The course is still on my mind this morning. I read a few more reviews... then an idea struck me. A little bit of Googling... around 45 seconds later... YES!!! Coupon code for $10!!! Ok, I'm doing it. I'm signing up for this course. I'll happily risk $10 for a shot at this being worth it!
After processing the payment, I spent a while engaging with the course, watching the videos and so on. In fact, I ended up spending much of the day on it. This stuff is truly amazing. It's like stumbling across something that I've always been looking for but never even realised was missing. This is so incredibly cool.
The course starts by working on improving memory. Speed reading is covered later, but there's not a lot of benefit to reading fast if you can't remember much of what you read... so yeah, covering memory first makes an awful lot of sense. Watching through the lectures and reading / watching the associated materials, I'm blown away by the sheer awesomeness of these concepts. The potential is nothing short of mind blowing. Memory champions - people actually compete at remembering things! Man, would that be awesome. Reading over 3 times as fast as I can now, and comprehending probably twice as much - now THAT would be ultra life-changing stuff.
The thing is, I can see this happening. I can see it working. I can see me sticking to this. I can see me getting that good.
This afternoon, I made what I consider to be a pretty decent couple of first attempts. The first was using markers and memory palace techniques to remember the content of a random wikipedia article. It went something like this:
A curving, crystal clear river flows up to my front door [of my current house] (the surname of the person the article is about it Rivera). Stepping into the house, and continuing down the hallway, there is a set of drama masks on the hallway wall (she is an actress). A large, padded microphone dances in mid air down the hallway, leading me into the living area (she is also a musician). I see myself sitting on the lounge watching TV (Rivera plays a character called Bianca in a show called "There's something about Raven"). The Edgar Allan Poe "Simpsons" episode with The Raven in it plays on the TV. The raven is wearing a purple coat. I look across to the dining table where my sister is seated, covered tastefully in tattoos (Rivera is, in her spare time, a tattoo artist).
All in all not terrible.
My second first-attempt was at a memory game http://neutralx0.net/home/mini04.html. The idea is to remember a set of images, which is then scattered amongst a bunch of other images, and you must recall which were the images originally shown. I treated the images as markers and used memory palace techniques for each set of images. It was challenging, and incredibly fun to come up with the creative stories to tie the images together. I wasn't particularly fast at it, but it wasn't a bad start I think. I mostly used my first childhood home for the memory palaces I created during this activity. It seemed to work really well for me, even though the last time I saw the place I was only 8. Lots of really strong emotional bonds there though, tons of strong associations to tie things into. I passed Level 7 in the game, which means that I managed to correctly remember 12 images. I didn't fail, and I could have kept going, but I opted not to. I think partly I wanted to end on a win... but also my brain HURT. I'm not sure I've ever felt like that before, like I actually exercised my brain! What a truly bizarre feeling!!!
After that, my brain really felt like an overused muscle for the rest of the night. My brain was fried. So weird. A little bit scary... but I can also feel that this is working!!! How exciting!!!!
Some song lyrics come to mind as vaguely relevant to memory palaces:
After processing the payment, I spent a while engaging with the course, watching the videos and so on. In fact, I ended up spending much of the day on it. This stuff is truly amazing. It's like stumbling across something that I've always been looking for but never even realised was missing. This is so incredibly cool.
The course starts by working on improving memory. Speed reading is covered later, but there's not a lot of benefit to reading fast if you can't remember much of what you read... so yeah, covering memory first makes an awful lot of sense. Watching through the lectures and reading / watching the associated materials, I'm blown away by the sheer awesomeness of these concepts. The potential is nothing short of mind blowing. Memory champions - people actually compete at remembering things! Man, would that be awesome. Reading over 3 times as fast as I can now, and comprehending probably twice as much - now THAT would be ultra life-changing stuff.
The thing is, I can see this happening. I can see it working. I can see me sticking to this. I can see me getting that good.
This afternoon, I made what I consider to be a pretty decent couple of first attempts. The first was using markers and memory palace techniques to remember the content of a random wikipedia article. It went something like this:
A curving, crystal clear river flows up to my front door [of my current house] (the surname of the person the article is about it Rivera). Stepping into the house, and continuing down the hallway, there is a set of drama masks on the hallway wall (she is an actress). A large, padded microphone dances in mid air down the hallway, leading me into the living area (she is also a musician). I see myself sitting on the lounge watching TV (Rivera plays a character called Bianca in a show called "There's something about Raven"). The Edgar Allan Poe "Simpsons" episode with The Raven in it plays on the TV. The raven is wearing a purple coat. I look across to the dining table where my sister is seated, covered tastefully in tattoos (Rivera is, in her spare time, a tattoo artist).
All in all not terrible.
My second first-attempt was at a memory game http://neutralx0.net/home/mini04.html. The idea is to remember a set of images, which is then scattered amongst a bunch of other images, and you must recall which were the images originally shown. I treated the images as markers and used memory palace techniques for each set of images. It was challenging, and incredibly fun to come up with the creative stories to tie the images together. I wasn't particularly fast at it, but it wasn't a bad start I think. I mostly used my first childhood home for the memory palaces I created during this activity. It seemed to work really well for me, even though the last time I saw the place I was only 8. Lots of really strong emotional bonds there though, tons of strong associations to tie things into. I passed Level 7 in the game, which means that I managed to correctly remember 12 images. I didn't fail, and I could have kept going, but I opted not to. I think partly I wanted to end on a win... but also my brain HURT. I'm not sure I've ever felt like that before, like I actually exercised my brain! What a truly bizarre feeling!!!
After that, my brain really felt like an overused muscle for the rest of the night. My brain was fried. So weird. A little bit scary... but I can also feel that this is working!!! How exciting!!!!
Some song lyrics come to mind as vaguely relevant to memory palaces:
And the amazing thing is this my friends - the song we sang on that fateful night didn't actually sound anything like this song... this is just a tribute!
~ Tenacious D, Tribute.
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