anyone use the method of loci..aka mind palace

en.wikipedia.org...

i have to admit i got interested in this after reading and watching sherlock holmes.
ive been trying to practice it but i am not doing very well.

if anyone practices this, do you have any tips?

In this technique the subject memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete loci. When desiring to remember a set of items the subject 'walks' through these loci in their imagination and commits an item to each one by forming an image between the item and any distinguishing feature of that locus. Retrieval of items is achieved by 'walking' through the loci, allowing the latter to activate the desired items.

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so how i understand it is you would use something you know like your house or your neighborhood. that would be your palace.
if you want to 'store' things you place them in your mind palace for later retrieval.

for example if i needed to buy milk today i would place a cow at my dining room table and later when i walk through my mind palace, i see the visual cue (the cow) and that triggers my memory to buy milk.

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Memory champions elaborate on this by combining images. Eight-time World Memory Champion Dominic O'Brien uses this technique.[8] The 2006 World Memory Champion, Clemens Mayer from Germany, used a 300-point-long journey through his house for his world record in "number half marathon", memorising 1040 random digits in a half hour. Gary Shang has used the method of loci to memorise pi to over 65,536 digits

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some of the great orators of ancient rome and greece would use their mind palace to memorize speeches that were sometimes hours long.
paper(or whatever they used) was expensive and not easy to come by in those days.

a reply to: Mugly

My memory is pretty bad, in terms of being able to recall USEFUL data. However, I can recall useless facts and the details of an incident, or event with clarity, and without conscious effort. It is quite aggravating, since having the ability to recall useful, day to day, mundane information would be very handy. Unfortunately, I remember the basic explanation of black holes and nuclear power production, much more readily than I do things like birthdays, appointments, PIN numbers, passcodes, reference numbers, phone numbers, web addresses, and things like that.

I am pretty sure that my memory operates on a strange system, which I have developed over the years to combat the effects of being overdosed by doctors, while I was in my mothers womb. Pethadine... lovely stuff

In any case, the system appears to be chaotic, but has resulted in my brain being very adaptable in terms of lateral thinking, and problem solving, as well as my ability to recall totally useless information without actually having to consciously put any effort in. For a guy with really big memory problems, it is somewhat heartening that one moniker by which I am known, is "The Walking Encyclopedia". The nickname used to be "The Walking Dictionary", until I pointed out that my spelling is far from perfect, and that my capacity for retrival of utterly useless facts is what tends to surprise and delight my peers, and so The Walking Encyclopedia is more appropriate.

a reply to: Mugly

I do this all the time it really improved memory.

Sort of like cheating

a reply to Mugly:

Ello mate. I have been an and off practitioner of the "mind palace" technique for a good few years. Although granted my "palace" only consists of my own home attached through an imaginary door to my parents home. I can't seem to expand too much further and still maintain a concrete memory of what memories I've put in these rooms.

It definitely helps to use areas you are most familiar with as this helps to picture more sharply the things you place in your palace. That's why I use my own home and my parents. I imagine it as my back door to my property (which normally leads to my garden) is actually the front door of my parents home. It's tricky but with practice you will be surprised how much you can recall and with great clarity.

I first learnt the technique by reading a book by Derren Brown. For those unfamiliar with him, he is a kind of hypnotist/magician/psychic performer from the UK. However he claims himself he has no "special powers" and everything he does is done by pure mental techniques that anyone can learn.

Unfortunately I lost this book a few years ago. Although I think it was this one... www.amazon.co.uk...

If you have any questions though I'll be happy to answer the best I can.

Take it easy dude.

a reply to: Mugly

I have a rudimentary "mind palace", it is more of a room though. Walls covered with pieces of papers with info of all kind, and at the center of that wall, a computer screen to run computations.

It takes time to build a "mind palace". You have to program your mind to capture information and store it the right way. Everyone is different. And it takes time.

I think the first advice (just from me) is that having a whole location can be a little over kill for some basic things. I often trigger myself using two pieces of imagery rather than using a location. For example, if I need to remember to purchase a book called 'Dear Leader' I might imagine Kim Jong Il buying the book from Dymocks or reading it on my breakfast table or something before I go to bed. I find the memory 'triggers' when I see the mundane object. The sillier the image the better.

I can memorize most of a deck of cards on a good day by imagining myself going to school when I was little and assigning images to the numbers and suits, though I sometimes have to 'restart' my journey. I can't do it backwards or anything, just linearly, but I've found this method mostly useless for most mundane tasks. Also it hasn't improved my recall particularly, I have to consciously put effort into it.

Oh the last thing I'd say is ... I don't use my house or anywhere I travel everyday. I can't do it. Since I travel like that all the time it just fades into my usual routine. It needs to be something that shakes me out of my routine or I find it much harder to recall. I find locations when I was a child to be the easiest to use.

a reply to: Mugly

Not exactly but I use the same sort of idea to think.. I have trouble thinking in words, or in linear thoughts. I find I can be much more intelligent if I can make imagination videos take place, and then once the video is in play I can then move around watch rewind zoom in out remove layers add things in...

For instance I have a particular big bang imagination I use. I use it anytime I want to see long term patterns.. I just play the big bang and watch as eventually planets evolve, and then life... I play fast or slow and move around, and use all different concepts as I watch..

It's how I started understanding chaos and how order may be arriving..


Something that is the "Sub-Conscious" can hold onto VAST amounts of data, but it's not you.. It can't really get you to use it's data without you seeing it. Communication is in archetypes.. Some archetypes are as old as TIME.. Some are only yours and no one else has them..


Dreaming is doing the loci palace practice without setting up the palace.. Though some people have made palaces in their dream spots. I have a few.. I have this one spot on a beach that my soul goes to... It's not so much a palace as a beach with crystal water amazing sun and cliffs to my back.. Only way to get in, is through a portal (from any other dream). It's a place closer to my center, and as such has very few other dream characters.. Just other pieces of me, in peace..


Obviously the movie Inception is ALL over this...
And then.. Are we in "God's" loci palace??

Lol..

a reply to: Mugly

Hannibal Lecter used the technique. Stay away from liver, fave beans, and Chianti.


Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

a reply to: Mugly

anyone use the method of loci..aka mind palace

Hey Mugly,

Yeah, I do.

For anatomy I use a palace that looks like one of the fake old-west style towns from Knott's Berry Farm.

I use a variation of this to learn languages. To do this, I visualize the sound of the word I want to learn, for example January in russian sounds like Yenworry, so linked a picture of a chinese guy worrying about his money in January, february sounds like favral, pictured my favourite rail on a fence and so on... It sounds stupid, but works really well as have learnt russian and quite a bit of arabic. Just the writing thats the prob now