Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Yeah, but I’m serious though that these kinds of weird association is now I’m building a richer network. One of the things that I find is you can have somebody’s name that’s just totally generic like John Smith or something, no offense to people with that name, if I see a generic name like that, but I’ve read John Smith’s papers academically and then I meet John Smith at a conference, I can immediately associate that name with that face ’cause I have this pre-existing network to lock everything in to. You can build that network, and that’s what the method of loci or the Memory Palace technique is all about is you have a pre-existing structure in your head of your childhood home or this mental palace that you’ve created for yourself. So now you can put arbitrary pieces of information in different locations in that mental structure of yours and then you can walk through the different path and find all the pieces of information you’re looking for. The method of loci is a great method for just learning arbitrary things because it allows you to link them together and get that cue that you need to pop in and find everything. We should maybe linger on this Memory Palace thing just to make it obvious, ’cause when people were describing to me a while ago what this is, it seems insane. You literally think of a place like a childhood home or a home that you’re really visually familiar with and you literally place in that three-dimensional space facts or people or whatever you want to remember, and you just walk in your mind along that place visually and you can remember, remind yourself of the different things. One of the limitations is there is a sequence to it. You can’t just go upstairs right away or something. You have to walk along the room. It’s really great for remembering sequences, but it’s also not great for remembering individual facts out of context. The full context of the tour, I think, is important, but it’s fascinating how the mind is able to do that. When you ground these pieces of knowledge into something that you remember well already, especially visually, it’s fascinating. I think you do that for any kind of sequence. I’m sure she used something like this for the Ikea catalog, something of this nature. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think the principle here is, again, I was telling you this idea that memories can compete with each other. Well, I like to use this example, and maybe someday I’ll regret this, but I’ve used it a lot recently. Imagine if this were my desk, it could be cluttered with a zillion different things. Imagine it’s just cluttered with a whole bunch of yellow Post-it notes and on one of them I put my bank password on it. Well, it’s going to take me forever to find it. It’s just going to be buried under all these other Post-it notes. If it’s hot pink, it’s going to stand out and I find it really easily. That’s one way in which if things are distinctive, if you’ve processed information in a very distinctive way, then you can have a memory that’s going to last. That’s very good, for instance, for name/face associations. If I get something distinctive about you that’s it like you’ve got a very short hair, and maybe I can make the association with Lex Luthor that way or something like that. If I get something very specific, that’s a great cue. But the other part of it is what if I just organized my notes so that I have my finances in one pile and I have my reminders, my to-do list in one pile and so forth so I organize them. Well, then, I know exactly if I’m going for my bank password, I could go to the finance pile. The method of loci works or Memory Palaces work because they give you a way of organizing. There’s a school of thought that says that episodic memory evolved from this knowledge of space and basically there’s primitive abilities to figure out where you are, and so people explain the method of loci that way. Whether or not the evolutionary argument is true, the method of loci is not at all special. If you’re not a good visualizer, stories are a good one. So a lot of memory athletes will use stories and they’ll go, like if you’re memorizing a deck of cards, they have a little code for the different, the King and the Jack and the 10 and so forth. They’ll make up a story about things that they’re doing and that’ll work. Songs are a great one. I can still remember there’s this obscure episode of the TV show Cheers. They song about Albania that he uses to memorize all these facts about Albania. I could still sing that song to you as just as I saw it on the TV show.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.