The Journey Technique for Memorization: how does it work?

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I'm not sure where to post this question. It could go in the school & college section, or in the games section, but I'm putting it in the science section because it relates to the science of memory, psychology and neuroscience.

My question is about how the Journey Technique for Memorization works in practice. Has anyone tried it, and how did they use it?

The idea behind the Journey Technique is that it is easier to remember rather random bits of information (e.g., the digits of pi, or the order of playing cards in a deck), if you can create a story out of them by relating them to a familiar journey (which is already burned into your long-term memory).

The problem I have with this is that when I see the technique described, the stories that are created seem so arbitrary that remembering them is in effect (I believe) no easier than remembering the information without the story attached to it.

I can give a very simple example to illustrate what I'm talking about.

Say you want to memorize the first six digits of pi, 3.14159.
And to help you with this, you apply the digits to your journey to work, where every morning you walk past (in this order) a butchers, a bakers, a cheese shop, a florist, a running shop and a menswear shop.

So the story you create might go like this...

I walked past the butchers and in the window I saw THREE legs of pork.
Then I walked past the bakers and in the window I saw ONE loaf of bread.
Then I walked past the cheese shop and in the window I saw FOUR slabs of cheese.
Then I walked past the florist and in the window I saw ONE bunch of flowers.
Then I walked past a running shop and in the window I saw FIVE pairs of sneakers.
Then I walked past the menswear shop and in the window I saw NINE suits.

Ok, I know the stories you create are supposed to be more interesting than this, but I believe my point still stands, i.e., that such stories are no easier to remember than the original information itself. What am I missing?

PS - perhaps such memory techniques are unnecessary for some people on the spectrum who have savant-like skills for this sort of thing, but I'm not one of those people.

What you are calling the “Journey Technique for Memorization” is a variation on the Method of Loci also known as the memory palace.
What makes it work is that you are actually using different parts of your brain, parts that are very good at remembering many things in long term memory and parts that aren’t usually used in traditional study techniques. Picturing places like the butcher shop and things like loves of bread are engaging your visual memory in ways normal studying would not. Similarly the journey associates these things in a specific order by using the parts of your brain that remember where you have been and how to get back home. This can be seen in brain scans of experts in the techniques. Also the complexity, the extra information, gives your brain associations and this engages the associative memory functions. You might forget the loves of bread but then remember the baker, you might then by association remember the loves of bread. The other thing to understand is how these techniques work in practice. The part of town with the butcher and the baker is made up of locations (also called loci). Each location is a place to store or remember a “chunk” of memory as an image. Your journey uses this part of town as a place or “palace” which is a collection of loci. You could also use your home town, the house where you live now, the house where you grew up, your favorite museum or places you have only seen in books or magazines. One memory expert used homes from Architectural Digest. Another made up several houses with similar layouts but with very different architectural styles. One guy used his home and his favorite pub and the places he walked past to get from one to another. One book recomended using the parts of your own body. Another drawing a “mind map” with lines connecting colorful drawings of each “chunk” to remember as a visual image or icon.

What all these have in common is that they all use some kind of loci with the palace and journey giving order and structure. Memory chunks can be placed in each loci and recalled in order by repeating the original journey in your mind’s eye.

All of them use the visual and geographical memory parts of the brain.

The part that is often not discussed is how memory expert’s practice. The purpose of the practice is to become very very familiar with the palace and the journey and the loci. This form a firm memory that other things can be associated with.

So first you memorize the palace (or pub crawl or walk past the butcher, baker, etc) the later you can associate images with the well known loci.

Two related techniques are PAO and the Major System. These are both systems for associating images with more abstract information like digits or playing cards designations. Both of them allow more than one idea or atom of information unto one chunk.
Again first you practice with the associations then later apply them. The Major System associates one or more letters with each digit and then digits (now letters) combine to make words so you get more than one digit per word, and one word can be one image. With PAO you create a list of 100 Persons, 100 Actions and 100 Objects. Each Person, or Action or Object is associated with two digits (change 100 to 52 if you want to memorize cards). You memorize the association of letters to digits and digits to letters for the major system, and the PAO to digit pairs for the PAO system. Practice practice practice. Then when yoy need to memorize pi (or a license plate number or a form number for work) you use the previous memorized associations to quickly place images at loci in your memory palace. For Major system you get about 3 digits per loci image and for PAO 6 digits per loci image. More than one digit per image is “efficient chunking”

With enough practice people can memorize several decks of shuffled cards or 100 digits of pi very quickly. It also works with phone numbers. It can be modified to memorize poetry, foreign languages, faces, and images. Some people extend PAO to memories binary digits, and binary digits to represent braille, and braille to memorize mathematical and chemical formulas.

It all comes down associative memory, image memory, geographic memory and practice practice practice. It works because it uses parts of your brain that other techniques don’t use.

Google “memory palace”, “method of loci” and “pao memory” and “major system mnemonic” for more information. There is a web site called “art of memory” with forums. There is a book of the same name. Also worth reading “Moonwalking with Einstein”.
Also search YouTube for the names ed cook, josh foer, and tony buzan. And google the Ankimobile app.

The Journey Technique doesn't look as if it would help my memory either, for the same kind of reason - it's the same list of seemingly arbitrary things wrapped up into some daft and unlikely story which isn't ultimately any easier to remember than the original set of raw data.

I once tried to use a somewhat similar published memory method that had me associating numbers with words: 1=sun, 2=shoe, 3=tree, etc. - the idea was that I'd be able to easily remember a shopping list as follows - if item #1 was butter, I'd form a vivid picture in my mind of the sun (1) shining on a pack of butter and melting it. The author said that I'd also be able to remember strings of numbers as follows: for the number 312, I'd picture a tree with the sun shining on it and then the sunlight would reveal a shoe hanging from the tree. The principle behind the whole method was supposed to be that pictures are recalled much more easily than numbers. It worked fairly well for the first few items I tried to memorise, but after that my mind began to balk at trying to picture loads of somewhat similar combinations of shoes, trees, etc., and even when I managed to picture them, I quickly became unable to discriminate between the picture that was appropriate to the required recall and all the other pictures I'd been creating in my mind for other memory tasks.

I still have trouble remembering things, especially numbers and other bits of data that mean little or nothing to me emotionally. I've heard it said that learning is an emotional process and so it's quite normal to be unable to remember things that you don't care about on an emotional level (maybe those legendary "savant" Aspies who can recall long strings of digits are able to do so because numbers fascinate them - but I'm not like that, I have trouble remembering my own zip code). I do notice that when I can't remember a thing, it's often because I paid it only fleeting attention, so sometimes I've been able to go back and just look at the thing more carefully, and that's been quite helpful.

As a music performer, one thing I often need to do is to memorise song lyrics. I seem to do that mostly by some kind of "muscle memory" rather than any conscious, cognitive process. So I learn the lyrics by simply attempting to sing the song, at first with the lyrics written out in front of me, and then gradually looking away from the page more and more until by some strange process I manage to sing it correctly without looking at the page at all.

As for my zip code, my way of remembering it these days is based on the fact that for some reason I can remember my 3-digit coat peg number from my early school days. By a happy coincidence, those 3 digits are also the central part of my zip code, in the same order, so I only have to add a digit to the beginning and another digit to the end, and there's my postcode. How I remember those 2 extra digits, I don't know, but I seem to get them right every time, albeit often with a feeling of uncertainty. I guess it's just a matter of training the brain - just as we can form a physical habit by doing the same thing with our muscles several times, so we can form a mental habit by doing the same thing with our brain several times. I can remember my bank card PIN number quite well because I use it often, and when I haven't used it for months, I have to look it up.

I'm interested in the Anki software that somebody mentioned above:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anki_(software)
https://docs.ankiweb.net/#/

The principle behind the method seems pretty sound to me - learning is all about associating a trigger with a required response, and if you perform that association at the right times after being told what the association is, you should be able to optimise the use of your time for committing things to memory. The software claims to do that by the use of carefully-timed flashcards. I've had the download for a couple of years, but haven't tried installing and using it yet, probably because I've been free of any great need to rote learn great piles of material since about 1977 when I finally managed to escape from college courses. I never did understand why the modern world expects so much rote learning from kids and young adults. It's always seemed a very unnatural thing to me.

Ed Cooke, Joshua Foer, Tony Buzan

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

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mag ... _Minus_Two

https://artofmemory.com/wiki/PAO_System_Examples/

https://forums.ankiweb.net/c/ankimobile/10

https://artofmemory.com/blog/list-of-memory-techniques/

https://docs.ankimobile.net

https://docs.ankiweb.net

https://medium.com/self-learning-resour ... f2339d94ec

(Sorry, infodumping)

Fenn & ToughDiamond, thanks those detailed responses.

@Fenn, thanks for the explanation. I can appreciate why the journey itself and the locations in it are relatively easy to remember, but I still don't understand how the journey in my example helps with remembering the digits of pi.

Say I remember the journey perfectly, and I can always remember that the first point on the journey is a butchers, and that there are legs of pork in the window.

How do I remember that there are three legs of pork in the window, and not one, two, four or five etc?
And how is this any easier than simply remembering that the first digit of pi is three?

If the answer just boils down to stating that remembering an image of "three legs of pork" is easier to remember than the remembering the number three (because it employs visual memory, as you say) then fair enough. Stories like this still seem too arbitrary to me.

(Maybe it would be easier to remember if I linked the THREE legs of pork to the THREE little pigs from the nursery rhyme.)

I think I've tried the Major System before, and (unlike with the Journey System) I can actually see how that might work, although I gave up on it pretty fast.

I just tried installing and running Anki. It works, though it wasn't intuitively obvious to me how to use it. I tried downloading a couple of "decks" of flashcards. They kind of work, but I'm still struggling to figure out how to switch between different decks and different sections of a given deck. I was also stumped to find that the software only showed 20 flashcards per session, but it seems that's a default setting. It wasn't easy to find that setting - it seems there's more than one set of settings. There's a "getting started" section in the guide, but the first thing there seems to be a list of basic concepts to learn about, so it's not exactly a quick-start guide. It's probably going to take some time and effort to learn how to use the program very well.

The decks I downloaded were for learning French. One thing I noticed was that I was poor at remembering the answers to the questions. I don't think it was the fault of the cards or the program, I suspect that older people just have more trouble learning languages than young people do. I only seem to be good at learning when the information makes sense to me and / or "maps onto" what I already know, so I can't easily learn facts that are only facts for some arbitrary reason. I also think that it's easier to learn by doing than by just passively observing.

I think the memory palace system works only if you can actually picture something in your mind. I can’t. My mind’s eye is blank.

A related skill I can do is construct a story based on what I see as I am traveling through an area like a forest. It keeps one from getting lost. My understanding is this technique is used by aboriginal people.

That's logical, but wrong. The memory palace does work without the ability to see images in the mind's eye as counter-intuitive as that may seem.

The ability to see the item is not a requirement, it's the concept of the thing and the effort made to connect to it that's important. It works just as well if you use words or other senses to describe the item. The only real non-negotiable is that there does need to be some sort of an order to it.

That being said, this does move it dangerously close to the peg system or something tied to abstract concepts though. Not that it's a particularly important distinction.

^ if you can remember real places you can try constructing a physical memory palace/journey. Pick teal things in your basement or thrift store or dollar-store (any place inexpensive). Each thing represents something you want to remember. Place these real things in real locations along ythe journey/ along a path in your house (could be outside like geo-caching). Keep repeating the real journey until you remember the journey and all the stuff.

You can also do it on paper with pictures of stuff. Like a collage. This is the idea behind mind maps.

For OP: there is a youtube video of Josh Foer memorizing 100 digits of pi with a memory palace and the Major System.

● Josh Foer video memorizes pi

This quick video uses a doll house to represent a memory palace and shows how the Major System can be used to memorize numbers using mental pictures of words.

More details at the other links I posted previously.

Josh was the winner of the United States Memory Olympics and has published a book on his experiences.

This page describes how to use PAO in place of the Major System:

● artofmemory.com - Blog - PAO (Person-Action-Object) System