Let’s put it another way: the memory palace is a powerful way to build a memory of ideas, and you can build the memory palace out of the ideas directly.
My memory palace for the 20 amino acids is just a protein built from all 20 in a certain order.
My memory palace for introductory mathematical series has a few boring-looking 2D “paths” and “platforms”, sure, but it’s mainly just the equations and a few key words in a specific location in space, so that I can walk by and view them. They’re dynamic, though. For example, I imagine a pillar of light marking the separation between the nth term in the series and the remainder. I can pluck one of the partial sums from the set of them and carry it around. I have a “stable” in which the geometric and harmonic series are kept like horses ready to be ridden. But it’s just the equation forms of those series lined up side by side. I don’t see fences or hay.
My memory palace for the proteins associated with actin is just a cartoon movie of actin filament formation and disassembly.
When the memory palace is constructed, I can scan the environment and see what’s there. For example, when I’m standing close to the basic representation of a series, the very first part of the palace, I can look across the way and see the “stable” of example series, or at the “testing platform” where the integral test and comparison tests are located. I can’t see all the detail until I go to them and spend some time inspecting, but I know it’s there and know what I expect to find when I go over.
The memory palace isn’t the end of memorization. It’s the beginning. As I’ve walked through my amino acid memory palace probably 10 times, I can now simply visualize an entire amino acid and its name all at once, with less effort than it takes to traverse the memory palace.
So my advice is to build your memory palaces directly out of the knowledge you want to learn.
Mental architecture
Let’s put it another way: the memory palace is a powerful way to build a memory of ideas, and you can build the memory palace out of the ideas directly.
My memory palace for the 20 amino acids is just a protein built from all 20 in a certain order.
My memory palace for introductory mathematical series has a few boring-looking 2D “paths” and “platforms”, sure, but it’s mainly just the equations and a few key words in a specific location in space, so that I can walk by and view them. They’re dynamic, though. For example, I imagine a pillar of light marking the separation between the nth term in the series and the remainder. I can pluck one of the partial sums from the set of them and carry it around. I have a “stable” in which the geometric and harmonic series are kept like horses ready to be ridden. But it’s just the equation forms of those series lined up side by side. I don’t see fences or hay.
My memory palace for the proteins associated with actin is just a cartoon movie of actin filament formation and disassembly.
When the memory palace is constructed, I can scan the environment and see what’s there. For example, when I’m standing close to the basic representation of a series, the very first part of the palace, I can look across the way and see the “stable” of example series, or at the “testing platform” where the integral test and comparison tests are located. I can’t see all the detail until I go to them and spend some time inspecting, but I know it’s there and know what I expect to find when I go over.
The memory palace isn’t the end of memorization. It’s the beginning. As I’ve walked through my amino acid memory palace probably 10 times, I can now simply visualize an entire amino acid and its name all at once, with less effort than it takes to traverse the memory palace.
So my advice is to build your memory palaces directly out of the knowledge you want to learn.