I have a horrible memory when it comes to arbitrary, unrelated bits of information, and that includes all sorts of ideas and quotes that pop into my head which I won’t be able to write down until later. I use a variety of mnemonic techniques to compensate for this deficiency, the most useful of which for retaining my thoughts being the link system. What I generally do is compose a mental image using a single attribute from every idea or quote I wish to remember at the time.
As a practical example, I once had a depressing quote in my mind along with a bunch of thoughts regarding education, jobs, status, and hypocrisy. So what did I do? I imagined myself as a student crying in front of a university while holding a suitcase and having a big-ass log sticking out of my eye. In another example, I had something I wanted to write something related to my mother, something about tears as signaling, and something related to transhumanism, so I imagined a female I knew as a cyborg who was nursing a baby with a tear rolling down her cheek, and recalled that image when I sat down at my computer to write a few hours later. When thoughts are still fresh, a tangential association is often enough to quickly bring them back in a much faster fashion than can be achieved by stack tracing previous trains of thought, and with less mental effort to boot.
I have a horrible memory when it comes to arbitrary, unrelated bits of information, and that includes all sorts of ideas and quotes that pop into my head which I won’t be able to write down until later. I use a variety of mnemonic techniques to compensate for this deficiency, the most useful of which for retaining my thoughts being the link system. What I generally do is compose a mental image using a single attribute from every idea or quote I wish to remember at the time.
As a practical example, I once had a depressing quote in my mind along with a bunch of thoughts regarding education, jobs, status, and hypocrisy. So what did I do? I imagined myself as a student crying in front of a university while holding a suitcase and having a big-ass log sticking out of my eye. In another example, I had something I wanted to write something related to my mother, something about tears as signaling, and something related to transhumanism, so I imagined a female I knew as a cyborg who was nursing a baby with a tear rolling down her cheek, and recalled that image when I sat down at my computer to write a few hours later. When thoughts are still fresh, a tangential association is often enough to quickly bring them back in a much faster fashion than can be achieved by stack tracing previous trains of thought, and with less mental effort to boot.