What to Expect From This Blog and Where I’m Headed
I’ve always been fascinated with memory and many different techniques to enhance it for a few years now. My favorite out of those is the “mind palace” or the Method of Loci. This technique was developed by the Ancient Greeks based on the idea that the human mind is more geared towards memorizing locations rather than cold hard facts. Once you have a familiar location set in your mind, you would associate any ‘pegs’ inside the location with the information you’re trying to memorize in the most absurd, obscene, disgusting, or surprising way. The brain has a way of holding on to those kind of information even though you don’t want it to stay sometimes. I’ll explain in detail how to use the mind palace in detail in a later post for those of you who are new to this technique.
While I was utilizing the mind palace for my history exam, I had the best understanding with the material in ages (history was and still is my weakest subject) and I could see how one thing related to another because I knew all the necessary facts. I’m guessing this is due to the fact that I had to really understand the significance of the material being discussed and form it into my own ‘special’ image. So back then I thought it would be great if I used mind palace on subjects where I had to memorize tons of facts such as biology, history, foreign language, etc., but I never actually got around to using it.
One day I watched one of Ed cooke’s videos and read his book Remember Remember. In it he wrote an instance where he would take ‘memory walks’ with a bunch of people, instantly create a journey (or mind palace) with them, help them learn the Kings and Queens of England. At the end of every walk people could generally recite all the Kings and Queens perfectly both forwards and backwards. This got me thinking. Even though it was not their own personal mind palace, people could still memorize facts by listening to suggestions of bizarre images. The effect was similar to when one would memorize the facts by oneself.
So I changed my thought from “I wish I would have used mind palace on difficult subjects” to “I wish there would be a premade mind palace with the association to necessary facts already in place.” Then I had a realization. There are numerous students who are struggling to memorize facts for exams, and there are tons of people worldwide of all ages who are already proficient in mind palace. If all those experts could share their mind palace and the information in it, the student who needs to memorize the information they have given could search it here and memorize it easily. Once the students use the expert’s mind palace a few times, they would grasp the technique, make their own palace if they wish to, and upload another kind of information to expand the amount of easily memorizable information ready to be used.
So to start this off, I’m going to create a virtual mind palace (“Hogwarts”) step by step in this blog. Once I’m done constructing the place (or maybe midway since Hogwarts is huge) I’m going to upload how I use that mind palace for the current subject I would be learning at that moment.
If during anytime there is anyone who is willing to upload their mind palace and the information in it, they can go to the 'Palace Group' forum and post their own mind palace there.
P.S. Even though my virtual mind palace is going to be themed Hogwarts, it’s not going to be 100% accurate Hogwarts. I’m going to be using a floor plan from http://randwulf.com/hogwarts/hogwarts.html for the structure, and Harry Potter movies and info from the book series for the interior design. Some things will be created by my imagination.
