Mnemonics – the art of the memory, mental mailboxes and memory palace
I am fascinated by our life, the nature and our journey through the universe on this planet earth. For me, learning, knowledge, science and technology are ways to find solutions to the challenges of our time, but also to gain insights and understanding for the connections and details, by looking into the microscope to the movement of our stars in the night sky.
For that it is an enormous advantage and worth to learn about mnemonics in order to remember knowledge, or to reliably remember names of people, dates of birth, vocabulary and passwords in the daily live.
Perhaps one now thinks of Sherlock Holmes who used mental mail boxes and his memory palace to search for important facts and associations and it may not seem easy to acquire these techniques. But I found it is easier than it seems at the first glance and it is a lot of extra fun.
For my son and myself, I went on a quest to change learning, including dry facts, in such a way that we enjoy doing it and so, that we can reliably access the knowledge even after a long time. In the end, I even decided to finish a training as a learning coach for this subject and wished I could have applied this knowledge earlier in my studies and professional life.
Quickly we were more successful than we had imagined and also we had a lot of fun to learn even abstract knowledge and to remember it reliably. Furthermore it feels good to appear safe and well prepared and to save a lot of time, because that way information is no longer forgotten and has not to be repeated.
But what finally is a memory palace? It is a building of you fantasy and contains different places or rooms. In each of these rooms there are details where the information is stored. Such a room can be for example your own car, with a number of details such as the steering wheel, the engine, etc. Another location can be, for example, the public swimming pool, with the details of the box office, the diving platform and the like. These details are mental mailboxes with which the information is connected. The palace can grow practically without limits, but rooms and mental mailboxes can also be used multiple times.
It works wonderful to imagine oneself the mailboxes and places and to connect knowledge with this mailboxes as REMARKABLE as possible. Remarkable in this sense is funny, or maybe creepy, in any case unusual and emotional. There are no limits to the fantasy and this is where the fun begins!
Isn’t it more remarkable to imagine the german word “zittern” for “shiver” in the form of a shivering (baby) sitter and to be reminded of => “zittern” by “sitter” than just trying to memorize the abstract sequence of letters. With the mailboxes in the rooms, this kind of remarkable information additionally is put into an order. That can be used for remembering numbers with a lot of digits or for the most important points of a free speech.
A set of 100 mental mailboxes and the expansion to 1000 by combining them with colors my son and I have easily remembered. Since then we have had a lot of fun connecting knowledge here and are always amazed, at how strong the memory of the invented connections and stories is.
This fascination for learning and memory techniques, the knowledge about learning motivation, work organization and learning specifics I gladly convey as learning coach to you! More…
All our videos you will find at our channel following: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUtV5VmLRWGHHN17yG_S_pQ
