I've read before that the key to memorizing stuff is to set up a sort of mind-palace to sort items as objects into rooms. I had accepted this as true, but it always sounded like a lot of manual thought to set up the "objects" in the "rooms," so I figured I'd never experienced it first-hand before.
I memorize layouts of grocery stores by thinking of a model of a grocery store in my head and the items go in their respective aisles, but it's not like I'm intentionally mapping long lists of non-grocery-store items into those places to help remember them. Is it a "mind palace" if all you're using it for is remembering the stuff that goes in the "palace" in real life?
Recently there was this fascinating [line of posts] (https://cohost.org/blep/post/262875-for-me-i-notice-ther) about hyperphantasia and after writing out the rest of this post below, I realized that the method I'm recommending may be heavily reliant on the way my brain works for storing and recalling information. If you can't picture a map from a game in your head, I do not know if this post will be helpful. Maybe there are parts of it that can be applicable in other ways? I'm not sure.
Continuing on: if you enjoy rote-memorization games like those found on sporcle, or if you're someone who ever memorized the Pokémon rap, you've likely thought about trying to recall all 151 original Pokémon from the first generation at some point. It's an especially difficult challenge to complete because there's 151 unique items, and even if you don't have to think about spelling the names correctly (exeggcute or eggxecute?) the anomia that sets in from trying to fire each of those connections in your brain makes things difficult, I've found. Try it out, if you want:
Today I realized what I think is the "real benefit" of mind palaces: that you can reduce the search space from a big set, where it's more difficult to remember each item, into a smaller set that's easier to remember. The key to this is that the mapping of connections from small set to big set must all be strong (i.e. automatic) enough that remembering any member of the small set helps you remember every member of the big one.
Alright, that's a lot of words and little in terms of examples. Suppose you want to remember 151 Pokémon. If you grew up playing Pokémon Red/Blue or Fire Red/Leaf Green, you may remember this map:
If not, or if you find it kind of hard to resolve the distinct landmarks, then here's the in-game map that's a bit simpler:
Each town is a node of a graph whose edges represent the routes that connect the towns together. Pokémon can be caught or obtained in most towns and routes in a variety (but fairly small set) of ways: tall grass, caves fishing, trading, gifts, certain indoor areas, buying, surfing, or cloning from fossils. I think that's it in gen 1? Pretty close, at least. If you can remember this set of 8 and the map itself, both of which the games themselves encourage, I find the act of recalling specific Pokémon in those areas to be much easier than just getting all 151 of them from nothing. It's easier for me to remember that there's the caterpie evo line, the weedle evo line, and pikachu in the grass in the Viridian forest than it is to remember that each of those Pokémon and their evolutions exist as Pokedex entries, as an example.
There are something like 20ish towns/caves/places of interest, about 20ish more routes connecting them, and about 8ish methods of encountering a Pokémon that's obtainable in any of those places. Remembering these 48ish things and relying on my brain to make the connections from those to the Pokémon - especially to remember evolutionary lines given one Pokémon from them - helps a ton in being able to recall all 151, since I've cut the things I have to manually remember down by a factor of about 3x, and a lot of it feels free with the map.
I'd be really interested to hear if you're familiar with this sort of thing and if you've ever thought about it this way with mathematical set mappings? If you're into Pokémon, did using this method lead to better results for you? Does all of this rely on a sort of hyperphantasia to be useful at all?