The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci

If you can find that book, I'd suggest getting it. There are also Chinese books on memorization through the combining of characters are that are very interesting. One thing to attempt is to make very vivid scenes using items from a list.

Clock, Ball, Donkey, House, Bird, Koala, Cell Phone, Guitar.

Instead of trying to remember the words, create a scene in your mind. See a house vividly with a white picket fence, as you zoom in on the house, enter one of the windows, on the wall is a clock. In the main room of the house is a Koala bouncing a ball. As you go back the hall to the bedroom, you hear the sounds of a guitar tuning. You open the door and there is a man tuning his guitar. His cell phone rings and he answers it. Suddenly you hear the hee-hawing of a donkey. You look over his shoulder and in the back window the donkey is bucking around while a raven pecks at him.

You'd be amazed at the number of things you can remember. Scenes are easy for me to remember, but you can also create static displays, almost like works of art: sculptures of the mind. This is more in line with what Matteo himself would do. He would create a gallery in his mind where different objects embodied the things he wanted to remember, and not always in ways that would be immediately obvious, but in ways that would trigger his remembering. So, he might have a clock on a round wall with feathers used as the hands of the clock and eucalyptus leaves in a bowl, or maybe even just the smell of it in the air. These indirect stimuli would trigger his memory. You can also create a song, this is perhaps harder, but still works. When I was a kid, I'd take the first letter of any list of things I needed to remember and I'd create a mnemonic device out of a sentence utilizing those letters.

The Hellenics were becoming experts at this prior to their destruction. Utilizing memories like this, you can even begin to recall things from your past in vivid detail. There was a famous instance of a man who was expert in this practice who was the sole survivor of the collapse of a temple complex, and he was able to identify where all the victims were and who each of them was based solely on the last clear memory he had of the room prior to its collapsing. If you want to build up your powers of observation. Look at a picture directly in its center for a few seconds and then try to bring it back up in your mind and look for things you did not notice from the information gathered by your periphery vision. Start with simple pictures with just a few objects and then move on to more complex ones. By the end, you can use a page from Where's Waldo and then find Waldo using only your memory of the picture you saw for a brief second.

A beginner's exercise that can get you into the game of association is, "More this than that." In this, take two objects, it doesn't matter what they are: pencil and spoon, and then walk around your town looking at things and categorizing them as more pencil than spoon or more spoon than pencil. It is kind of insane and forces you to really stretch your powers of association because most things are not really pencilish or spoonesque by any sense of the imagination. Some things you might categorize at first purely by their physical qualities, then you might move on to other, less intuitive relations. Maybe you'll think of pencils as yellow and therefore anything yellow is more pencil than spoon. Of course writing instruments are pretty obvious as are eating utensils, but what of a vehicle? Is it more spoon because it satisfies your desire for travel, or is it more pencil because it enacts your will into reality by taking you to the places you want to go?

When you find something that seems to be simultaneously equally pencil and spoon like, ponder on that synthesis and see what kind of epiphanies you can draw from that revelation. Then move on to other objects. This works best with nouns. I wouldn't suggest trying to do this with red and cowardly. It might be an exercise in futility at that point.

There are thousands of exercises you can do to expand your mind and its capabilities. These are just a few beginners ones.

The Pilot's Self-Clearing Homepage

The above is a link by a man who divorced the cult of Scientology. In it he gives some rudimentary techniques for consciousness expansion and recalling past events in clarity. Some of these are useful, some of these are not, but this represents the disclosure of information from one of the planet's many pyramid complexes so it is a resource that you will rarely find on this world. Go through it, reject the hokum, carry away that which is useful to you.

Don't leave out the olfactory sense. Take note of what you smell. I can recall minute details of my childhood when I recall scents.

a reply to: skunkape23

I'm Auditory Digital myself, so it doesn't really matter if I employ many of the other systems at all. I include visual because that is probably my strongest secondary model, and I try to include things from other systems for people other than myself who are reading the examples I produce. Kinesthetics and olfactory are probably the two systems I am most alienated from, but a truly powerful recall will really put you back into the situation, so you should be able to acquire information from any o the systems.

a reply to: Nechash

In am more auditory as well. Music runs in the family. Thank you the the book suggestion. :-)