Develop your "mind palace"

[Bini]

In the BBC Sherlock series, Mr. Holmes often visits his "mind palace" to recall information he has tucked away in his memory. It sounds a bit silly but I did a quick search and several articles pop up regarding it. Thought I'd share just one, found here, for you guys to do a quick read. It's pretty straight forward, nothing fancy, and might even be useful if you're prone to forgetfulness or just want to exercise your memory more.

I am actually going to start doing this. Having a mental visual map inside my head, where I can navigate the destination, and store stuff for later access. I'm using our house, since that's probably one of the more familiar places I know. Just got to be careful I don't tuck away something into a drawer that isn't opened much because then I'm bound to never find it again..

[Quin]

Curiouser & curiouser. :)

Really interesting read, Bini!

Myself, I have a highly trained Forgettery, and wouldn't want to mess with it. Not actually joking, as compartmentalization is necessary for living a normal life in some fields (mine included), and I'm half eidetic (part and parcel with ADHD). I'm constantly reliving sensory experiences... So I work very hard at forgetting as much as possible & blurring out as much of the rest as I can with a whitewash of noise & movement. Sensory overload makes my mind stop recording data, and I can think clearly.

But I can still tell you that my 11th grade progress report for English is about at calf level, under something orange, and that the color green is involved. Also something gritty. Crumbs or sand or glitter I couldn't tell you. Just grit. With the sun at my back, angle my shoulders, and reach. (Which means it probably slid off my bed, and later that my mind tagged something orange that fell on it. Green is probable another piece of paper in the stack. But might be a sock, poster, etc.). Seriously useless information runs rampant in my brain. The exact size and placement of a hole in the door in 1984, and what the stitching looked like in the clog that put it there (along with about 1000 other bits of information about that hole), the way anise smells, and the color of the fence, in every type of weather outside my fence in the canyons in the 80s, and again in the 90s (the wind changes the smell, and the wind was different in both decades, as the city size was different and pollution levels changed. (and 1000 other bits of information).

Q

[Guest LiterateParakeet]

Cool idea Bini. I haven't read the article yet (I will later), but lately I have been reading about visualization and how it can help the mind and body, or in this case the conscious and unconscious connect. I think this could be helpful.

[Kawazu]

Moonwalking with Einstein

Amazon.com Review

This is one of those rare books that is not only a joy to read, but also immensely helpful. It can help all of us with something that is at once troublesome and worrisome: our memory. It does this with ease, not teaching us some grueling rote memory technique, but one that is easy, natural and intuitive. Yet Moonwalking with Einstein turns out to not be exclusively a how-to book on memory. So what is it?

Well, yes, it is about memory and how to improve it, but it is at once a history of techniques, a description of what memory is and what can go wrong with it, and also a running narrative of how the author, a journalist himself with no special memory skills, tries to become a proficient memory athlete.

Personally, I enjoyed it. Journalist Joshua Foer learns mind palace techniques from existing Memory Champs.

[davisjone]

I enjoyed reading it and thinking to start doing it.

[Vort]

The human brain does exceptionally well at spatial tasks. We can locate things in three dimensions just by thinking about it. That's why we can easily look at a pattern and figure out that, if you fold it up, it will be shaped like a pyramid. Animals can't do any such thing. Some animals do have pretty good spatial perception, but nothing like humans have*. This also accounts for our unusual mathematical abilities, which are closely related to this ability to do three-dimensional mental gymnastics.

I think the most common association template people use for this is the house they grew up in, or some other house or location they know very well and that has lots of detail they can associate with whatever it is they're trying to remember. As a child or young man, I read about a guy who memorized something like the New York City telephone directory or some such absurd thing. I found it scandalous and slightly funny when I read that he claimed he used a mental map of the female body to associate things. Now, as a middle-aged guy, I find it funny and only slightly scandalous.

*(Some have suggested that whales and other cetaceans have a highly developed sense comparable to humans. But I know of no way to establish this, and if they do have something comparable to humans, it will of necessity be extremely different in how they do it, making it comparable in scope, perhaps, but not in application.)

[jdf135]

just stumbled on your thread.  Just finished Moonwalking With Einstein."  Talks about this extensively