In this article, I’d like to share with you a mnemonic technique I’ve started using lately to prepare for my exams in psychology. The things you have to retain in psychology are usually more or less unsystematic lists of facts that don’t bear any strong logical relation to one another. This stands in contrast to other subject matters like philosophy, for instance, where the relevant knowledge is systematically structured such that the premises are presupposed by the thesis, the consequences follow from it logically, all relevant objections stand in the relation of logical contradiction to at least some of its implications and so on. Thus, once you remember the thesis itself, the rest comes to mind pretty naturally, and this is why philosophy students usually don’t do a lot of learning by heart. The technique I’m about to describe to you is a pretty efficient way of artificially creating associative links between logically independent pieces of information such that you can recall the whole set at will. It is a combination of two methods, the method of loci and the narrative method and it can be used to learn such diverse things as whole texts in verse and prose, vocabulary, grammatical inflections, unsystematic scientific facts, birthdays, presentations you have to give, and story plots. Even highly structured domains of knowledge such as philosophy and other theoretical disciplines where a thorough conceptual understanding is key can benefit from this technique. Furthermore, recalling the information you memorised is so engaging for your brain that it naturally enters into a state of concentrative meditation which reliably yields the same pleasant effects of calmness and joy typically associated with Shamata meditation.
The method of loci
The technique goes like this: first, you think of a place you know very well such as the house you grew up in or the school you went to as a child. Secondly, you create a route that leads through this place and that connects all the different spots you can distinctly remember. For example, you think of your room and imagine standing in front of your bed. To the right, there is a small cupboard, then a bin, then a desk, in front of the desk is your chair, then comes the carpet, then your wardrobe, then your door, etc. You continue in this manner until the route you’ve imagined passes through the whole house and connects all of the different spots. This is what is called a mind palace or a memory palace. Thirdly, for every piece of information you want to commit to memory, you think of an image that represents this piece in some way and that you somehow associate with it. For instance, the concept of participation can be represented by a red balloon that you might more commonly see on a party. (Mind the pun “party-cipation”.) This would be an association on a phonetic level, but you could just as well choose the image of a ballot box (participating in the political process) or of a politician known for promoting political participation. Whatever feels most intuitive to you, really, and you should trust your instincts here because the association that comes to your mind most easily will most probably also be the thing that is easiest for it to recall later. Note that the most memorable associations are sexual or violent in nature or concern you in some way so in order to be most effective you should abstract from any ethically motivated self-censoring. Fourthly, you visualise that the associative symbol you’ve just made up is in one of the spots along the route you’ve created. For example, you imagine the politician to sit on your bed. Try to make the image as vivid as possible (done best with your eyes closed) and to involve different sense modalities at once. How exactly does the politician look, do her movements make a sound? Etc. This creates further associations for your brain to use in recall later. When you’re done, you should be able to mentally follow the route, visualise the symbols one by one and use them to recall the coded content.
The narrative method
Now, you’ll notice that coding information in this way takes up a lot of space in your mind palace pretty quickly and this is where the second method comes into play. So, fifthly, instead of just visualising a single symbol, you think of a series of symbol, each representing one piece of information and each interacting with one another and thereby forming some sort of narrative. For instance, the balloon might pop open, and a pencil falls out which is picked up by a toddler, who sticks it into a pudding etc. It is important that the symbols interact as strongly as possible and again, violent, or sexual interactions or interactions having to do with you are remembered best.
Now you can go through your mind palace, play the little narratives you’ve come up with one by one and recall all of the information you’ve stored there. You’ll find that, most probably for evolutionary reasons, your brain has a natural tendency to remember spatial structures as well as narratives. As you go over the remembered material again and again, the recall becomes more fluent and you’ll be able to access the information on the spot in any circumstance. You’ll also find that it’s pretty fun to see how much information your brain can store in such little time.
Recall as meditation
More importantly, the experience of going through your mind palace itself is very enjoyable. My hunch is that the whole recall process is both demanding and engaging enough for your brain to stay focused effortlessly on the object of attention. Much like if you were to focus on your breath for longer periods of time, this calms your mind down and creates sensations of joy that stay with you for some time after the session has ended. If you want to use your mind palace mainly for meditative purposes, make sure you actually visualise the symbols and that you do this as precisely as possible and don’t just skim over them in a rush if your brain provides the answer already. This can be considered a form of conceptual meditation which was actually pretty common in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, read more on the subject here: https://not-the-territory.blogspot.com/2021/11/secularizing-western-meditative.html
More on mind palaces
A few more remarks on mind palaces themselves: once you get the hang of it, you can increase the number of spots in your mind palace. For example, whereas before you were just imagining your bed, now you are imagining its four bed posts, the pillow, and the sheets as distinct places to store your narratives. What’s more, if you want to jump from one mind palace to the next, just come up with a symbol that stands for the mind palace you want to go to and place it in the mind palace you want to depart from. This means also that you should never be afraid of running out of space, you can always jump to the next mind palace. You can also create hyperlinks between different places in one and the same mind palace. For instance, if you know that the information on borderline personality disorder, which you have placed in your parents’ bathroom, is relevant to the different pharmacological interventions, which you have placed in their basement, why not place the image of a bathtub in the basement at a position that makes sense? You’ll be able to use this image as a cue to jump back to the bathroom if need be. Likewise, you can place an image of a washing machine in your bathroom, so you have a gateway back to the basement. I’d definitely recommend creating one mind palace that functions as a library and contains all the other mind palaces such that you have an overview of all the things you have remembered.
Deepening conceptual understanding
I want to end by talking about two more applications of this technique. On the one hand, as I already wrote above, it can be used to deepen your conceptual understanding of systematically structured domains of knowledge such as philosophy. For example, you could store the different steps of an argument in a sequence of symbols in one of your mind palaces. Moreover, as philosophical theories often span whole books such that arguments made towards the end are based on suppositions discussed at the beginning, it is not uncommon to lose track of the argumentative thread and end up confused. Even if you don’t lose track, it can be useful to store the content of a book in your mind palace because you’ll be able to go through the theory over and over in a most concentrated state of mind, elaborate on all the little details that seem relevant to you without having to suppress the distractions that usually come up when you’re reading.
Recall as self-therapy
On the other hand, you could also use your mind palaces in a self-therapeutic way by symbolically storing events and conflicts you know are in need of more processing because they still trigger you emotionally when you think of them. Psychological orthodoxy would predict that going over them again and again in a deep state of concentration, which, note, is tantamount to exposure therapy in sensu, should lessen their emotional impact over time. This should also be an interesting and productive place to visit in the psychedelic state of mind, though I can only speculate at this point. If you’re interested in using memory techniques for psychological integration, I would cautiously recommend Anthony Metivier’s “The Victorious Mind”. As you can probably tell from the title, his somewhat peculiar aesthetic style isn’t for everyone and while he has an unfortunate tendency to include a lot of anecdotes in his book that don’t pertain directly to the methods discussed, there is also a lot of really solid tried-and-tested advice in there.
This concludes my description. If you want to try out the method yourself, I’d recommend you pick a poem or something else you’ve always wanted to remember, but which isn’t too long, and just give it a shot. You’ll quickly develop an intuition of what works best and how to go about things. If you do, I’d love to hear your opinion on the matter!
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