Our memory and thinking are deeply associative. Associations are critical for creativity. However, there is no clear recipe for creating associations. Instead, I suggest several options you can mix and match.
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How do we get mental landscapes?
A mental palace typically addresses a single building with several rooms. Mindmaps usually address around 20 objects branching from the central anchor. Put 20 mental palaces together and you immediately get a mental landscape, such as a mental city. If you want to remember 1 million keywords, your mental city will become very complex.
You can remember a small article (1-3 pages) as a small mindmap, something you can put on a wall of a mental palace. A larger article (3-15 pages) becomes a full mental palace. To learn a subject we need to read dozens of articles. Thus we get a mental landscape.
The subjects we learn are interconnected. There are associations both between the palaces within the subject area, and between different subject areas. How can we encode these connections?
Thematic reuse
The easiest connection is thematic reuse. Keywords are often encoded via fixed tables of visual dictionaries. Even if we do not work with fixed tables, we will often have a persistent visual association. The first visual association for a keyword will be the same every day.
The details, such as coloring schemes, follow a different scheme of disambiguation. For example, green for innovation, blue for methodology, and red for emotion. There can be secondary and tertiary colors – like in country flags. It takes time to generate a thematic color scheme, yet eventually, these colors and textures stabilize.
The contextual part of the PAO is usually encoded in a person or as a room color. So if we see the recurring person and room color, this is a clue for the association.
Reusing objects
Objects typically encode very specific keywords, like the recipe for the solution. If several problems have the same solution, a very specific object will appear several times. Creative people often try to come up with a different solution or visualization. This is nice, but it is a part of a different exercise. Encoding typically benefits from repeatability. Repeatability is usually the recipe for the easiest the most automatic and the fastest visualization. As an added value, reusing solution and object pairs.
Basic portals
If a random association is not enough, and you want to have a hyperlink from one subject area to another you can use portals. Portals are objects that exist in two mental palaces. You can visualize something like stargate. A large circular object with dials. Setting the dials selects the relevant subject area and palace. You dial in and go into a different palace.
This setup requires some sort of reference index of entry points, like a phone numbers directory. Maintaining such indices is possible in the beginning, but as the index grows the effort can become unrealistic.
1:1 dedicated portals
It is often easier to put a teleporting object between two palaces. If the palaces are within the same subject area, tunnels between mental palaces can work well. However, between different subject areas it is best to put a dedicated device, like a colored phone.
You kind of need to go through the phone line between two places several times before the connection becomes stable. This way you get an optional itinerary for another subject. I call this method “hyperlinking” – like web pages redirecting to other pages. There are several other articles addressing it and its variations.
Curio portals
It is possible to put shelves in the mental palace with multiple objects. Taking an object teleports to a different area. This method is inspired by curio cabinets of baroque, filled with findings from different countries. Researchers would examine the objects, thinking about other places and their riches, daydreaming and wondering,
Typically curio portal teleports to the anchor marker of a target mindmap or subject area, rather than a specific location within.
Notetaking
If you have a reading diary, you usually write down at least 5 keywords representing the article you just read. You can search your reading diary for these keywords, which will take you to articles you might not even suspect. As the keywords are chosen by you and not a search engine, this method produces results very different from what you would get from a search engine.
If you further use speedwriting to formulate your own ideas, you can search your blog. This step becomes more important as you collect decades of research results.
Autobiographical associations
Sometimes the association is not per keyword or per subject, but per our own activity when we encountered the subject. The state of the body, the clothing, the research interests, obsessions and passions, mood, and other personal cues may generate the association.
Similarity vs other criteria
Not always the association is similarity. Quite often, the association is via contradiction or complementary logic. We remember that there were X factors for something, and associate these factors. For example, bronze requires copper and tin or arsenic. These factors are associated as a whole and their components.
Creativity training
You do not have to encode the associations directly. You can do creativity training, like asking complex questions, considering diverse perspectives and daydreaming “what if” scenarios. Our brains are associative. They create associations automatically without us even trying.
Simply traveling and learning about diverse subjects may facilitate the process. Curiosity and passionate learning somehow strengthen associative connections. Possibly this is a chemical process. Stress and lack of sleep or depression usually reduce associative thinking ability.
General guidelines
After presenting so many options, what are the guidelines?
- Take notes. Even if you cannot search keywords, you may remember writing the keywords down.
- Reuse elements. In similar situations use the same visualization and disambiguate by context. The repeatable element generates associations.
- Try some hyperlinking. Maybe 2% of keywords may have hyperlinks. Otherwise, the itineraries become overly complex.
- Use curios as much as you can to boost creativity, up to one curio closet per mental palace.
- Practice creativity training and a healthy lifestyle.
