Today I’m having a go at a technique called image streaming . If practised regularly, it’s supposed to increase your IQ and improve your creativity. After I’d let the experience settle, I had some insights : I’ve put these below the video.
Watch me try image streaming here :
In my dream adventures, the river is a representation of me. In the image streaming experience today, I witnessed a series of images returning back to the river. In my life right now, I am taking action to return to myself. Something feels significant about landing on a tiny,spinning planet and being huge and (again!) bare. Bareness awakens the feeling of vulnerability in me ; a small planet and a big “me” brings the words “not fitting” to mind and the spinning elicits a sense of dislodgement and movement. As I type these associations, something is emerging that is making my heart pound!
I have to say it feels a little odd not to be extending my memory palace today : it really has become a bit of a way of life! It makes me giggle that when I check my bag for work, the list of essentials goes something like this now : phone, keys, diary, periodic table of elements 😛 .
For today’s adventure, I’m going to say a heartfelt thank you to Josh Foer (he was the guy in the TED talk on day 1 of my memory palace adventure). The message of thanks isn’t just for the inspiration, it’s also for the additional benefits of the technique : a genuine appreciation of the power of the human mind and a new sense of presence , a renewed sense aliveness to the world around me and within me.
I’ve tweeted a big “TY” and here’s short “thank you” video too :
Yesterday I managed to recall the first 103 elements of the periodic table . You can watch me in action here 🙂 . Today is the big day, I’m going for the full 118!
Throughout my memory place adventures, I’ve been having strange dreams. Some of them involved me watching the elements being projected onto a kind of mind screen. The most interesting of them involved me wandering through a complex labyrinth and making my way into a central cave. This cave was like a central “dream projection booth”. The cave had many portal-like windows and through the windows I could see a multitude of dreams going on simultaneously. I could step into each dream and observe it as a lucid dreamer before selecting the dream that I’d like to slide into.
This dream left me with a real sense of “mind space” and possibility. It left me with a tangible sense of the vastness of my own mind. Over the week, I’ve grown to marvel at the capability of the human mind and I’ve had a sense of discovering a doorway to an infinite space. The memory palace experience has really changed my mind about my own mind – the idea of “cramming” memories in just doesn’t seem to fit anymore 😛 . There seems to be a vast amount of space to record everything we need ~ and in the actual experience of recalling, that place of memory seems to exist way beyond my own head.
So, here’s me giving it a whirl. I’ve spent around 3 minutes a day for the last 9 days building this palace. In other words, this memory feat has taken under 30 minutes! If you’d like to try this technique for yourself, you can learn more about it here . For me this hasn’t just been about memory, it’s been about presence. The more immersed I am in learning, the easier it is to remember. The more immersed I am, the more alive I feel … the more alive the whole world looks – even the periodic table 🙂 .
I’ve been away with work for the past couple of days, so this post is a wee “catch-up” on all my memory palace news! I’ve spent 2-3 minutes every day for the last 6 days building and extending a memory palace for the purpose of memorising the periodic table of elements.
You can see what happened on Day 3 here , on Day 4 here and on Day 5 here 🙂 .
Over the course of the last 6 days, I’ve spent about 20 minutes in total building my palace and (so far!) there seems to be very little effort required in terms of “committing” anything to memory. If you want to try this technique, my top tips would be :
1. Know the layout of your palace inside-out (I’m using my own house).
2. Create exceptionally memorable images.
3. Be fully present while you are decorating your palace (I actually think that this is the key to this whole technique!)
I am really getting the hang of this whole memory palace thing ~ I’m genuinely shocked at how easy it is to remember things and how rapidly things can be memorised! It seems that all you need is sufficient imagination to create a memorable enough picture.
Today I learned the next 13 elements on the periodic table and put that learning together with yesterday’s. In the video you’ll see me recite the first 23 elements of the table and you might notice something really interesting. If you know anything about NLP eye accessing, you might expect my eyes to move so that they can go and “look for” what I’m remembering. When I watched the video back, I was very surprised that my eyes didn’t move at all : they seem to be staring ahead.
I am pretty certain that this is to do with the spatial memory aspect of this technique. That is, the rooms in my home are so familiar to me (and I’m anchoring images to places in rooms in my home) that I do not need to go and look for the place which holds the information. How cool is that? It’s a really “quick access”.
As my eyes are staring straight ahead, I am just seeing all the locations in my house in the order in which I anchored images. It’s like a conveyor belt of elements!
I am out of circulation for the next couple of days but I’ll still be recording videos and I’ll bring you up-to-date with my memory palace on Saturday. Over the coming days, I’ll be gradually increasing the number of new elements I learn : this could get exciting 🙂 .
Well, the big game has happened. I struck it lucky and got to play with the white pieces this time. Having studied some classic openings, I decided to throw my son off the scent by using a closed game opening.
The game lasted 1 hour and 20 minutes. You can see the final state of play on the image below today’s video. Watch the video to find out more 🙂 .
Today’s the day : I’m playing a full game of chess against my son and will be putting everything I have learned over the past 6 days into action!
In today’s video, I talk about my experiences of employing one of the opening move sequences I described yesterday and I share details of a move which everyone should know (apparently 🙂 ) and which features in most games ~ especially if a player wants to keep his/her king safe.
The match is tonight and I’ll report back tomorrow 🙂 .
Last night I played my first game of chess with my son. We played for 15 minutes and the image shows how well it went for me : I am “white” – and I’ve already lost a knight!
I’m hoping for some improvement tonight, having watched a really helpful YouTube video. Now I know a key strategic principle which I should avoid violating at all costs. (I also stumbled across the term “castling” in this video. Further investigation reveals this to be even more complicated than the off-side rule in football, so I don’t think I’m going to take that move any further at the moment!)
I’ll be playing again tonight and I’ll be keeping my top tip to myself to until after we’ve gone head-to-head 🙂 . I wonder if he’ll notice any difference …..
My Space Odyssey has encouraged me to expand my imagination and grow my creative thinking. To support this development in my thinking, I’ve decided to learn to play chess! There seems to be a whole heap of benefits associated with playing this game and, even though my impression of chess is that it might be quite complicated, I am looking forward to squeezing my head through another wormhole 🙂 .
Today I started out by learning the basic moves from this short YouTube video. Over the coming days I’ll be watching more video tutorials and playing too.
Today’s the last day of my Space Odyssey : I get to grips with String Theory and I reflect on my own learning process. A new line of questioning emerges for me too. It’s a different type of enquiry ~ it’s a question that exists at a new level and reflects a new order of thinking . I think I only this new question as a result of going through the process of learning about theoretical physics.
Grappling with questions about cosmology and theoretical physics has had the impact of pushing my mind through a metaphorical wormhole. I now find myself in a new universe where new laws of thinking might apply. I wonder what I’m going to discover in this new place? Whatever I discover, I’m certain it’s going to be thanks to “Wormhole Thinking” 🙂 .
Humans Resourced 