Hi folks, I’m just getting started. I was wondering what you do when you are trying to create an image for something but you just draw a blank. For instance, “somewhere.” I can see using an image involving “sum,” but I’m not entirely sure where to go from there. Also, what do you do with small, common words like “is” or “and”?
sum - wear
sum - warehouse
sum - weird
Are we talking about exact representations of texts?
Two things that came to mind:
Somewhere: Underwear with sums on it, or just clothes with sums on it. Sum-wear!
The other thing I thought of was swimwear.
I haven’t attempted any verbatim recall yet, but for memorising key concepts or foreign language phrases verbatim memorisation isn’t required! 
If you are talking about verbatim…I’ll let one of the others take this one!
Thanks guys, I was trying to memorize song lyrics as just an exercise. Ultimately I’ll be working on physics concepts, but since I just started I wanted to take it a little slower.
However, it doesn’t look like anyone answered my first question. What do you do when you come to a word or concept that just leaves you drawing a blank?
I come on this forum and beg for help.
There’s no special technique for it. You just have to come up with an idea, a way to break through the barrier. The same as with a question in a physics exam. If you don’t know the answer; you have to think your way around the problem. Break it down, see what you do know and what fits in.
I really don’t know. With a bit of creativity one can usually find a way.
This weekend I met a guy called Douloubakas. The name is Greek. So I broke it down to Doulou and bakas.
Doulou is pronounced almost exactly as doeloe and bakas is close to the roman god of wine and debauchery Bachus.
The link is now easy. I imagined a couple of Dutch Indonesians drunk with wine and doing all kinds of debauched stuff. I leave the details up to your private imagination.
If you draw a blank, just let it go and come back to it later.
This usually works for me.
I like to draw a mindmap with the word/concept at the centre and then add lots of empty branches. The brain just loves filling them in, but basically just write something/anything on each branch and then branch from the branches. You’ll soon get something - well hopefully!
(If really stuck I will start with some branches as why, what, where, when, who, how etc. to get me going.)
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I usually just walk my places while finding a image for the concept.
Umm… Let’s use your examples.
To me, ‘is’ doesn’t have a meaning at all in this moment. So, I go into my place(that is my home actually). I see a frypan and feel that ‘is’ sticks to frypan very well(Immediately, I felt a frypan fits for ‘is’.)
So, I make some reasons or metaphorical(like symbol) meaning for ‘is’ with frypan.
Frypan has handle so handle means i and the curve of frypan means s (and when I wash the frypan, the sound of frypan heard like -s sound).
In this way, I memorized a laplace transform of mathematical functions and concept of topology(Which I even cannot understand. My friend told me to memorize them.)
Therefore,
For more abstract example, Let’s memorize this:
lapalce transform of sin(wt) = w / (s^2 + w^2)
(I memorized this 6months ago when I don’t have a concept about the transformation. So I don’t have a confidence whether this recall is correct but it’s not matter at all right?)
sin function makes me a sense for graph(visual) but rest of the relation(wt, = w / (s^2 + w^2)) doesn’t have any senses.
So, I go into my place, my room and see what would fit for wt.
I have a white board in my room so a marker pen and eraser are could be found and made some stories for this.
Marker pen draw a curves(w) on the board and eraser erased them drawing t.
So sin(wt) can be a image like sin(A white board makes some waves like water does) wt(marker gave some work(drawing w) on the board for eraser and eraser removed them(t))
and sign of equal(=) won’t be forgotten because if it isn’t, the whole relation doesn’t make sense.
So there’s left w / (w^2 + s^2).
w was curve made by marker pen. So use it as a scribbling on the wall and ‘/’ would make some positional information. So under the scribbling, (w^2 + s^2) must lie.
w^2 + s^2 it fits with my bookshelf(because there’s two of bookshelf.)
So under the bookshelf1, w lies as (a opened two books) and s lies two snakes eating my books under the bookshelf2.(s = snake makes sense)
This is how I deal with not sensual things. And I think that by using method of loci in this way, loci method can also means a treasure box of metaphors, symbols, images for creativity. And, in my opinion, if you don’t use already memorized places for tool, I think it is just waste of memory. So, use your memory and create your memory.
(English isn’t my first language and I haven’t written long texts at all so maybe you could find some awkward places. Sorry)
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