What makes the memory palace work? Four key principles:
Sensory integration: Journeying through the memory palace activates your kinetic and visual imagination
Pacing: The journey happens at your natural pace for recollection
Decomposition: Instead of trying to remember all pieces of information at once, you can focus on the single item that’s in your field of view
Interconnections: You don’t just remember the information items, but the “mental path” between them.
We can extract these principles and apply them to other forms of memorization.
When I memorized the 20 amino acids, I imagined wandering along a protein built from all 20 of them, in sequence. This was essentially a “memory palace,” but was built directly from the thing I wanted to imagine. This made the process of remembering them much easier.
In general, I think that we should preserve the principles underpinning the memory palace, but dispense with the palace itself. I see the “palace” as being distracting and confusing, but the general principles it embodies to be extremely useful.
What if we wanted to apply these principles to something much harder to visualize, like the theorems and proofs associated with Taylor series in an introductory calculus textbook? Could we create a mental structure that allows us to “journey” through them?
Memory palace foundations
What makes the memory palace work? Four key principles:
Sensory integration: Journeying through the memory palace activates your kinetic and visual imagination
Pacing: The journey happens at your natural pace for recollection
Decomposition: Instead of trying to remember all pieces of information at once, you can focus on the single item that’s in your field of view
Interconnections: You don’t just remember the information items, but the “mental path” between them.
We can extract these principles and apply them to other forms of memorization.
When I memorized the 20 amino acids, I imagined wandering along a protein built from all 20 of them, in sequence. This was essentially a “memory palace,” but was built directly from the thing I wanted to imagine. This made the process of remembering them much easier.
In general, I think that we should preserve the principles underpinning the memory palace, but dispense with the palace itself. I see the “palace” as being distracting and confusing, but the general principles it embodies to be extremely useful.
What if we wanted to apply these principles to something much harder to visualize, like the theorems and proofs associated with Taylor series in an introductory calculus textbook? Could we create a mental structure that allows us to “journey” through them?