Why do this? I was a year out of graduate school, but I could already feel my knowledge leaking away. This is a frustrating experience that will be familiar to any of you who've switched fields, if you are no longer working with your hard won knowledge/skills, they seem to vanish. The mind is a leaky sieve, without constant refilling it empties quickly.
Like, if you asked me to write down the Schrodinger equation (my PhD was in physics), right this instant, I'd have a 50/50 chance of getting it right (I just tried this, by the way, and I failed, now all I'm left with is a wrong equation and a slightly... (read 1266 more words →)
Great question! First, for me at least, memory palaces are asymmetric in effort, they can take a fair amount of effort to build (especially if you are trying to encode a lot of information), but retrieval is fairly constant (not instantaneous, but on the order of seconds.) As with anything, this gets better with practice.
And I don't want to mislead you! Memory palaces are fairly easy to get started with (like if you want to remember simple things, like a grocery list, you can plop groceries around a path in your house). The complexity in my techniques comes from developing a consistent visual language to encode things (like numbers with the Dominic... (read 357 more words →)