Use of Memory Palaces
This is a response to Ton Zijlstra's post Do You Use Memory Palaces? What for?:
If you're clicking the link in Slovakia, heads up; his site seems to be blackholing Slovak IP ranges these past few years, or something.
In it, Ton asks:
I decided to create a memory palace in my home office, which now has 45 loci.
Which leaves me with the question, what do I want to remember in it? And, I don’t know!
I find it quite hilarious that I can’t come up with something worthwhile to put in a memory palace!
However I suspect that it might be the same for others. Searching forums for memory techniques, most applications are focused on showing off how well the methods work. Memory competitions to remember a random deck of cards in sequence in a few minutes.
I have actually tried using a memory palace because my memory isn't all that great. I used it for some details from history that were of personal interest, with mixed success. But it later turned out that part of the reason was that I'd been doing it wrong, heh.
I later listened to a short audiobook - Extracts from Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown, which explained some memory techniques in terms even I could understand. I've tried them and they work.
But at that point, I no longer had much use for them. I've significantly improved my note-taking practices, and the benefits of having searchable, interlinked notes with backlinks are even greater than perfect recall in most of the cases I deal with.
Some of the tricks in Brown's book - most importantly the list memorization - might still come in handy from time to time. But I don't think I'll have much need for memory palaces any time soon.
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