[Written as part of Notebook Blog Month.]
I’ve got some half-written drafts for topics on the original list which I want to finish soon, but for now I seem to be doing better by going off-list and rambling about whatever’s in my head. Today it’s visual imagery.
I’ve ended up reading a bunch of things vaguely connected with mnemonics in the last couple of weeks. I’m currently very bad at concentrating on books properly, but I’m still reading at a similar rate, so everything is in this weird quarter-read state. Anyway here’s the list of things I’ve started:
- Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. Pop book about learning to compete in memory championships. This is good and an easy read, so there is some chance I’ll actually finish it.
- Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong. One of the references I followed up. About oral cultures in general but there is stuff on memorisation (e.g. repetitive passages in Homer being designed for easy memorisation when writing it down is not an option)
- Brienne Yudkowsky’s posts on mnemonics
- These two interesting posts by AllAmericanBreakfast on Less Wrong this week about experimenting with memory palaces to learn information for a chemistry exam.
Those last two posts are interesting to me because they’re written by someone in the very early stages of fiddling around with this stuff who doesn’t consider themself to naturally have a good visual imagination. I’d put myself in the same category, but probably worse. Actually I’m really confused about what ‘visual imagery’ even is. I have some sort of – stuff? – that has a sort of visual component, maybe mixed in with some spatial/proprioceptive/tactile stuff. Is that what people mean by ‘visual imagery’? I guess so? It’s very transitory and hard to pin down in my case, though, and I don’t feel like I make a lot of use out of it. The idea of using these crappy materials to make something elaborate like a memory palace sounds like a lot of work. But maybe it would work better if I spent more time on it.
The thing that jumped out of the first post for me was this bit:
I close my eyes and allow myself to picture nothing, or whatever random nonsense comes to mind. No attempt to control.
Then I invite the concept of a room into mind. I don’t picture it clearly. There’s a vague sense, though, of imagining a space of some kind. I can vaguely see fleeting shadowy walls. I don’t need to get everything crystal clear, though.
This sounded a lot more fun and approachable to me than crafting a specific memory palace to memorise specific things. I didn’t even get to the point of ‘inviting the concept of a room in’, just allowed any old stuff to come up, and that worked ok for me. I’m not sure how much of this ‘imagery’ was particularly visual, but I did find lots of detailed things floating into my head. It seems to work better if I keep a light touch and only allow some very gentle curiosity-based steering of the scene.
Here’s the one I found really surprising and cool. I was imagining an intricately carved little jade tortoise for some reason, and put some mild curiosity into what its eyes were made of. And I discovered that they were tiny yellow plastic fake gemstones that were weirdly familiar. So I asked where I recognised them from (this was quite heavy-handed questioning that dragged me out of the imagery). And it turns out that they were from a broken fish brooch I had as a kid. I prised all the fake stones off with a knife at some point to use for some project I don’t remember.
I haven’t thought about that brooch in, what, 20 years? But I remember an impressive amount of detail about it! I’ve tried to draw it above. Some details like the fins are a best guess, but the blue, green and yellow stones in diagonal stripes are definitely right. It’s interesting that this memory is still sitting there and can be brought up by the right prompt.
I think I’ll play with this exercise a bit more and see what other rubbish I can dredge up.
drossbucket 