Today we will talk about expanding the memory palace and speed memorization.
The more support images you have, the more information you can remember. It will also greatly increase the effectiveness of your workouts. If you are limited to 20-30 locations, then you can hardly realize your full potential as a mnemonist. To memorize large amounts of information and frequent training, you need much more.
Where can I get support images?
Think of all the familiar rooms. Your apartment, dacha, friend's house, apartment where you lived before, office, shop, which you often visit. If possible, walk through these rooms and select everything that can become a reference image. Count how many locations you got. Now mentally walk through them, counting each location. If you forgot something, then walk through the rooms again until you remember the route. It is advisable to immediately try to memorize something on it, because some supporting images may not be very successful (when memorizing them, you often cannot remember an image or memorizing it will take longer than other support images). If there are such supporting images, feel free to cross them off the route. Why use ineffective locations?
Go outside the premises. Break Brodsky's ban and leave the room. You can highlight a variety of support images in the park, on the way from home to bus stop or work place. Perhaps there are many monuments in your city that can be used as locations? Courtyards, routes that you often move, squares, streets with unusual buildings, rows of shops with bright and unusual signs and other design elements - go outside and look around: you are surrounded by a huge number of reference images that you can start using to memorize today … Highlight, memorize supporting images and periodically use the created memory palaces so as not to forget the location. Walking in the fresh air is useful, but walking and highlighting supporting images is three times useful. Try it!
Be observant. This is in addition to the first two points. If you find yourself in an unfamiliar place: a cafe, restaurant, visiting someone, or taking a trip and walking around an unfamiliar city, etc. - Pay attention to details and highlight reference images for your memory palace. If you develop this habit, in addition to increasing the amount of memorization you can, you will also learn to better navigate unfamiliar places. Also, high observation will improve your ability to think logically.
Contact realtors. Enter the query "apartments in * city name *" in any search engine and start browsing the proposed options. Naturally, the apartment should be with furniture, household items and some things of the people who sell it.
Promotional video:
For example, I decided to look at apartments in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. I take one of the first that caught my eye:
I go into the graphic editor, mark and number the support images of my new route in order:
Done - my memory palace has become ten more locations.
A few more sources of locations. As reference images, you can use locations from a computer game, the apartment of the heroes of your favorite TV series, a room from a design magazine, etc. Do not limit your imagination - reference images can be found almost everywhere.
Important! Do not use the same or very similar objects as reference images. If one of your locations is a bench in your favorite park, then only a bench of a different color or shape can become another supporting image, so that you cannot confuse them. After all, if you confuse supporting images with each other, then when remembering you will change the places of the memorized information! This should never be allowed. If the locations have some minor differences among themselves, but you represent them almost identically to each other (you simply cannot imagine the image in detail, as in the photo, with all the cracks on the wooden bench and dried drops of paint), then in this case you also have to leave only one of the two reference images.
Increasing the speed of memorization
To begin with, I would like to acquaint you with some of the results of the World Memorial Championship (yes, there are such, if you did not know), which was held in Jakarta on December 1-3, 2017:
Alex Mullen memorized 3238 digits in an hour, 568 digits in five minutes, 133 dates in five minutes (in memory championships, fictional events are used to exclude the possibility that the participant already knows this date) and a deck of cards (in world championships, 52 cards are memorized) for 15.61! Munkshur Narmandah memorized 1776 cards (34.15 decks) in an hour, and Yanjaa Wintersoul was able to memorize 354 random pictures (in a certain sequence, of course) in five minutes! Moreover, at the world championships they give a limit on the time of recall, which creates additional complexity.
Perhaps you will not memorize a deck of cards in 15 seconds (and perhaps you will!), But you will be able to memorize at a rate of 1-2 seconds per element, this is a very real and achievable result. You will probably even learn to do it faster.
Method one: practice. Your speed will increase as you train. You will get used to visualizing the image, to the process of attaching it to the reference one, and gradually get used to doing it. Over time, your speed of memorization will grow only due to active (most importantly, regular) training. As long as memorizing 200 numbers (conditionally) is an ordeal for you, you are not ready for quick memorization.
Method two: new system. If you memorize at a speed of 4 seconds per element, then it will take you 2 minutes to memorize 60 digits in two-digit numbers, and a minute and 20 seconds for three-digit numbers. If you bring the NPP to automatism, it will take you even less time. You can memorize not one card at a time, but two at once.
Method three: reduce the time of image presentation. You don't have to imagine every goose feather or threads sticking out of a hat. You still cannot do this, but you will only waste time and torture your brain. It is enough that the image is clear to you. It is enough for me to know that this white creature with colored spots on its head is a clown, if I want to remember him in a second or faster I have no time to imagine his facial expression or the cut of his costume.
Fourth method: stop being afraid of mistakes. As in any other area, you should not be afraid of mistakes in memorization (I am talking about training, when memorizing the bank account number it is better, of course, not to be mistaken). Start spending less time capturing one look. You may feel that you do not remember it well enough. Ignore this feeling. Try to spend as little time as possible tying each image to the support, and then try to remember everything. If you usually memorize at a rate of 5 seconds per item, then when you memorize at a rate of 4 seconds per item, you are unlikely to forget something. Surely, less time will be enough for you to reliably fix the image with the location. Find your speed limit (when you have 10-30% errors) and train on it. When there are fewer mistakes (0-10%), you can start memorizing even faster. With a small speed rollback, you will be able to memorize accurately, and it will take less time than before. The secret is simple: if you want to memorize quickly, start memorizing quickly.
Method five: moving along the route. Learn to quickly move between locations. If after each reference image you think about which one comes next, then, obviously, you will not be able to quickly memorize. You must know your route firmly. And switch from the reference image to the support image instantly. You should not mentally go from one to another, but switch locations like frames in a movie - one after another.
Use all these methods, and your memorization speed will definitely increase.
Practice! Create 10 looks now. It does not take a lot of time. Learn to quickly move between them in order to use for high-speed memorization in the future.
