An ultimate guide to memory palaces

I&#x27;ve trained my memory over the last ~5 years. I became fascinated with oral cultures. How could they transmit enough knowledge to survive and basically confer PhD level knowledge of survival without books? How could they remember it all? How does your experience of the world change when every place you find yourself is (mentally) chock full of (your most prized) memories?<p>I also wanted to get more out of reading. I used to read a book, maybe take notes and hopefully take some new action. Next year it&#x27;s gone, maybe I recall 3 ideas. How could I get more out of reading?<p>So I memorized books. Convert a book into 100-250 bullet points, memorize them in a memory palace. If I don&#x27;t practice recalling my palaces, at least once every 6 months or so, I&#x27;ll forget it. However, this isn&#x27;t a negative. When recalling you can ask yourself questions about the knowledge. How is the relevant to my life right now? How can I apply this? How does the world look using this knowledge as a lens? How does this compare or contrast to other things I&#x27;ve memorized?<p>At first this was an enormous effort. But with all training it gets faster. We&#x27;ve all spent thousands of hours learning to read. Now reading is unconscious, you see a word and instantly you know the concept behind. My first book took about 4 hours and reviewing it took an hour. Now reviewing a book (250 items) takes under 15 mins, and I can do it while making dinner or driving. People can memorize a deck of cards (52 facts in order) in two minutes. Eventually, I believe it&#x27;s clearly possible to be able to memorize at the speed of speech (250 words per min).<p>At the moment, I develop software. I decided to memorize the packages of the python standard library. Why? Is it going to help? It provides a link to attach concepts to. When I find a better solution than something in the standard library, I attach that memory to the standard library. Like when I think of argparse, I automaticaly think of clicklib and fire. Before coding I review the software development palace. I can hold it all in mind... because those packages have become one chunk in my mind.<p>With all this training, my ability to visualize has just gone through the roof. At the end of the day, I can mentally re-watch my whole day and catch interesting, things that I missed in the moment. It feels like watching a vivid (albeit dreamy) movie.<p>Anyways, like anything the deep end of this mind training is totally amazing and unlike the initial &quot;lifehack&quot; quick wins.

Another good resource is The Memory Book[0]. It covers a few different systems that cover different scenarios, such as lists, like in the article, names and numbers. It uses techniques like the article, but also expands on them in interesting ways. If you put the practice time in, it does work!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Memory-Book-Classic-Improving-School&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0345410025" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Memory-Book-Classic-Improving-School&#x2F;...</a>

I am creating a personal knowledge management platform called Memory Maps that enables users to build and maintain spatial mnemonics alongside their notes.<p>-It is built on Google Maps and allows you to create memory journeys anywhere in the world where there is Google Street View coverage.<p>-It will include an AI based copilot that can learn from the images you create, autosuggest good encoding images, and remind you of what you have already used.<p>-Spaced repetition based active recall practice is built in and optimized for mobile.<p>Check it out! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.memorymaps.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.memorymaps.io&#x2F;</a>

Been using old quake 1&amp;3 maps that I used to play in when younger to form palaces, so far it&#x27;s working great

Moonwalking with Einstein de-mystified memory for me. As mrock described, in the beginning it was a lot of work building palaces and making associations, but like a muscle, things quickly got easier. In time, memorizing a list of 30 or so became pretty easy. I was able to memorize a list of 875 North American bird species and then recite it from memory. Took about 35 min to read it all back.

&gt; Close your eyes and visualize your way to the shop in the head<p>So I guess people with aphantasia are out of luck?

Has anyone used this approach to memorize music? E.g., for playing an instrument.<p>I used to be able to remember plenty when I was young and practicing a lot. And certainly professionals can remember significant amounts (and not just the music, but performance details, fingerings, etc).<p>Seems like a different mechanism, relying less on visual and spatial associations, more on hearing. But perhaps it&#x27;s similar in that you learn a structure and attach details to it.<p>Or, having developed a good memory for music, can we use it to help memorize random facts? Perhaps associating them with places in a song.

I could never get memory palaces to work for me, but found that with enough practice, Mnemonic Pegs is like a superpower.

I have an awful memory, and I experimented with the memory palace concept for a while. The funny part is, although I haven&#x27;t used it in months (years) my memory palace is still perfectly intact.

If you liked this article, check out the book Moonwalking with Einstein.<p>I doubt it will revolutionize your life but it’s a fun read.

Isn&#x27;t there a &quot;no free lunch&quot; about remembering as well? Yes, memory training is probably a good idea but how do you pick what to store there in the first place? Forgetting things -properly- is an underappreciated skill in my opinion.

I don&#x27;t know if others share a similar belief as me about memory and understanding, but I see it as the following model:<p>Imagine your mind as a planet full of water (like earth) and some of its area is covered in land. There are asteroids flying into its gravitational pull and landing on the planet.<p>If the asteroid falls out completely out in the water then it will drown. If repeatedly a lot of asteroids fall in the middle of the ocean around each other, they may be able to become an island.<p>If it falls on the continent it becomes part of it, if it falls close to the continent then it also becomes a part of it, provided there is a connection to the continent.<p>The continent represents our mind. The asteroids represent data. The connected part of the land represents our understanding (i.e information).<p>If you read a piece of information such as: &quot;Mackresh Holdings own 21% of Yojing Lee Corp, and the right to coniunctis viribus.&quot;<p>This is an asteroid landing in the ocean, unconnected to any land, and is likely to drown (one way to avoid that is to keep landing more and more asteroids to the same spots, until it builds up into an island, this is what repetition based learning does).<p>On the other hand if these topics can be connected to your &#x27;continent&#x27; (i.e the body of understanding), then its far less likely to drown. For instance (completely made up) if you learned that Yojing Lee Corp owns election machines of South Korea and Mackresh holdings is a company fully owned by Mark Zuckerberg (the founder of Facebook), and the right to &#x27;coniunctis viribus&#x27; means the right to merge companies under Korean law.<p>Similarly if you learn that Mark Zuckerberg acquired stake in that company because he wants to connect FB to the election machines, and he wants to do that by merging the two companies, this arbitrary fact has been connected to your existing body of knowledge.<p>If it wasn&#x27;t Zuckerberg but the fictional Korean business tycoon Woo-Jun Paik from some TV show then you&#x27;d lose this connection to this fact (and the information might be Lost more easily again) as it will become an island of its own. On the other hand if you learn that this TV show was &#x27;Lost&#x27; (part of the Korean soap opera storyline), then it might make some connection again, and that island could be found again.

It&#x27;s not true that you don&#x27;t understand&#x2F;learn by &quot;storing raw information&quot;. The Human brain is incapable of not understanding information. And even if there is nothing to understand in the data we try to memorize, we rather make something up to memorize it rather than forget it (what you have to do in order to use the memory palace on numbers, for example).<p>In many subjects, rote memorization is the only route to real understanding. I&#x27;d like to name medicine, biology, law and languages. Only be memorization, over weeks and years of relentless learning and just as much forgetting, the mental infrastructure of an expert is forged.<p>I can&#x27;t cite it off hand, but there are even studies that compared understanding between students using a memory palace technique and those without. The former understood more.

This is so cool!<p>I do something quite similar, so I&#x27;ll memorize certain references like where in a book&#x2F;movie&#x2F;source something is, and what it is.<p>Then, sometimes years later, I might be working on a problem or discussing something and not only do I have the topic in mind, I also remember the exact place I found it.<p>Maybe this is due to the rote memorization techniques I practice in my youth as a Indian kid, by age 6 I know my times tables to 30x12.<p>My colleagues also think its funny that I remember IDs, because they&#x27;ll be fishing in their history for some ticket or article, and I&#x27;ll just recall the url or item ID.

I find it interesting to hear what kinds of information people find usable to memorize. If there are people here that utilize the memory palace (or any other memorizing method): what do you put inside the palace?

Mildly out of context question: Has anyone tried those virtual memory palaces available for VR headsets?<p>I feel like this would either hack it and make it instant and available for all or fail miserably without helping memory.

I tend to eschew memory techniques. Often I find forgetting is a feature and not a bug - garbage collection of the memory system if you like: a sign that (given the current presentation) the data doesn&#x27;t seem relevant enough to retain.<p>But as a child I was an avid reader and I scoured the libraries of my youth and naturally built up spatial memory maps for them.<p>I&#x27;m in my 40s now, but I still have a sense of where and in which library certain books and certain topics go.

Does aphantasia affect the ability to create an effective memory palace? I find that my ability to visualize things in my mind’s eye is diminished and somewhat low-resolution. Has anyone here with mild or total aphantasia been successful in building a memory palace?

took me back to when I binge watched &quot;the Mentalist&quot; where Jane (the lead) explains pretty much the same thing. What an incredible show that was.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sauerbraten.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sauerbraten.org&#x2F;</a> could be useful to create maps

I was expecting a Persona 5 strategy guide. The title&#x27;s pretty misleading.