reviewing”). Again, depending on what the friend has done during their holidays means learning more or less interesting things.
We can leverage that by trying to have more meaningful conversations with our family and friends (or even total strangers): sharing what we are learning, or telling about an interesting podcast that made us reflect about X and Y… some people may be more receptive than others, it’s true. But I’ve learned lots in such conversations (including on subjects that originally didn’t interest me at all) and also discovered that some people are actually really interesting if we take the risk of trying to talk about more than the weather or choose other subjects than complain about X or Y – and take the time to listen…
Images, music, things that are spatially-anchored, especially things that are anchored to a spatial sequence.
Useless things…
Something new that destroys established ideas and thereby amazes you. But I don’t know how to use it, because it was always unexpected for me. Even when I create very peculiar images in my memory palace, this is not the case, because I am aware of the nature of these images.
Associations in general. I think the main reason why memory techniques work, is because they hijack our ability to associate thing a with widget b, whether or not that association truly exists.
If you learn someone’s name easy, you probably instinctively associate that name to the person, and your brain considers that worth keeping. Mine doesn’t, it’s very hard to remember someone’s name. And yet with a few mental images one’s name could be learned the first or second time!
Reminds me of this old Tony Robbins video on the topic. Think the video was still pretty new when I watched it, and I almost had tutunga. Missed that first ‘t’.
Only now had the time of watching it. It’s nothing really new, but it was expressed in a way that is easy to remember.
I particularly liked
Cheap answer: our brains remembers memorable things best. The memorability of a thing is distinct from its form. The melody of our favorite song may be more memorable than a location, our favorite video game location may be more memorable than a typical melody, a favorite story is more memorable than an acronym, but a repeated childhood acronym may be more memorable than a typical story…
Rather than “what can be remembered best” we should ask “what memorable thing can store the most information”, and I think the answer to this is clearly spatial visual memory.
It all comes down to attention and the use of the interconnected sensory memory, because if you do not remember a piece of information very well another one can bring that information because it was better encoded, sometimes one type of memory works better than another, such as the context in which you are, because you do not memorize only the place, but also its contexts which can be varied.
The type of memory that is most prioritized by the brain is visuospatial and its context which can vary, I also have books on the subject such as perception, sensory working memory, visual memory in all contexts, synesthesia, hsam, osea neurosciences in general.