I've got a trick for remembering things that, to me at least, feels like magic. It was particularly useful in Biology courses where I would have to remember a large set of terminology like family names of fishes.
Just imagine a route you regularly take. Ideally a walk where you have time to consider your surroundings, but any route where you can remember landmarks will do. Now assign each thing you need to remember to a specific landmark. That's it. I've found that if I go through this process and then review it just once in my mind I can remember everything with 100% accuracy.
I used this trick recently to remember a gate code by assigning numbers to nearby architecture. I'd have a terrible time trying to remember it any other way.
When I'm driving my car and listening to an audiobook or podcast, I find that if I rewind it a couple minutes, my brain will flash back to where I was driving when I heard it the first time.
really weird.
additionally, and somewhat unrelated... The best racers know the course. They can sit back, close their eyes, drive the course in their mind, and open their eyes. If they are missing parts of the course in their memory, they have more to learn. If they time this exercise the closer they are to a lap time, the better they know the course (and the better chance they have of driving it well)
The audiobook thing! Yes! I hike or mountain bike with books, too, and when I bike those routes now, sometimes I get almost total word recall of a moment in a book I heard years ago. It’s a great sensation.
I recently signed up on goodreads and went and rated a bunch of books I have read to improve the suggestions. It's been fun using the app, as I keep recalling books I've read and they bring up fond memories. My girlfriend was impressed that I could remember what month and year I read books even over a decade ago. But as I saw the title and cover I could recall where I was when I read it. Many were on airplanes so I associated them with the trips and those were some of the easiest to recall.
Some people learn best by listening, others by reading, etc. The same variation is true for memory techniques. Some memory techniques work better for some people than others.
However, strictly speaking, the technique should work well for everyone but especially well for some people.
The human brain can store and recall some types of information more readily than other types. Humans have an uncanny ability to recognize voices, recognize whether we have seen a face before, and we automatically absorb all sorts of information about places we travel to.
We struggle to deal with other types of information, like random series of digits, dates, etc.
All memory techniques work under the same principle: take something that you want to remember, and convert it into a different format which you can remember more easily.
Memory palace technique converts input into a spatial representation. That doesn't mean you have to have a good spatial memory! Unless you have a specific kind of brain damage or cognitive impairment then you have an excellent spatial memory just for being human.
If this technique doesn't work well for you, then the point of failure is your association between the hard to rememeber input and the easy to rememeber format. That's great news because it means there is a memory technique that will work great for you if you give it another try until you can figure out how to make effective associations.
It's interesting in that I have a pretty amazing spatial memory. I can find my way around the wilderness (off trail) by identifying specific trees etc. I just find it exhausting to do the linking part of memory palace. It's literally easier for me just to remember outright, which I have little difficulty doing.
It actually takes work to become good at linking pictures (which I rarely find highlighted in courses that cover mnemotechnic, probably because the author has forgotten he went through this step).
It took me around a year of regular practice to get to the point where it does not take me time and effort for each picture. The key for me was to want to memorise something that was so large that, even if using mnemotechnic was hard it was still way easier than to try and root learn it.
FWIW, I consider myself to be a visual thinker, and feel the same as you. It's far more work to make the link that it is to just remember the dang thing in the first place, which (as long as the thing to be remembered slots in to some spot in an overall system) is close to effortless.
> All memory techniques work under the same principle: take something that you want to remember, and convert it into a different format which you can remember more easily.
Here I thought memory techniques were essentially data structures for the mind. Memory palace always felt to me a bit like a hash table; some of the techniques I read about for remembering sequences of items or numbers were quite literally building linked lists in the head.
I think in images, spacial relationships, shapes. Some people, when I mention this to them, shrug as if I'd said something as obvious as 'the sky is blue'. Others look at me like I'm speaking gibberish, because what I'm saying makes no sense at all. What I find most interesting about all of this is how such little effect this seems to have on how we as a group see the world overall.
I am one such "auditory thinker". Despite learning to read music from a young age and a lot of practice, I have never been able to sight-read music. I do however have a good auditory memory and I have always been good at playing music from memory, even compared to other musicians.
Perhaps counter-intuitively most classical musicians are "visual thinkers" and are very good at sight-reading and less good at playing by ear.
A few years ago, I decided I would learn how to memorize a deck of cards in a single pass through a shuffled deck. I was surprised to find that it wasn't too difficult. Googling will reveal a few instructional web pages or you tube videos. E.g. see [0].
First, I created a list of letters associated with the numbers 1-13 and suits. There are two commonly used methods for this. I had already used the Major System[1] when I first read about it many years before (1963) in an old 1957 Scientific American. The Major Method worked well and I could recall around 50 random items in order or reverse order or call out the 37 item and so forth.
I decided to try a newer system, the Dominic System[2] for memorizing cards. The Dominic System associates a person with each number, in this case a person was associated with each card. This is done by using the following mapping:
0 - O (letter O) Ten in a deck of cards
1 - A (the ace)
2 - B
3 - C
4 - D
5 - E
6 - S
7 - G
8 - H
9 - N
Along with three more letters for Jack, Queen, and King. Using this mapping, a three of hearts (3H) would be represented by some celebrity, cartoon character, fictional character, or friend with the initials CH. In this case Captain Hook of Peter Pan.
With a few hours of practice, I could easily visualize Captain Hook whenever I turned over a 3 of Hearts; likewise, every card had an associated person.
Then I memorized 52 locations that I would remember easily. I used my home. Starting at the mailbox at the street I had a list of 10 spots: Mail box, Driveway, Guest parking spot, Parking outside of garage, Parking in garage, at the back door, inside the back door, laundry room, back stairs, kitchen door. Likewise, I had four other sequences of locations in my house and yard each 10 long and a couple more to make 52 locations.
I could then go through a shuffled deck of cards and if the three of hearts came up as the fifth card in the deck I would simply think of Captain Hook inside the garage (doing something dramatic, like putting his hook through the hood of my car). As each card was turned up, I pictured the character in the location doing something memorable. Then, a friend of mine might say "What was the location of the eight of spades? This card has initials HS == Homer Simpson so I would think of where I pictured Homer Simpson and realize that he was in my bed upstairs which was location 36 in my list of memorized locations so the eight of spades was in location 36.
It's a pretty impressive trick and it can be combined with card magic tricks without too much difficulty. For example, cutting a deck doesn't change the relative order of the cards to each other.
A similar strategy works for remembering names too. The next time you meet someone, imagine their name emblazoned on their forehead in bright letters. At least for me, this helps to associate the intangible name with a real, physical thing - seeing their face almost becomes a kind of mnemonic.
Something that happens to me, which feels related, is that if I'm listening to a podcast for the second time, at memorable points of the podcast (when the topic changes for example) I always remember exactly where I was when I heard those words for the first time (which part of which street if I'm walking). It's strange.
The memory palace technique is amazing and works wonders for me. However, I do mine a little differently where I imagine all the things I have to remember interacting with each other. I will have to try the landmark strategy though.
Thomas Bradwardine (1300-1349) recommends combining the two techniques. I.e. at each Loci you link together more than one item using the story mnemonic.
Just imagine a route you regularly take. Ideally a walk where you have time to consider your surroundings, but any route where you can remember landmarks will do. Now assign each thing you need to remember to a specific landmark. That's it. I've found that if I go through this process and then review it just once in my mind I can remember everything with 100% accuracy.
I used this trick recently to remember a gate code by assigning numbers to nearby architecture. I'd have a terrible time trying to remember it any other way.