გაზიარება

@worldofjoeriggs Hey Joe! Thanks for all your support.

— ჩანაწერები Gatiss (@Markgatiss) June 4, 2012

As a Mentalist I’m sorry to say that while I wish it was indeed that way, it isn’t. We didn’t know how to fight after watching the ‘Karate Kid’ for the first time, well some of us thought we could and found out differently very quickly. მაგრამ მე digress…

Why would you need more than one Memory Palace?

Every new palace should have you taking notes. The written word seals the deal.

The First Source of Memory Palaces: The places and locations where you have lived.

As some of you know by now a Memory Palace is almost always a place you have literally lived, or been to frequently. Yet you can easily include routes you know well, paths you’ve taken often, the levels of a video game you know backward and forwards, even a journey through a comic book you have memorized, having adapted the stories journey to the mental walk technique. The possibilities of places from which to create your first set of Memory Palaces is literally endless.

Further Down the Rabbit Hole. An endless wealth of pre-existing Palaces…

This next source of Palaces I like to call “Palaces through Proxy.” Stepping outside of your immediate world for more Palaces. This includes a home of a friend you can mentally walk through without issue, a video game that you once loved and can still walk through each level with your eyes closed.

Consider a photograph or painting that you adore or have memorized perfectly. Just by defining a starting and ending point in the painting as well as defining a clear route from each point of significance (peg), to he next, you will have successfully turned a already known painting into a Palace in and of itself. Hang this painting inside a Memory Palace you’ve already made if you didn’t retrieve it from one in the first place. Consider the embedding.

Hopefully by now you can see that since the method of loci is literally a mental walk through a known place/route, you can literally start creating multiple palaces with ease. Creating enough pegs in each palace and combining them is another story.

Memory Pegs: The backbone of EVERY Memory Palace. Expand & Define your Pegs.

In the first lesson “მეხსიერება სასახლეში – მდებარეობა შერლოკ ჰოლმსი to პროექტირება საკუთარი” we learned how to create our first Memory Palace and the meaning of pegs and pegging through vivid and absurd associations. For those of you that missed that I will summarize it briefly but do go back and read the aforementioned post. It will serve you well to know exactly what we’re talking about as we move forward with some more technical terms, concepts and jargon.

Pegs are nothing more than stationary objects that reside in your Memory Palace or mental walk. In the scenario of a ‘house’ palace then everything inside the house that you pass along your predetermined mental walk through it can and very well should become a memory peg.

At first I started like many of us do. A basic Memory Palace that I use to this day, the home I grew up in. At first each one of the five rooms was a peg by itself, meaning I only had to attach a desired thing to remember to a particular room, which is not a hard task. However remembering all fifty of the United States or your countries equivalent would become problematic quickly. The same applies to a Memory Palace created from a walk, journey, road trip, და ა.შ.…

Then next evolution in ANY memory palace is the adding of addition pegs. From five pegs per room all the way up to 50 pegs per room depending on how extensive those rooms are. My childhood home’s palace has twenty pegs per room, I find the need to add more than that is almost always actually the need to create an altogether new memory palace. Pegs are created by first mapping out your route through the new Memory Palace.

You must set this in stone and every time you close your eyes you must walk through your palace in the exact same footsteps. This is why keeping notes of your palaces is such an extremely recommended habit. Once you have your path completely down, you then create ‘pegs’ out of every stationary object you pass along the way during your mental walk through the palace. Start one room at at time, step into the room and slowly scan the room with your eyes from left to right. Create five, ten or twenty pegs based on what you see. Map this out perfectly and you will be on your way to the foundation of a extremely strong Memory Palace.

If you are using a walk perhaps for a certain Memory Palace, then take the walk in real life or inside your mind and do the same thing. Note every significant thing you pass from start to finish. Write these down further sealing your new pegs into memory. Hopefully now you’ve fully grasped the concept of adding pegs to your Memory Palace.

Pegging for more: How to firmly attach anything to pegs in your Memory Palace.

One word… Absurd. Yet it is THEE most crucial step to a successful Memory Palace and no information will stand the test of memory if this is not taken quite seriously. Yes that’s right, take the absurd seriously. Scientifically it’s hundreds of times easier to store something into long term memory if you create a ridiculous, absurd or bizarre picture out of it. THIS part IS holographic, you will need to use your imagination more than ever here.

Oddly this is the very step most people glaze over. The feel very deep and then find it suiting to skip over the ‘silly’ part; not realizing they have just missed the key element that if you lack, undermines the entire foundation of your Memory Palace. I’ll go over a brief example before moving on.

Let’s assume your Memory Palace is your childhood home and the first room you come to is the television room. You’ve decided to create five pegs in each room for now so you have five places in this room to peg or attach information to. Let us pretend for now that scanning from left to right you’ve chosen in order:

Ugly Fake Plant…Coffee Table…Television…Couch….Stairs. Those being the five you’ve chosen.

Now let’s say you need to remember five things right now, it’s NOT good enough to just place each item next to, or on top of each peg. It just does not work that way. You have to make VIVID absurd images, every time. In this example let’s say your list of things to remember is:

Helicopter…Phone…Soda… Giraffe… Astronaut.

Now you instantly form an absurd image to attach ‘Helicopter’ to your first peg ‘ugly fake plant.” In this case I see a toy remote control helicopter flying into that fake plastic tree and shredding it, the leaves are flying everywhere. You can go on and connect the remaining four yourself remembering always to make the images vivid and absurd. Mark my works that if you truly do this, you’ll still have that list memorized weeks, months if not years from now. Just from following along this example, if you did so in a vivid and serious way. If I were to ring you tomorrow and say “What was the first item on the list?” your thought process should go something like this:

“First item on the list, okay, going inside Memory Palace; first room, first object on the left is the ugly fake plant.” INSTANTLY you would see that plant in your mind and the ABSURD animated image of the helicopter shredding the plant would be given to you almost instantly. This is where the power of the absurd connections prevail, in the recalling of the information/data. People skip it as a step, then wonder why their Palace never delivers the results. The same result would have been true for any item on the list. Not only that but this method of loci enables you to recall information in and out of order. With the same speed and accuracy, something not often achieved when memorizing things with a ‘brute force’ method. This becomes extremely invaluable when you need to remember the information in reverse.

The way we generally remember things, lists etc. We get absolutely dumbfounded when we have to perform the same mental task in reverse. Like saying your alphabet backwards, unless you’ve made a point to memorize it that way it is almost always a slippery task. Mind პალასში, Memory Palace or Method of Loci resolves all these problems by storing the information in the peg system manner. If I said “helicopter” it wouldn’t take seconds for your brain to come back with ugly fake of plant. This is especially useful when we’re not dealing with such arbitrary information.

For the sake of examples however, simple objects and lists get the job of learning done. You can apply this method to any kind of information. As long as you can convert whatever item you need to memorize into an image, you can peg it to something in your Memory Palace with an absurd visual. Most everything can be reduced to an image to represent it. One of the only exceptions generally being numbers. Numbers need to be covered into sounds and then words in order to be filed away in your Palace. This is achieved with ‘Phonetic Encoding‘ which I will be covering in a subsequent article later this week. We have a one more section left to go, exploring the Labyrinth method as I call it, connecting your palaces in a curios way. Don’t forget to subscribe at the top right hand of this blog to be notified of aforementioned subsequent post(s) to come.

კავშირი ლაბირინთები ფარგლებში…

Filling your Mind Palace is one thing. თუმცა ‘შერლოკ’ couldn’t have sorted through droves of interconnected webs of information by using a few Memory Palaces. This requires the connecting or stacking of separate palaces to or atop each other. I’ve never been particularly fond of the stacking method and won’t take the time to cover it here. I don’t use it, I find the following way to be more efficient and holographic. So i stick with what works.

How many of us have seen a movie or those of you that play video games may relate as well, where a door is opened yet instead of what should be behind the door lies a completely different world or universe? Any true science fiction fan has seen this scenario take place. I suspect Whovians (google it America) will have a vast array of memories and flashbacks to rely upon. Yet I digress. (Hogwarts staircase anyone?)

For now let us just say we are working with two Memory Palaces:

1. Your childhood home in which you’ve created as many pegs in as many rooms and hallways as you want.
2. The route you take to work everyday having created pegs for every significant sight on the journey.

Two connect the two Memory Palaces you build upon your primary palace. This will be generally your first but always your most extensive and used palace. Now you find some place in this palace this is NOT a peg in any way. I usually do not turn closets into rooms in my primary Memory Palace for this reason as you will see.

Taking the closet for example, You would connect that closet door in your palace to the very beginning of your second Memory Palace, the route to work. This is not just a decision you merely make cognitively it is again something you must now twist into an absurd vivid image. These ‘labyrinth like portals are fun to make.

See yourself opening that closet door and every time you do you’re INSTANTANEOUSLY materialized in your car on the way to work. You have just stepped out of one Memory Palace directly into another. This example was extremely basic and you will come up with new and absolutely insane ways to connect your labyrinths within.

Think of a mirror… I have one mirror in the hallway of my primary Memory Palace that whenever I look into it, suddenly it magically causes me to change places with my other identity, who is, სინამდვილეში, in a completely different house altogether. Another house I once lived in for a long time and is now a solid Memory Palace. How would you go about creating portals inside your Palaces to create a labyrinth of possibilities? Well you get to do it and it is an exciting and thrilling ride with mind altering results.

I hope you enjoyed this in depth look at supercharging your memory palace, creating additional palaces and connecting the labyrinths within. In the next series we will delve further into the methods in which numbers can be phonetically encoded and we will learn to see playing cards as distinct words and images lending themselves to be stored in your Palace instantly, during a live game as well as many other exciting techniques!

Your comments are welcome as always! Thanks for your support.

-Mentalist & Consultant Joe Riggs

გაზიარება