onan_pulled_out

In discussions I hear lots of biologists talk about, “All life that we know of is life based on DNA, except for minor exceptions ….” What are those exceptions, and are they interesting?

Thanks Ed. So if you were learning a new topic, for example a period of history etc, one stage of your learning would be getting the memory palace together?

Have you got any suggestions/resources on building memory palaces. Google maps, any computer games etc, or would you visit somewhere and spend the day getting a palace together?

Also if you were having multiple lectures and not taking notes would you suggest multiple memory palaces? Very resource intensive :)

EDIT: I remember stumbling across this in Richard Feynman's "Surely You are Joking Mr Feynman" "Altered States" that always interested me and is pertinent to this discussion:

"When I went into the tank that week, and had my hallucination, I tried to think of very early memories. I kept saying to myself, “It’s gotta be earlier; it’s gotta be earlier”—I was never satisfied that the memories were early enough. When I got a very early memory—let’s say from my home town of Far Rockaway—then immediately would come a whole sequence of memories, all from the town of Far Rockaway. If I then would think of something from another city—Cedarhurst, or something—then a whole lot of stuff that was associated with Cedarhurst would come. And so I realized that things are stored according to the location where you had the experience. I felt pretty good about this discovery, and came out of the tank, had a shower, got dressed, and so forth, and started driving to Hughes Aircraft to give my weekly lecture. It was therefore about forty-five minutes after I came out of the tank that I suddenly realized for the first time that I hadn’t the slightest idea of how memories are stored in the brain; all I had was a hallucination as to how memories are stored in the brain! What I had “discovered” had nothing to do with the way memories are stored in the brain; it had to do with the way I was playing games with myself. In our numerous discussions about hallucinations on my earlier visits, I had been trying to explain to Lilly and others that the imagination that things are real does not represent true reality. If you see golden globes, or something, several times, and they talk to you during your hallucination and tell you they are another intelligence, it doesn’t mean they’re another intelligence; it just means that you have had this particular hallucination. So here I had this tremendous feeling of discovering how memories are stored, and it’s surprising that it took forty-five minutes before I realized the error that I had been trying to explain to everyone else."

How close he was!!!

Hi Ed I have been using memory techniques for a few years and love it. Dominic O'brien, you, harry lorayne, mary carruthers etc have all been authors I owe a great debt to. One thing I have encountered is that things learnt via the method of loci are stranded there, that is they are not "recallable" without the loci. I always read that, eventually the memories will become natural, automatic and the loci will no longer be required. Have you found this problem, and/or how do you overcome it? Transferring things learnt via loci into your natural associative memory.

Using your memorising a talk/lecture example how would you transfer that to your natural associative memory? So you could use the journey for another talk?

Hope the question makes sense hard to type on my phone