10 KiB
[Q] A question about mind palaces:
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Author: u/MultipartiteMind *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3tu7wo/q_a_question_about_mind_palaces/
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Score: 11
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Created: 2015-11-22T18:32:24
Post:
Hello! (Please tell me if I'm violating any rules of asking-location or otherwise.) When I first encountered the idea of a mind palace I imagined it to be an unrealistic fictional concept, but after encountering it more often recently I became more curious and read more on the subject of {mind palaces}/{the method of loci}/{the journey method}. The main thing which currently holds me back from trying it myself is concern about reversibility--what is one to do if one wants to reuse an environment/journey for different associations (would the different associations become muddled with each other?), or if one later regrets using up all one's easiest-to-remember major routes early on for things too unimportant to have been worth it? Do people here use this mnemonic method in practice, and if so are these imagined issues issues or not (and if they are, how are they handled) in practice? Thank you for your time!
Comments:
u/Revisional_Sin [+10] (an hour later)
Memory competitors use Memory Palaces to remember the order of playing cards. This requires them to clear them out the route after every use. So yeah, it's fine. If you need to learn the techniques then check out a community like that.
"Moon-walking with Einstein" was a pretty good book, detailing the journalist getting into it and training to become the American champion.
Edit: If you just want a more effective way to learn, SRS is pretty useful as well.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+4] Roll the Dice on Fate (5 hours later)
Second on that book rec, good stuff.
One of the competitors used to watch Grand Designs a lot to get more and more mind palaces, which I always thought was neat.
Edit: Within 20 minutes of reading a description of how to make a mind palace I'd remembered something like 20 pieces of bizzare and useless data, on the order of smoked salmon, director's chair, venison sausage, skintight, catsuit ect. A month later I could remember 19 of them. It is now 4 years later and I can still remember half of these things, and my memory for details is shit. Seriously, it's awful.
u/quickpocket [+1] (2 days later)
Did you know that Heinz started by making pickles?
u/Amonwilde [+3] (22 hours later)
Memory palaces are a real and effective way to memorize arbitrary information, though they fall down for some tasks, such as memorizing poetry. They take advantage of a quirk of the human mind--that we are better at quickly assimilating information about three dimensional layouts and spacial locations than we are at recaling arbitrary lists of disconnected infromation. This makes sense...knowing your way around a potentially dangerous location that you may have only visited once was selected in the ancestral environemnt, whereas memorizing digits of pi or state capitals was not.
Don't worry about filling your memory palaces too early. Competitors who use the technique can go through and "clear" their palaces (supposedly), though I've never gotten that to work for me. Your palaces will also clear themselves over time, though you might have some artifacts left over from before. You can also get creative with your locations, using places from games or movies or walking around your neighborhood while memorizing the information you want.
u/Izeinwinter [+3] (2 days later)
Memory palaces require you to have strong visualization. The fact that not everyone does is the classic example of why the typical mind fallacy is a fallacy. Thus this is a technique which may be outright impossible for quite a lot of people to learn, which is why they consider it horseshit.
u/None [+2] (2 hours later)
[deleted]
u/MultipartiteMind [+1] (12 hours later)
(Rather than definitely wanting to reuse them, I'm used to being able to (almost) completely change a directory's folder structure on whim (major changes for small benefits), and worry about unremovable clutter/mental cobwebs. Thank you for the link!)
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (5 hours later)
Mind palaces as in fiction are unrealistic. Their practical benefit in real life is questionable to me.
u/biomatter [+3] (13 hours later)
And yet, other people in this thread seem to think otherwise. I had pegged them as fiction too, but now my curiosity is piqued. Someone should throw some links at me or something :D
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (21 hours later)
20 pieces of bizarre and useless data
I really don't see where I'm going to need memorized lists of items that I shouldn't be already learning in a more fundamental, intuitive way.
u/AugSphere [+4] Dark Lord of Corruption (22 hours later)
Have properly secure individual diceware passphrases for every authentication?
Might actually be useful, if you're a sysadmin or something similar.
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)
True. I've been considering upping my security practices.
u/xkcd_transcriber [+1] (22 hours later)
Title: Password Strength
Title-text: To anyone who understands information theory and security and is in an infuriating argument with someone who does not (possibly involving mixed case), I sincerely apologize.
Stats: This comic has been referenced 1821 times, representing 2.0391% of referenced xkcds.
^xkcd.com ^| ^xkcd sub ^| ^Problems/Bugs? ^| ^Statistics ^| ^Stop Replying ^| ^Delete
u/None [+3] (a day later)
[deleted]
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (a day later)
mass-learning of foreign words
If you're learning a foreign language, you won't ever speak well by riffling through an internal translation dictionary every time you say, hear, read, or write a single word.
list of OSI layers, list of side effects of medication
Why?
poems
Why?
for history studies, statistics about your sales, pi to 100th digit
Why?
name/faces of people
I don't see how.
phone numbers
When are the numbers that you have not already memorized ever been required in a situation where you don't have the information available?
The only convincing justification so far is passphrases, as /u/AugSphere brought up. It's possible there are more actual reasons, but you're not convincing me.
u/MultipartiteMind [+1] (2 days later)
(My organogenesis course has fourteen sets of lecture slides, each on a topic which has nothing to do with any of the others, each one loaded with details--details which, like the stages of heart development or {which collagen types contribute to cartilage and bone and mopping up bone morphogenic protein past one cell layer in the parts of fruit fly ovaries that I've forgotten the name for already}, swiftly blur and fade from my mind a few slide sets after I've put one set down. This makes exam revision concerning. I haven't started on the attempt yet, but if I could acquire fourteen mental rooms (presumably copied from rooms I was familiar with), each filled with objects that I could go through one by one and be vividly reminded of one important forgettable detail from a slide--being able to tell when I was leaving something out, too--that would be invaluable to me. I have no idea whether it's feasible, though. (Perhaps linking each detail with each room-object in a memorable mental image..? I need to read more in preparation before starting, in any case, as long as I don't start too late.))
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (2 days later)
So, exams for badly-taught classes is another. Have you tried spaced repetition like Anki?
u/MultipartiteMind [+1] (2 days later)
Not yet, but it sounds excellent.
u/qgml [+1] (5 days later)
It might be useful to look into the Image Occlusion addon for Anki. Basically, you take an image or graphic and cover up the bits you want to memorize, instead of writing cards or generating them.
The author has an example of using it to memorize every step in a graphic of a metabolic process, and I've successfully used it to learn some basic anatomy (major bones and muscles, I'm an engineering student not a med student).
That all more-or-less depends on the slides having some useful structure, instead of being blocks of text, tho. I'd still recommend spaced repitition for any of the things I've used it for, but that's foreign-language vocab and seldom-used formulae.
u/Liberticus [+1] (2 days later)
If you want to memorize a speech using the memory palace for keywords might be effective. Not looking down at a paper/pad makes a certain impact.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (2 days later)
Palace or not, if you want to give a speech well you practice it until you know the material you're hitting backwards and forwards. Not really necessary to use the artificial device.
u/Liberticus [+1] (2 days later)
It might be a faster way to memorize with the palace, I don't know. I just remember hearing about someone using it that way and that was the only practical application that came to mind.