Philosophical Vegan Forum

I want to introduce something that i find to be one of the most fascinating subjects that not enough people know about. It's called Mnemonics. It's complex to fully grasp at first, but it's pretty simple once you get the hang of it. You know that thing that Sherlock would do when he wanted to remember something? How he would go into his " Mind Palace"? It turns out that is actually a real thing. It blew my mind when I found this out.

The title of this thread is a bit hyperbolic, but not by much in my opinion. What people can do once they master mnemonics is superhuman. While I admit some of the applications people have chosen to focus on is pretty trivial for the memory championships, it still illustrates the power of the process. With 5 minutes of study people can remember 500 numbers, or 125 random words, or 1080 binary digits all in the correct sequence presented. Johannes Mallow can memorize 132 historic dates in 5 minutes. He could pass a history class with 5 minutes of study...
http://www.world-memory-statistics.com/disciplines.php

The core of mnemonics is image associations. If you have one image, it's WAY easier to remember the context around that image and what it was interacting with than it would be to just come up with those objects by themselves. So if you have a list of 50 images\objects you have pre memorized in order, you can then associate new objects you want to remember via stories or interactions to each of your list in sequence. For example, if the first Pre-Memorized word was hammer, and the first 2 objects you were trying to learn was tomato and clock, you would vividly picture the hammer hitting a clock and tomato guts spilling out. Do that for each of the 50 pre-memorized objects, then when you want to remember what you learned, you scroll through your pre memorized list and ask what was #1 hammer doing or interacting with? Tomato and clock will come easily from that, then you move on to the next pre memorized object and ask the same thing. The problem is needing a list of things you already pre memorized. This is where the method of Loci comes in.

It just so happens that our brains are especially good at retaining information about space and location. Without having studied it at all, you probably can remember every object in sequence traveling through your house, or at least all furniture and walls. That's hundreds of pre-memorized objects that you don't have to take any time to study, and if you need to memorize even more stuff than that, mentally take a trip to the mail box or walk your local park. There are already hundreds of pre-memorized lists in your head that you can call upon by simply imagining yourself walking through a location. Then after associating information with each part of your journey, you just ask yourself, " what was happening at this particular chair, water fountain, fence, or whatever is on that path, and you get the information you associated with it for free.

So associating images is the core of mnemonics, but then the obvious question is, how do use that if what i want to learn isn't an image. That's where mnemonic encoding systems come into play. Your encoding system will basically need to turn whatever abstract concept you want to learn into images through a predictable process. It's taking data that our brains don't process well and repackaging it terms of things we do. (Sort of like in a computer, repackaging information normally done on the CPU in a way the GPU can understand in order to leverage that increased processing power.) Numbers for example are usually encoded using some version of the "Major System".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system

The application i'm most excited about is in language learning. I'm building my system to encode random sounds(the foreign language) into images for example. Then i can associate those images with places on my journey for memorization.

Sorry if this was explained poorly. It's sort of a hard thing to explain. This forum has a lot of good information about it: http://mt.artofmemory.com/ if this sounds interesting, I recommend joining it and asking questions.

That's pretty fascinating stuff. How are you coming with your system to learn languages? Has it paid off vs. traditional learning? That might be something I should try.

I'm relatively new to this whole thing, so I'm not going to make any claims about my own system yet, but I think it's going to work really well from what I can tell. If you want a proof of concept for mnemonics in general you don't need a system. Just google for a list of 100 random objects then pick a starting point in your house and start placing the objects in vivid interactions with each other and the current part of your house. Break the pieces into as big or small of chunks as works best for your mind( under the table, on top of the table, the lamp on the table, the first cushon of the couch next to the table etc.) I haven't timed myself too strictly yet or anything, but last time i did this proof of concept I memorized a list of 60 things in 15 minutes or so in exact order. It was like 2 months ago and I still remember all 60 in that same order. This is slow by competition standards, but FAR better then I would have been able to do without it especially since I consider myself to have a below average memory and haven't practiced that much yet. I expect to do much better in the future when i start dedicating myself to practicing rather than system building. The more you do it the more you discover which types of interactions between objects work for your brain specifically. Things that work for me personally is having the object becoming possessed and bounce around doing what it stereotypically does(cutting, brushing, squirting) to the next object in the list. Another thing that works for me is picking a piece of one object that looks the most like the next object on the list and have it break off and transform into the next object and fly over to it's respective location. While doing this always keep the location where this is happening in mind and try to tie it in as much as possible since the location is the initial queue. Play around with this: https://www.randomlists.com/things

Once you get that working well, then you can know it will work for whatever system you may use to generate those objects. The most popular systems usually generate a person, an action, and a object. That works better for some people, but not me. People tend to run together in my mind.

I hope this helps