The Antipalace: The Limits Of Mnemonics
No, You Don't Actually Want to Remember *Everything*
Table of Contents
Swiss Cheese Memories
I first learned about mnemonics back in the 1990s when I stumbled onto one of Harry Lorrayne’s books on memory. I did the whole “remember a card deck” thing, mastered the major system, and dabbled with a variety of mnemonic techniques on and off throughout the years. Still, the practice never really stuck with me until 2018.
That was the year I had a flash of insight for a new take on a very old mnemonic practice.
I’m not ready to go public with everything I discovered that year since it’s going to power some software I'm working on, but let’s just say I noticed something that other folks in the mnemonics world had overlooked.
And overlooked is the key word, since as much as I would love to say my insight is wholly original, it’s really just a variation of something that the ancients did.
I put a modern spin on an ancient practice, and the results were amazing.
I realized I could finally Memorize All The Things.
Oh man.
I have the natural memory of a goldfish.
I have ADHD. It’s annoying. Those of us with the condition are less efficient at encoding memories than normal people, and we’re more prone to interference which helps explain why ADHD’ers learn more when we study at night then when we study in the morning.
I got around having the memory of a goldfish by taking a lot of notes and reading way, way, way more than normal people do. I would read a hundred books a year, easily.
And I’d forget most of what I read.
If my memory was Swiss cheese, I’d just have to make more cheese to make up for all the holes.
The result is that I have a massive and eclectic knowledge base full of annoying gaps.
It’s not all bad. There’s always some random thing my friends never heard of that I can throw at them to help shine a different light on their own ideas. I may have been jealous of the depth of their learning, but the breadth of my own allowed me to come up with plenty of of creatives takes, so it was a bit of a wash.
In the end though, I always wanted to combine this breadth of knowledge with a deeper mastery of the things that were important to me. I wanted to be Mr. T.
In 2018, I finally saw a way forward.
And then I bit off way more than I could chew.
Time and Rate-Limits
Like I said, I took a lot of notes for the books I read. I have thousands of pages of notes and quotes, and I thought I could memorize all of them.
Hah.
It took multiple years to build a system to organize all my notes in a way that would make them easy to memorize. I had to build a novel PKMS system designed around mnemonics, and that included figuring out a way to build a memory palace that could store hundreds of thousands of entries for thousands of topics.
I did it.
I did the thing.
It existed for a brief moment in time.
It was a big accomplishment. I’m probably the only person in the world who has ever built a mnemonic PKMS that could store hundreds of thousands of items.
But that’s like being the world’s best kazoo playing unicyclist.
Sure, it’s sort of … cool, maybe?
It’s also pointless.
The problem is that the system I built overlooked a simple fact: time is a scarce resource.
The problem wasn’t how to memorize things. That’s easy once you follow a few rules.
The problem wasn’t how to organize the things I wanted to remember. That was also easy.
The problem was using the things I had memorized. That? That’s the hard part. And it’s hard because we’re not immortal. There are only so many hours in the day that we can spend contemplating things. There is a limit to how many ideas you can think about in a given day.
Yeah. Thinking is rate-limited.
I quickly realized that I would never have the time to sit with all the notes I had taken from the books I had read. Sure, I could memorize the gist of these notes and store them in a memory palace… But I would never have the time to contemplate and engage with everything that I had memorized.
This fact should have been obvious to me from the get-go.
I was already familiar with Akira Haraguchi when I was busy working on this project. Haraguchi is a world class mnemonist who has committed 100,000 numbers of pi to memory.
Reciting those numbers takes him 16 hours.
Those are just digits. Ten single words, most of them a consisting of one or two syllables, repeated thousands of times. And it took him the better part of ad ay to recite those tiny little words.
I remember the sinking feeling I felt in my stomach when it took me several hours to recite five hundred notes.
10,000 notes? Forget about it. It’d be a week’s worth of work, a forty hour task, at minimum.
And this is just reciting those notes.
It’s not contemplating them. It’s not engaging them. It’s not sitting with them. It’s not appreciating them.
It’s just acknowledging their existence.
I would compare it to walking down the street and saying hello to the people you walk past.
“Hi pointless quote I copied from a book 15 years ago! Sorry, I don’t have the time to think about you right now, I’ve got to go say hi to 9,999 other bits and blurbs. It’s going to take me a week. Bye!”
That’s what walking around my memory palace felt like.
I was just saying hello to the notes and quotes that I had collected over the years.
Alas, I don’t want to just say hello to the things in my memory palace. I want to have meaningful conversation with them, not just greet them.
I had built an “I see you” memory palace, but what I wanted was a “let’s hang out and chill” memory palace.
The Antipalace
There’s an idea that Umberto Eco came up with called the antilibrary. Those are all the books in your library you haven’t read and might never read.
I realized the memory palace I was building was a more sinister version of Eco’s antilibrary. It was an antipalace. A place for ideas I would never have the time to engage.
I had spent a lot of time building a product that was guided by a Panglossian view of what mnemonics made possible.
It wasn’t that mnemonics didn’t work. You can remember pretty much anything you want to remember. It’s easy!
You just can’t spend all the time you want with those memories.
Time is scarce, and you’ve got prioritize how you use it.
The more items in your palace, the less time you have to invest in each of those items.
In a memory palace, quantity comes at the price of quality.
My antipalace was too big to work.
So I threw it away and briefly gave up on my memory project.
Thomas Aquinas Comes To The Rescue
My salvation came in the form of Thomas Aquinas.
I discovered his approach to using mnemonics in Mary Carruther’s Book of Memory, and I realized that he had found a solution to my problem.
Thomas Aquinas was proof that mnemonics could be used in the way I wanted to use them: as a tool for contemplation and creativity.
Aquinas had a mnemonics practice that allowed him to commit the books he read to memory, then write mental notes in his mind about what he had read which he could then use when composing his own works.
In other words, he had developed a note taking system that involved not taking any physical notes. He then used his mental notes to create many of the works that would make him one of the most influential thinkers in human history.
It’s the opposite of what I had been doing prior to my experiments with mnemonics: capturing ideas and quotes randomly on paper and in files, hoping to extract their wisdom at some random point in the future.
Aquinas did that in real time, on the fly, inside his head.
There is something deeply depressing about realizing that the thousands and thousands of pages of notes I had taken over the decades were all for nought. Had I just been practicing the Aquinas method from the beginning, I would never of had to take any notes at all.
I’ve only been using the Aquinas method for the last six months or so, and it took me quite a while to get the hang of it. It’s a work in progress. However, for the first time in my life, I can say that I actually remember what I read in a way that lends itself to real mastery.
I am baffled by how powerful the Aquinas method is, and I am shocked that it isn’t a common practice. Everyone who enjoys reading should learn it.
Heck, I’m confident that in a couple decades, the Aquinas method will be well known and most serious readers will use some variation of it.
It’s just that powerful.
I look back at my reading history with horror. I don’t even consider the thousands of books I “read” before I learned the method to have even been read at all. They were just consumed.
Inventio and the Flashcard Fallacy
Scott Young, the author of Ultralearning and a variety of other self-help books, is critical of mnemonics, and there’s a sliver of merit to his arguments. He believes that flashcards are more useful than mnemonics, and he’s not entirely wrong. He’s mostly wrong, though.
Modern mnemonics generally suck since most (though not all) practitioners don’t emphasize contemplation, and contemplation is needed to harness the power of intentiones, which is the bedrock of actual memory.
I’ve mentioned intentiones in past essays, which are the automatic responses you have to images and forms. Flashcards help build a certain kind of intentiones, that knee-jerk reaction that forms between a cue (a question) and a desired response (the answer). Mnemonics, on their own, do not foster this cue-response relationship.
In order for mnemonics to elicit a desired intentio, they need to be contemplated and investigated. I often talk about “binding intentions” to forms, and the way you bind intentions is either through discovery or experience. Discovery is one of the products of contemplation.
The ancients combined the memory arts with a variety of different metacognitive tools that allowed them to investigate, explore, and contemplate the mental objects they had committed to memory.
It’s worth noting that memory was one of the five canons of rhetoric, where it was subordinate to inventio, the central canon. Mnemonics without some sort of inventio style practice is like a sandwhich without bread. Add inventio to the mix and you’ve got something you can think your teeth into.
Mnemonics have an indisputable history of powering world shaking creativity.
I think composing timeless classics using mnemonics the way Thomas Aquinas did is a lot more impressive than learning a list of foreign words with flashcards.
It’s a bit silly to fault mnemonics because of how modern mnemonists use them when there are plenty of examples of world class minds who used mnemonics to brilliant effect.
Flashcards will not help you compose the Catena Aurea or The Republic or the Nicomachean Ethics, all of which were composed by people who had highly trained and disciplined memories.
Here’s a quote from Mary Carruther’s book of memory on Aristotle’s version of memory palaces:
“Aristotle did indeed think of his topoi as structured regions of the mind where arguments, either general or subject-particular, were stored. He advises students in his Topica (163b, a passage evidently known to Cicero) to memorize these by number, for then they will be able to take a quick and sure mental look at them (the verb he uses is blepein) when composing their own discourse.”
Composing discourses from memory!
Good luck doing that with flashcards.
Now of course, if you make the mistake of building an antipalace, you won’t have anything to show for it. An antipalace is a memory palace that’s never consulted, and at that point, you’re better off using flashcards. However, if you build a palace that you actually use, similar to how Aristotle or Aquinas would have used it, that palace will be significantly more valuable than a deck of flashcards.
Putting it all together
Don’t repeat my mistakes. Memory palaces are awesome if you build them right.
Here are a few simple rules for building a memory palace that you might actually use:
1. Don’t try to memorize everything: Prioritize what you want learn. Pace yourself. Respect your limits, and make sure you don’t take on more than you can actually do.
2. Prioritize contemplation over memorization: Aim for a 1/10/89 split, where you spend 1% of your time memorizing, 10% of your time reading, and 89% of your time thinking about what you memorized. The majority of the time you spend with mnemonics shouldn’t be in the “committing to memory” phase or the reading phase, but in the “sit, think, and apply” phase.
3. Curate your memories: You don’t have all the time in the world, so if you are going to memorize something, it should be something you care about. You want to build a palace full of things you not only want to spend time with, but which you want to engage with on a regular basis.
4. Realize that it’s okay to forget: You don’t have to keep growing your memory palace. You can (and should) get rid of items in it that no longer “spark joy”, as Marie Kondo would say. Since memorizing things is easy once you know how to do it, forgetting things isn’t a big deal. You can always revisit what you forget or put to pasture. Don’t bother keeping things in your palace that you aren’t using. Time is the most valuable thing you have, and the items in your palace should be things you want to continue investing your time in. If you’re not feeling that, let it go.
5. For the love of all things holy, THINK. In classical rhetoric, memory was one of five canons. It was a small part of a greater whole. Inventio took pride of place. You’re only going to get value out of your palace if you use it to discover, explore, and invent. Stuffing facts in your head without thinking about them is a waste of time.