Spatiality, that's it. It really seems to make a tremendous difference for me to know where something is written down, and sometimes even remembering doing it. I always felt that doing it on a computer was indeed too abstract, losing that spatiality.

I also agree with the audiobook thing. For example, I recently thought back to a passage in an audiobook I enjoyed... and my mind instantly visualized how I was standing in front of the washing machine, doing laundry, while I listened to it.

A weird thing though is that some concepts and topics in my mind bring up images of locations that have nothing to do with the topic itself, and as far as I can tell don't match up in time. For example, one recent rather abstract concept is associated with the parking lot of my old school seen from a certain angle--many many years earlier.

I imagine that in those cases I might have been thinking about both the old school and the abstract concept at somewhat the same time, and they got associated from then on.

I wish I could find the reference, there's an old Roman (Greek? likely older?) rhetorical trick to public speaking.

The speech flows as you invite people to your home, and walk them through it. So, the front door is like the greeting, welcoming guests into your home. The picture in the front room is the first point, the couch is the next point. the dining room table is the next point. etc.

practice the speech by looking at each item you select, and mapping it to the point.

It's pretty amazing.

Everyone knows what their living space is like, and hopefully it's a safe comfortable space. Anyone can talk for a long time without notes. The memory of home is emotionally calming. Inviting listeners in gives a warmth that's hard to explain.

I mean, rehearsing helps a lot too, but mapping talking points to objects in the home is an amazing trick.

Documented in The Art of Memory by Frances Yates

https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Art_Of_Memory.ht...

Yates' book is a scholarly treatment of memory systems. She is an historian who waded into the subject matter, but isn't a mnemonic practitioner. For a practical treatment, see Memory Craft by the science writer and memory champion, Lynne Kelly.

https://www.booktopia.com.au/memory-craft-lynne-kelly/book/9...

I have heard the trick commonly referred to as 'memory palace' or 'method of loci'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

I understand this is the origin for: "In the first place".

A pretty cool technique, I just used this to coach my son for an english oral to great effect.

An interesting theory as to why spatiality helps so much is outlined in Jeff Hawkins' "1000 brain theory" (https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Brains-New-Theory-Intelligen...). His team's research hints that all neocortical processing happens with reference frames at the core.

I get that weird concept/location thing too, and I usually can't figure out the association.

For example, when I hear "Turbo Pascal" I immediately see the intersection of Lawrence Ave. East and Pharmacy Avenue in Toronto from the perspective of a person standing at the northwest corner of the intersection, looking south. I don't think I've ever been there on foot. It's a pretty unspectacular intersection. I'm quite sure I like Turbo Pascal significantly more than I like the intersection, and yet my brain has decided to link them.

Though I think it's an even more general mechanism of association. And places might also be easy to remember because they also contain many elements we can associate. You can call it the connectedness of a memory. You can also try to repeatedly explain to others something you want to remember or whatever.

Could be, but to me it seems our brains are optimized a lot for operating in the spatio(temporal) world, and so spatial connections in particular seem to fit the wiring of our brains particularly well.

You're probably on to something there. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution for finding food and avoiding predators. At best: a few thousand for managing linguistic skills. (or possibly hundreds of thousands, when it comes to our ancestor's pre-linguistic abilities).

IIRC research in mice has even found grid neurons that are specifically firing for spatial locations, beyond just mere association.

Would love to check that paper, if you find the link.

It most likely would've been on arstechnica.com/science, which usually has links to original papers.

The seemingly “disconnection” between the concept and spatial memory happens to me a lot either in day time or dream. Most of the scenes occurred in my childhood, and I feel my emotions, i.e. happiness, somber, anger, are associated with them, which pop up when those feelings struck.

I suspect that this effect has something to do with why I can search a book faster for some non-indexed thing I've previously read in it if it is a physical book than I can if it is an ebook.

The physical book is 3D. As I progress through the book the stack of pages on my left grows and the stack on my right shrinks, giving a sense of moving through something physical. And as I alternate pages I'm first looking to one side than the other.

And so when I'm later wanting to look up something, my memory of that thing has associated with it a memory of the feel of the book at that point and what side I was looking at, and that gives me a sense of where to start looking.

I find I can sometimes remember whether the content I'm after was on the left or right page of the open book, which halves the area to scan, but has no impact on the number of page-turns needed.

i wonder how much of this could be fixed or improved on by changing how the UI works. like when reading a book and having the progress bar always visible and more prominent than usual? or having a visual que of the stack of pages on the left and right growing and shrinking.

that sort of thing goes against a lot of the ultra minimal design choices we use these days where everything had to be hidden, but maybe people in the future will be able to figure about better ways of dealing with this once the exact science is known

During the pandemic, I have been listening to audiobooks while I’m programming. I don’t really listen to the content, it just makes me feel less lonely.

But what I’ve found is that I end up associating code I’m writing to the audiobook I’m listening to at the time. Later on, when I work on that bit of code again, I replay the audiobook I was listening to when I wrote it, and it helps me remember how that code works.

Very interesting! In college, I strongly experienced the phenomena of taking a test and not being able to remember the exact content, but could accurately remember the layout of the page that the data was on.

I also got into the habit of creating 1 or 2 page cheat sheets for tests, whether I could use them in the test or not, and the spatial organization of the data seemed to correlate very directly with my ability to process and absorb the data.

I had a similar experience in high school with Spanish vocabulary tests. I could remember where the word was on the page, but not the translation.

At the time I perceived using the location as a crutch, so I made photocopies of the pages, cut them into the separate columns, then taped them together to make one very long and skinny list of words. I would then roll it up into a small scroll, little bigger than a tube of chapstick. Maybe the spatial location was a learning aid, and this actually made it harder to learn words, but it did make it much easier to discreetly study during other classes, so it was probably a net win overall.

Really interesting to hear others had this experience as well. During tests, I would routinely see an image of sorts of the page in my head, with the words or equations I needed blurred out.

Now that I think about, no clue why I assumed that was unique to me.

Yeah - I do this too, and I also find that for learning new programming tasks, if I make my own cheat-sheet, I remember the content well enough that I don't actually need to use it that much. But when it comes to using someone else's cheat-sheet, I have a hard time remembering and I have to constantly refer back.

Yes! Same thing for me. I’m a bit dyslexic so reading things never goes well. But I could always remember where on the page the equations were in the textbooks. So during a test, I’d picture the equations and where they were and the write them down so that I could use them.

Thanks! Interesting observation about the layout!

Indeed, I also feel my most effective notes are the ones where I get a little creative with the layout, placing things out thoughtfully.

(Also, going back and filling in with a lot of balloons with thoughts afterwards etc, to make each page a little customized).

I read the game of thrones novels ages ago in pulp paperback and tried to read the fifth one as an ebook and I simply could not keep track of the various character story lines, names, etc. that I had no problem with while reading the physical books.

I'm very sure that just remembering how much of the book was in my left hand and how much in the right was extremely valuable in helping me remember - basically having an additional dimension recorded in my memory made it much easier.

> I figured I can actually remember the exact place along my running route in a nearby forest that I was listening to a particular passage in the book - and vice versa

I've experienced the same thing. I sometimes relisten to podcasts and specific lines in the podcast bring back the place where I was physically when I heard the line for the first time. Like "Oh I was walking down this part of that street around 7pm 2 years ago when I heard this for the first time". I don't think that I have experienced it in reverse though.

That's pretty cool actually, I don't visualize things much and I've only experienced it in the reverse direction, and another commenter above mentioned something similar. Do you feel you are more likely to visualize or internally verbalize things (or perhaps both are relatively balanced)?

I can't visualise at all and I don't know if that's aphantasia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia) or that I perceive things in the same way as most people but we use different words to describe what is happening.

I have aphantasia (i.e. no visual imagination). It hadn't occurred to me that people could use theirs to help them memorize things...

I have very little visual imagination and have experienced the audiobook/running thing a lot, but only in one direction. Running by the same place will often make me think of something I heard there, but thinking about something I heard doesn't bring back the place.

I think I have aphantasia to some degree and have experienced what the OP is mentioning. Also handwriting is a good aid for me to remember things, particularly if it is written by hand. I don't need to review the notes but the act of putting it down sticks a bit better. I will also have to add that my memory is better at concepts and abstract things but not so good at details.

The handwriting thing makes sense, since I don't think aphantasia necessarily affects motor memory. Drawing/writing by hand could actually be more important for people with aphantasia in that case, since it could provide a motor memory that directly corresponds to something visual.

Also I think at the core of the "visualizing things in different parts of space" memory trick is just making good associations. If you're much better at verbal/internal monologue type of thinking you could still do something pretty similar, by mapping the things to memorize into a story.

Granted certain things are easier to map to a visual space than to language, but that's true in the other direction too. Anecdotally it takes a lot of effort for me to visualize things and I barely do it naturally, but I seem to have a much stronger internal monologue and a better memory for things people say than most of my friends. I wouldn't be surprised if poor visualizing abilities during development could strengthen verbal reasoning a bit like how blind people have other senses heightened.

I really hope research into aphantasia will become more commonplace, but a lot of it is speculation for now unfortunately.

Yeah, I am familiar with this technique, and have tried using it in the past (as my "spatial" memory is very good, despite a total lack of visual imagination), but I've never been successful.

Interesting, how do you experience spatial memories? Is it somehow encoded verbally, or via somatosensation? Or does it feel completely subconscious, like a Pavlovian reaction? Or something else?

I am bad at visualizing things from what I can subjectively tell, but as far as memory is concerned it's mainly the spatial memory tests where I perform poorly. So it's hard for me to imagine what recalling spatial memories is like, besides the assumption that people can probably visualize them.

It's kind of (but not exactly) like proprioception. Close your eyes and hold your hand out. Even without visualing (because we can't...), you know "where" it is. It feels a lot like that. I just have a good sense of where things are relative to me and each other.

I recall hearing about one contestants strategy for recalling the most digits of pi using this technique. He said he'd imagine a room with many objects in it. He'd assign 100 digits on the light switch, 100 digits on the top drawer, then the next drawer, and so on until reciting was just a matter of walking around the room in his mind and reading off the numbers from the objects in the correct order.

This is the reason why it drives me nuts when Apple Book randomly chooses to shift the content of the pages of the eBook. Content that was on odd page number starts appearing on even page number. This is also the reason why I never change the font size.

(Please let me know if there is a way to disable this.)

Another memorisation aid I accidentally observed was with using different pens/inks for note taking.

I started taking an minor interest in different pens at some point, and have about a dozen pens I switch between (a mix of cheap fountain pens and rollerballs mostly).

I found that I started remembering which pen or which colour ink I wrote certain things with, it seemed to add yet another memory link to whatever I was writing.

One outcome of that is vicious hier(5) wars - everyone has a particular hierarchy of folders that "makes obvious sense" to them, mostly I suspect because of spatiality.

It would be like someone moving the rooms in your house.

I've been noticing this over last few years too. Replying a podcast and I recall where I was at certain bits.

Perhaps the trick is notebooks with little images in the margin