I’m into the second chapter of this book, Moonwalking with Einstein — Joshua Foer. So far, it’s a journal of discovering memory palace.
This wasn’t a strange term to me. I read about it in 2015 and followed a few brief practices of building a memory palace. I was so much into the tech interviews back then and I aimed to memories algorithms and patterns.
It’s not completely useless as I still recall the entrance to my ‘palace’, there was the title that reminds of the concept of anagram. Once I enter the ‘palace’, more of a small beach house, the wall on the left will remind me of graph notions: it’s a set of fist-size, round-shape shining glassy dots, connecting to each other; I suppose they represent the nodes in a graph.
That was pretty much all I have in the house. It wasn’t quite successful as I quickly realize remembering the algorithms or patterns is one thing, but interviews are more about reacting to the present problems/situations, as opposed to reciting what’s in my memory.
Years later, now I’m again reading a book of the memory palace, where it shows more width and depth of the concept.
A few things stuck out as this book illustrates how some people matching reality with imaginary objects; I had similar experiences as a child.
I used to have a strong impression of every single person and give them a color. For example, I have an uncle who I met just a few times at age of 5, till this day, I recall his color was kinda bright and warm yellow. However, for someone, I really disliked in the family, as a child, I gate pale-dark-gray for that matter. Mom used to be purple. One of my cousins is a cool darker green, the other two cousins are more grounded yellow-brown. Dad was pure-transparent color as I thought of him as a smart person, and he has a high standing in the family.
Matching people with color was my ‘special’ ability as a child. I only mentioned a few times to my family, but this ability faded as I grew up. Why? I believe, as I try to rationalize it now, there are far more obvious and distinctive ways to represent a person, so I follow along with their tags. Their look, voice tone, behavior, height, kindness, frustration, life achievements, or the mean people and their interactions with me…and so on. I simply didn’t need to imagine anybody to match them with color.
The color matching, or giving subject personality, was one of the techniques to memory things, mentioned from a person described as ‘S’ in the book.
Another thing stuck out in my life experience. The book cited a few occasions where a room was the basis for memorizing things, as you can place objects in the room and link their connections. I had one experience that’s just like that.
In the 5th grade, my school was relocating to a faraway location (yeah, that doesn’t happen to normal people), and all the kids were to be relocated too. More dramatically, I moved from this town to another side of the country for family reasons. Even young, I understand it was goodbye to all my friends and perhaps that was it between us for this life. It was sad and dramatic.
I wake up at night and can’t accept the reality that I and these kids are never going to meet again (It turns out true that I only met later perhaps 2 friends out of them all). I had struggles and I didn’t know how to overcome. My resolution was, hey, I am going to put all of you, your names, your personality, our relationship, and every connection in that particular classroom, using the seating position you last have. Yes, right there, in that specific classroom.
I spent many nights (as I missed them can’t sleep) reciting the sequence of seats, their names, and the moments we had together. Until this day, about 20 years later, I can recall many faces and a handful of names in that class seating from my point of view. It’s like, all memories are out of reach about them, but as long as I start from that specific class, I can just trace through all events that happened with us there.
It’s fascinating to give a rationale for what I did as a kid. I perhaps never intentionally think about this classroom after the first few months, but the memory of that place stays solid year after year.
Though I believe this is common to everyone. I bet we all have some sort of class-seating-type of memory of events or subjects. One real-world application is if I lost track of a phone or keys, I usually try to think hard about the last point of time I used it, and trace through the moments after that to locate the lost subject (everyone does this).
Well, I perhaps will write another page of this book, but so far, it’s just fascinating to align life experiences with people who are allegedly memory championships.
