Mnemonics.
Extension of the comment I wrote under this post.
Okay lemme tell you a thing: I love this tutorial because it's good for creating spaces in your imagination and exercising this amazing ability of your brain.
But.
Mind Palace is a technique of remembering and storing your knowledge. What is shown here is basically only creating a place in your mind. Nothing more. (But, yeah, it's a good step towards actual Mind Palace and it's explained marvelously.)
If you want something like Sherlock have it will take some more effort.
It's better to start with simple mnemonics and then going to the most complicated one that Mind Palace is. But you can create your place now if you want. It's required to be very familiar with it, so the longer you have it the easier you'll be able to move around and find what you need.
Here is rough summary of what I know based on a book "Mind Palace" by Kszysztof Galos. The book is in Polish so I translate some details as I go.
After finishing note: This is definitely NOT a summary. I basically wrote everything there is in this goddamn book...
Let's start with simple mnemonics:
Purple ones are often used in education, don't require imagination and are used to remember things for long periods of time/forever.
Blue ones on the contrary use imagination and you can remember long lists for short time. (I was annoying my friends in high school by making them list me random stuff up to 20 points and I was remembering the lists in under a minute. But those sort of mnemonics aren't good for abstract concepts.)
Okay, let's start with the ones on the right.
Rhymes - Short sentences that rhyme are known to be easier to remember. For example In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. - the "discovery" of America. In this sort of mnemonics the material that we have to learn enlarges (elaborating mnemonics), but paradoxically is easier to remember. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Acronyms - out of few reducing mnemonics of this sort the most popular and the most effective are acrostics. You take first letters of every word you have to learn and create a word or a sentence with them. Like ADEK - vitamins that dissolve in fat, or HOMES - big lakes of north America. In specific cases we can change the list of words we have to remember into something else that is easier to remember. For example the eight small bones in the wrist: Navicular, Lunate, Triquetrum, Pisiform, Multongular (Greater), Multongular (Lesser), Capitate, Hamate: Never Lick Tilly's Popsicle, Mother Might Come Home. Fun fact: the more ridiculous they are the easier it is to remember them.
Numbers into letters - this is a technique that requires some practice. Basically you can remember long chains of numbers, like Pi, by creating a sentence in which words have the number of letters equal to the numbers we want to remember. 3.14159265358979 can be encoded as "Now I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics". Now - 3 letters, I - 1, need - 4, and so on. Cool, right? 8D
Stories - creating funny stories can help to quickly remember the facts. Again the more ridiculous and funny it is the easier you'll remember. Like... The direction in which stalagmites and stalactites grow: When a woman has ants in her pants, the mites go up and the tights go down. ;>
Right.
Now the left side.
So here we use imagination. This is incredibly powerful tool and I want you to remember that. You can create anything with it. Dang, a whole UNIVERSE! So compared to being a god of your own infinity of dimensions I presume mastering those mnemonics will be a piece of cake.
I must say that I mostly use this kind of creative memory techniques because they are way more effective than the ones above and they are fun.
The techniques I'm about to describe are based on Chain Association Method. General idea: if we replace an information with a word and imagine it, the probability of remembering it increases. (tremendously, I'd dare to say.)
So here we go:
Chains - first of all, you need to know that the more colourful, the more vivid, the more detailed the image is the better and for longer you will remember it. It's important to try using all your senses. So if you imagine a sausage, try to recall how it smells, that it's slick and greasy under your fingers, the sound of frying it and so on. Now, the actual chain technique consist in linking one point of the list with another (wow like in a chain). I'll show you how it works by giving you an example because it's way easier to understand that way. So let's make a list of: phone, sausage, book, cabbage. - phone/sausage - Now, imagine hearing your phone ring, but when you reach for it you grab a greasy and warm sausage. Uhh... yuck. - sausage/book - the idea of using sausage as a bookmark seems really ridiculous, but that is why you will remember it. So picture putting a sausage inside a book, leaving fat stains, and closing the volume at the same time squashing the sausage inside. - book/cabbage - oh no! What is that?! All pages in the book changed into cabbage leaves! They are tattered on the edges and your whole palms are covered with sticky juice. See? This is pretty easy.
Bookmarks - Well, basically it's something that I just described. It's clashing images together. Making them: - crash with each other - stick to each other - stand one on another - stand one under another - stand inside another - change into one another - exchange the situations with one another - weave with each other - let them speak - let them dance - let them exchange colours, smell, action
Visual-Rhyme Bookmarks - it's assigning images to every number that looks like said number and then a word that rhymes with a number. 1. brush, pencil, feather, pen, candle... gun, bun, won, son / (first) burst, cursed 2. swan, duck, goose blue, blew, flu... Blah blah. You get my drift.
Alphabet - you can attach images to letters like A - ace, B - bee and so on. You can also use NATO phonetic alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta...), which is harder but also very good.
Specific cases - mnemonics are incredibly plastic, which enables to remember very different things like... Physics and Mathematics formulas. I'll show you something that I've learnt two years ago and I still remember it - aka the only Physics formula that I know to this day. Formula for First Cosmic Velocity. Ding:
How did I remember that? "Gmyro in the house". Sounds strange, right? But Gmyro is my friend, and a house is a root. It looks like a house, doesn't it?
Okay, we're done with simple mnemonics. Time for...
Mnemonic Major System.
Uuu, scary.
Mnemonic Major System was invented in the 17th century by Stanislaus Mink. Due to increasing amount of available information new, better, memory system was needed and there it was. Better than any other, allowing to remember any kind of numbers, dates and events. It's based on imagination and phonetic alphabet, and to this day is the most advanced mnemonic technique.
This wibbly-wobbly thing is vital part to becoming Sherlock. Seriously. If you want to have Mind Palace like he does this is important. Though it's... hard.
Main Code.
The base of MMS is a phonetic alphabet in which numbers are changed into consonants.
Have this Wikipedia chart because I'm a lazyass.
There are also other versions. For example Derren Brown uses this:
l
n
m
r
w, f, v
b, p
t, d
h
g
I actually can see why he likes this version better.
Creating Matrix
As I said the key to this whole thinger-majinger are consonants and all the other letters are irrelevant in the matrix we're gonna create. So basically to every number from 0 to 9 you create words that consist the matching letter from the chart above (we're gonna use the Wikipedia one, not the Derren Brown one). For example:
0 – Sow, Snow, Zero, Zoo 1 – Dye, Tie, poT, Doll 2 – kNee, Nose, Noose 3 – Ma, Milk, Moon, Mice 4 – Row, Rose, Rice, Rope 5 – Law, Letter, Leaf, polL 6 – SHoe, CHair, Joint 7 – Cow, Car, Glue 8 – Fee, Worm, Fork 9 – Bay, Book, Bee, Bark, Pool, Pork
You can put your consonant in the middle or the end of the word if you want. It doesn't matter. Also it's better if you create your own matrix with your own images. You will remember it better.
So now we have the basic word-pegs ready. You have to remember them to the point that imagining those things will be as easy to you as counting. (or will be equivalent of counting)
The follow-up pegs up to 100 can be created like that:
92 - BasiN 77 - CaKe 45 - RolL
And so on.
There are two fundamental ways to enlarge our matrix so we can code even tens of thousands of facts. Both methods have their pros and cons, but it's up to you to choose which one suits you better.
The first method - creating every single new peg from 100 to 1000. It's incredibly time consuming and requires to swallow a dictionary. But the con is that we don't have to strain our imagination muscle.
The second method is the same that you will use after creating the ones from 0 to 999 - you have to create only ten pegs for every hundred or for every thousand and combine them with the ones you already have.
Let's go straight to thousands.
1000 - 1999 something in a big block of ice 2000 - 2999 covered in thick oil 3000 - 3999 burning 4000 - 4999 pulsing in the bright purple light 5000 - 5999 made from soft suede 6000 - 6999 completely transparent 7000 - 7999 smelling like your favourite aroma 8000 - 8999 in the middle of the motorway 9000 - 9999 on the blue sky
Again, it's better if you create your own pegs.
I'll give you few examples on the use.
6014 - transparent TuRtle (or whatever you have for your 14) 5658 - a word we have for 658 like... SHeLF and then 5000 peg - suede. So you have suede shelf .___. (or if you picked the other method you'd go with 58 word, then the 6 hundred peg and 5000 peg. e.g. PINK suede shelf :D)
We can use the same method to create every 10 thousand, then every 100 thousand peg and as many other as we want.
I hope my gibberish is understandable p_q
You can use sites like major-system.info to generate yourself a matrix if you don't want to do it yourself.
Remembering phone numbers
You can "save" phone numbers in your head using Major Mnemonic System. If you've got at least 0-9 pegs from above it should be easy. The only thing you need to do is change numbers into letters, find words and link them somehow to the wherever you want to call.
Like...
Florist - 9271531 - PiNK (927) TaiL (15) MeTeor (31)
So you imagine a meteor made of flowers with a pink tail of fire. That's actually pretty cute. (ʘ‿ʘ✿)>>>>>>
Or if you really swallow a dictionary like I said earlier you can remember something like 2110019563214201 with only one word: antidisestablishmentarianist (it's an actual word. I checked).
You can also use this for remembering you schedule oooor historical dates (you can even make yourself pegs for months), or any dates in general, or whatever you like tbh. It can be even used for card tricks. >_>
But you wanted to hear about Mind Palace, right? So here we are.
Mind Palace
First records of using memory technique as Mind Palace (also called The Method of Loci) date hundreds upon hundreds of years before Christ. It was used by ancient Romans and Greeks and was described by them in their works.
Anonymous user in a work The Rhetorica ad Herennium, the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric, dating from the 90s BC, writes about the basic rules of creating The Palace, advising keeping the right distances between every fictional element (around 10 meters), and proper, not too bright, illumination.
In the palace you put every single thing you want to remember, coded in all of the mnemonics I described above. This place is like a storage of your memory, granting you easy access to whatever you are looking for.
There is this theory that your brain keeps everything you ever remembered, but the threads which you'd have to follow to find your memories get old with time to finally fray and break. Mind Palace is basically that link that makes you able to find your information.
This is what The Mind Palace is.
Thanks for reading. I'm never doing something like this again _^_"