From way back when, I've been interested in mnemonics. I've been developing what we geeks like to call "in opinionated framework" meaning it comes with an initial set of defaults such as a practiced developer might have implemented over time.
In my case, given my druthers, that means diagrams more than lists, and so on. Spatially geometric structures are made manifest, but then dollhouses and castles (memory palaces of old) are likewise spatio-geometric. My preferences and biases need not be foregrounded as somehow contrarian, when it comes to the ancient disciplines of memory management. My aesthetics are consistent in many dimensions (I would claim).
Those who dump on "reflex conditioning" must not play a musical instrument, or be creative in any skilled way. Why they say (whether correctly or not) that it takes ten thousand hours to master a discipline, is because it takes that long to hard wire the brain, and yes, I'm fine with reading brain stuff metaphorically, even when there's a literal truth component.
There's a slower, more tentative mode, called learning, that even great maestros partake of. When I shared Python programming with a tiny team of Hubble savants (as in space telescope), I had people of enormous gifts who seemed all thumbs when it came to keyboarding. That's how it is.
Specialization has not been the problem. However over-specialization means losing a center, having only extremists, only freaks. Without a glue of polymathy, a kind of semi-paralysis sets in. Such was the critique in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, one of Buckminster Fuller's best known books.
Suppose you're in the humanities, a reader of Borges, you've tackled Infinite Jest a few times, and love Love's Body. You want to preserve some level of fluency when it comes to reading the sciences and the maths. You want an illumined right brain (remember, metaphoric OK) when doing so. You have a good imagination and don't want it to stumble in what, in principle, is highly visual territory.
Your obstacle is likely the machinery of whatever coordinate system and all the differential equations used to show the next tock tik. Given now, what's next? This depends on rates of change. There's a perpetual "falling" going on, called the conservation of energy with momentum a big part of that, i.e. inertia. Nothing turns on a dime unless it's small and nimble, and nothing just stops, period. Not without its cause. Not without so-called "forces" and/or "influences" and/or "contributing factors" (the vectors of change).
So one aspect of mnemonics is harnessing this momentum and using it to one's advantage, which might mean taking aspects of one's immediate environment and imbuing them with memory palace type attributes.
Start with your own locale.
Weave your memories and sensibilities into where you live.
Why that maybe sounds like strange advice is we do this unconsciously anyway and don't need anyone telling us to do this. However the memory palace discipline is about extending our unconscious abilities into consciousness, itself a teaching in harnessing momentum. Do what you do anyway, just more consciously. Awaken your inner interested observer.
What staves off taking this more concerted "place based" weaving exercise are fears and superstitions about interacting with a private text to the point of deviating too significantly from established dogmas, faiths, practices. If you read too much into your local private experience, don't you run the serious risk of becoming a weirdo, which comes at a price, such as (maybe) being ostracized or even confined?
However, the psychological sciences, designed for conscious application, are precisely the controls we have in place to keep the show on the road, meaning operable and functional (well adjusted).
We as dream weavers (practitioners of the pragmatic art of memory management) remain collaborative and cooperative by nature, without much coaxing or cajoling. We're spontaneously contributing members of society. We want to build worlds together, and understand that it takes a village.
Lets take an example. I want you, as a Borges reader, a James Joyce friend, cognizant of Ezra Pound cantos and so on, to have access to my hypertoons, featuring fast and slow dissolves among geometrical (i.e. spatial) topics, many involving spheres.
We might have spheres in an astronomical context, as in cosmology (e.g. Hubble), or we might have spheres integrated within a coordinate system, such as XYZ or the CCP, a grid, a lattice.
We in the humanities embrace the lattice concept, without relinquishing it to STEM. We might call it a Matrix (emphasizing its pro-generative nature).
To that end, towards the ball-packing lattice, I introduce triangular and tetrahedral numbers, meaning stackings of idealized fruits in the market, pyramiding in two ways: with a square base, and with a triangular base.
We will discuss these features, and then point out how these options unify, as both square based and triangular based are patterns within the same CCP or FCC. Through the Buckminster Fuller vocabulary, we also get the IVM, which he patented briefly.
Once we've made it over the C.P. Snow chasm, from the humanities (PATH) into the sciences (STEAM), via the ball packing bridge, we're ready to reintroduce the polyhedrons, which resonate throughout the arts. We accomplish this with another mnemonic construct, the concentric nesting of a primitive set, which includes the Platonics, taking the dual (a unary operation) and their first generation "begets".
Combine a polyhedron with its own dual by criss-crossing edges, to beget a beget.
Those of you who've been our students or share the same lineage, are already high familiar with these well-trodden paths. I'm preaching to the mainstream, once we narrow that to mean "the choir". We also slap on some volume numbers, associated with relative size.
But in so doing, we're diverging from some mnemonic systems already in place. Which need not be a problem. Bifurcation, or forking, is not inherently a threat to anyone, but a smart investment. We have the old ways of remembering, in addition. No either / or calculus need step in. We're fine with co-existence.
