I have never taken the idea of attempting a memory palace seriously, as although I have a terrible, terrible, memory, I also am terrible at visualising things.
To me, using a memory palace to solve memory issues is like making a speedboat out of coconut husks to escape a desert island. Or, perhaps, the xkcd regex ‘2 problems’ comic.
I don’t have so much experience with memory palaces but I have used mnemonics a fair bit with SRS/IR. It’s hard to explain and I have no idea how transferable it is but I don’t think it’s as hard to make mnemonics as you think. E.g.: if you’re trying to memorize a word in Japanese which sounds like random syllables, if you lift the filters on your brain it isn’t as bad as you’d think to figure out some connection by which to give those syllables meaning where they had none and to more easily memorize the word.
I’m also terrible at visualizing things. Except when I’m stoned. Or when I practice.
What’s really hard for me is trying to force myself to visualize a specific, stable image in a high level of detail. But if I just close my eyes and allow myself to visualize, exploring the mental experience in an open-ended way, I can do much better. Figuring out how to understand and control the experience better is what I’m working on now.
Trying to do that reminded me of something I used to do as a kid: I would watch static on TV, and find myself constructing imagery from it. Usually, it would be like traveling over landscapes, or a rotating/panning view over some entity, and the quality of the visuals would be like line drawings.
The reason I remember that is because my mental visualisations have a very similar quality. After maybe a ‘flash’ of a fairly detailed scene—or at least the suggestion of one—it rapidly devolves into short-lived abstractions, and only where I’m mentally focusing.
Perhaps what I need is to look at some static again and see if it improves visualisation.
I have never taken the idea of attempting a memory palace seriously, as although I have a terrible, terrible, memory, I also am terrible at visualising things.
To me, using a memory palace to solve memory issues is like making a speedboat out of coconut husks to escape a desert island. Or, perhaps, the xkcd regex ‘2 problems’ comic.
I don’t have so much experience with memory palaces but I have used mnemonics a fair bit with SRS/IR. It’s hard to explain and I have no idea how transferable it is but I don’t think it’s as hard to make mnemonics as you think. E.g.: if you’re trying to memorize a word in Japanese which sounds like random syllables, if you lift the filters on your brain it isn’t as bad as you’d think to figure out some connection by which to give those syllables meaning where they had none and to more easily memorize the word.
I’m also terrible at visualizing things. Except when I’m stoned. Or when I practice.
What’s really hard for me is trying to force myself to visualize a specific, stable image in a high level of detail. But if I just close my eyes and allow myself to visualize, exploring the mental experience in an open-ended way, I can do much better. Figuring out how to understand and control the experience better is what I’m working on now.
That’s basically lucid daydreaming, then?
Trying to do that reminded me of something I used to do as a kid: I would watch static on TV, and find myself constructing imagery from it. Usually, it would be like traveling over landscapes, or a rotating/panning view over some entity, and the quality of the visuals would be like line drawings.
The reason I remember that is because my mental visualisations have a very similar quality. After maybe a ‘flash’ of a fairly detailed scene—or at least the suggestion of one—it rapidly devolves into short-lived abstractions, and only where I’m mentally focusing.
Perhaps what I need is to look at some static again and see if it improves visualisation.
And I tried it. Didn’t help :-/