Today I’m going to share the methods I’ve been using to memorize the advice from the ninja manuals, as well as the things there are to learn that supplement ninjutsu such as foreign languages as well as for studying in college. Furthermore, as a modern ninja, the ability accurately recall details from a situation, as well as the things people say, is invaluable. I have yet to find any compelling evidence the ninja used anything like this, so far none of the scrolls I’ve read said anything about it, but nonetheless, as a modern ninja the memory palace or method of loci is an invaluable tool.
Most of what I currently use I learned from Anthony Metivier and Ben Cardall so anything particularly insightful likely came from one of those two brilliant people, anything that doesn’t make sense, doesn’t work, or is plain wrong came from me. If you read this article and want to learn more about memory, or in Ben’s case, Sherlockian reasoning, I highly recommend you check them out. Otherwise, I will be writing a few more articles on the Art of Memory for use as a modern ninja so stick around for that.
Mnemonic imagery
Now the main point with mnemonic imagery is that you need to give it life. Some people don’t actually “see” images in their head, but even people with Afantasia can still use the mind palace by thinking about what it would be like to see the images. Anthony Metivier can’t really see images in his head but still uses these techniques to a very high level. If, like me, you can see images clearly in your head then all the better, but if you’re not particularly visual, or even completely unable, it isn’t going to prevent you from using mnemonics.
Don’t stress out over the specific images you use to memorize information, as I’ve learned from Ben Cardall, whatever comes to mind right away is almost always the best option. Quickly thinking of imagery to use will get easier with practice as well as with a few simple exercises you can use. That being said, you will want to strengthen whatever came to mind by adding action, cartoon violence, vibrant colors, movement, and sound in your imagery.
Anthony Metivier likes to use the simple acronym KAVE COGS to remember the modes you can use to make imagery stronger. The modes are kinesthetic, Auditory, Visual, Emotional, Conceptual, Olfactory, Gustatory, and Spacial. You don’t necessarily need to include each mode for each image but it’s helpful, especially in the beginning, or when something just isn’t sticking, to go through and apply as many as possible to the information you’re working with. this tip has been a game-changer in my Mnemonic practice lately.
Alphabetic Celebrity lists
This is another tip from Anthony Metivier, It can be very useful to create at least one list of highly memorable people whose names start with each letter of the alphabet, or in some way are connected to each letter. For example, you could have A as Alucard or Abraham Lincoln and B as Billy Butcher from The Boys or Barney Stinson from How I met your mother. This will allow you to fill in any gaps that you can’t immediately create imagery for and even spell out words with imagery if you’re really stuck or perhaps when studying languages. Generally, the last one isn’t required, however, and you should get comfortable trusting your brain to fill in the gaps.
Don’t go crazy with this
I wish I had found someone talking about this when I got started. As both Ben and Anthony have talked about in their training, you don’t need every letter represented in a mnemonic image and you don’t need every word in a sentence, your brain will automatically filter in filler words if you focus on the substantive ones. Going overboard with the amount you store from each source is also advised against as with most things you want to study, if you pick a limited number of points per section, source, or book, you can keep the number of images relatively low. Your brain will often latch the information you skipped onto the parts you memorized and you’ll get some of it along for free.
Furthermore, you don’t usually need something verbatim and if you only get three points from each chapter memorized perfectly, and practiced until it’s part of you, you will have taken vastly more out of that book than someone who’s re-read it multiple times. Furthermore, while I will be using examples of imagery that I’ve used, as well as hypothetical examples, these images likely won’t work for you, but should give you an idea of how this can work, customization is key. Essentially everyone can learn to do this but everyone will need to adjust the techniques to their liking.
The Linking Method
To get you started on your way were going to use the linking system. This method is a great first step in mastering memory techniques and provides a solid foundation while allowing you to quickly test your abilities to verify the techniques for yourself. The methodology is simple enough and all you need is a list of items you wish to memorize to get started.
Now oftentimes I see lists of easy to visualize but ultimately meaningless items set up for beginners to memorize but it’s far better to practice with information you actually want to learn. That is with two exceptions. Occasionally memorizing large strings of numbers or playing cards have their place in memory training as it’s difficult to get fast at memorizing numbers without deliberate practice and playing cards teach you to build images that hold multiple pieces of information at once. with that in mind, we will use an example from The Art of War to demonstrate the technique.
The five constant factors:
The way
Heaven
Earth
The commander
Organization
While most people can probably remember this list for a short time without much effort this is a simple and relevant example that can be scaled up later. Furthermore, using mnemonics will ensure you remember it for far longer with a very high accuracy and can call upon the information when needed far more reliably. For the linking method, you will take each point on the list and create a mnemonic image for that item, linking each item to the next. You can do this free-floating in your mind or turn it into a story but keep in mind that backgrounds will make it easier to remember if you can easily manage it.
The Way. A simple image for this could be a; This Way Road Sign You then link that to heaven by having the sign point to the white pearly gates of heaven. Then with Earth, you can see Saint Paul sending people in line back to Earth to try again because they didn’t make the most of their time on Earth. For the commander, you could see ex-Navy Seal commander Jocko Willink Commanding an army to conquer Earth Then for Organization you could imagine Jocko helping his kids organize their rooms or perhaps Adrian Monk helping Jocko organize his guns by size texture, and color. As you can see, each image naturally leads to the other as each is “linked” together. Now all you would need is to remember any image in the chain and you could work your way forwards or backwards to each of them.
There are some limitations with this system, however, and it isn’t what I use the majority of the time. It only works at all for lists and can be hard to recall over the long term as it isn’t anchored to anything. It has its place, for the information you want to quickly memorize and recall something accurately temporarily then this is great. If you have a trigger for the information that can work too. It’s ideal when used in conjunction with other techniques however as it can connect information in a mind palace more quickly, be used to create compound imagery, or make more efficient use of space in a mind palace.
The mind palace
The memory palace, mind palace, method of loci, or whatever you prefer is a step up from the linking method as it anchors mnemonic imagery to a familiar location. This has several advantages over the linking method. Firstly, it gives your imagery context and secondly, it takes advantage of our brain’s preferred way of remembering things.
The Hippocampus is responsible for storing long-term memories and also handles our spacial memory, such as where objects are located in space. By tying each mnemonic image to a location you know well you can take advantage of your brain’s natural hardware and intuitively remember where you “placed” the wacky unusual scenarios, aiding in recall.
Here is a great way to create your very first mind palace. Imagine a place you know very well. Your current house is a good starting place. As a beginner, you can even start with a single room in your house such as your bedroom or bathroom. That being said When I first started I picked the biggest building I knew well and jumped right in doing some deep meditation where I mentally explored the area for a long time getting all the details right. You can get started with as much or as little as you like.
Borrowing heavily from Anthony Metivier’s Magnetic Memory Method, these are some great rules of thumb. It’s best to start from a dead end in your house and move toward the exit so you can scale up your mind palace as needed without friction. Drawing a simple map of the space you working with is a great way to build out the mind palace so you can solidify the space in your mind. Nothing too fancy is required here as this is just for your own sake.
Next, mark out the general shape of the room or house you’re using and draw in major objects and furniture in the room. These will become what’s known as pegs, locations you store mnemonic imagery. Walk a path in your mind through or around the room and or house. Make sure to avoid crossing your own path as this can create confusion, the path should be somewhat natural.
If this excludes parts of your house that’s ok. There will always be more buildings you can visit to get mind palaces so you don’t need to worry about running out of space. Mentally stop at each location, labeling each one on your map in the order they appear with a number. Here’s an example of a mind palace I created recently.
As you can see as long as it makes sense to you it doesn’t need to be very pretty. Nowadays when I go into places for the first time I take special note of the environment so I can use it for a mind palace later thinking about the path I’ll take and the pegs I’ll use along the way. You can get great use out of the mind palace technique without doing this but it will give you far more options for mind palaces.
Keep in mind that while you can use purely imagined mind palaces not based on real locations, it’s not nearly as easy as using a place you’ve been before. When I was starting out I exclusively used locations I visited frequently or that I lived in. I would recommend the same to anyone starting, you can always experiment with locations that you’ve only seen once or twice, even locations you gather information about online, or fully fictional locations later on once you get the hang of it.
After already having many years of sticking to the fundamentals under my belt, I’ve had great success using the Chateau Du Brissac to memorize French vocab by using their virtual tour, having never actually been there. I’ve also used maps, pictures, and imagination to use The Crazy Horse Memorial to memorize information about Crazy Horse for a project in college. It absolutely can be done in due time.
Additionally, experimenting with exaggerated or fictional elements in a real mind palace can give some of the benefits of both approaches, for example adding more shelves to a bookcase or adding more seats in a room to accommodate specific information when convenient for organization or extra space. A tip I learned from Ben. For now, just stick to the facts as best as you remember them.
Over time you will likely want to continue adding more mind palaces and even create what is known as a mind palace network. This is useful for storing a large amount of similar information. These can be done more or less formally to fit your needs. Anthony Metivier recommends that you base it off the alphabet with one palace per letter at least. His approach is very applicable to language learning, one of his key focuses for memory techniques.
That being said I don’t always go with his approach. I will often create much smaller mind palace networks to target specific learning goals such as memorizing quotes related to situational awareness from various samurai and ninja scrolls. In that case, I personally didn’t worry about alphabetizing my mind palaces, it simply wasn’t necessary for that project and I didn’t really suffer by using a less formal approach.
I didn’t need the information to be in any particular order as I doing a public speaking event on ninjutsu and situational awareness in one of Ben Cardalls training courses so I could sample any quote I chose from any mind palace I pleased in a more organic fashion. Furthermore, an entire alphabet would have been far more mind palaces than was necessary.
Even if you don’t plan on using the alphabetic networks I would still recommend you go through the process of making one at least once as it helped me really stretch my mind to find one for each letter. Keep in mind as well that the location doesn’t necessarily need to have a name that starts with the letter as long as it has some connection to the letter. For example, you could use the doctor’s office where you got an X-ray for X.
While just having the list of mind palaces created for your network is certainly a seriously helpful tool, even better is to draw up a map for each of the locations in the network. I know this sounds like a lot of work but the more time you put into the preparation the less will be required during the execution. If you’re planning on using these techniques regularly the time you spend here will be small in comparison to the amount of time you save over the long run. In terms of a fully made mind palace network, maps included, I have a miniature one I’ll be using next semester in my collage course as a starting point and will make a fully fleshed-out alphabetic one when I go to learn Japanese. As someone who’s used each level of formal preparation, I can personally attest to how much time and energy good prep work saves.
Number systems
There are a multitude of ways you can easily convert numbers into mnemonic images. Two of the simplest ones are using rhyming, and using objects with a similar shape. Personally, I used the rhyming method for years before switching to a more advanced method we’ll talk about shortly. The rhyming method is simple, chose objects that rhyme with the numbers o-9 such as:
Zero: Hero
One: Gun
Two: Shoe
Three: Tree
Four: Boar
Five: Beehive
Six: Sticks
Seven: Heaven
Eight: Skate
Nine: Slime
Pick specific and memorable images for each of these concepts or chose your own. Don’t try to imagine an abstract hero but Superman or Batman, preferably a specific instance of the character, whichever one comes to mind. To level this up, you can do a person action object system with three images for each number that way you can have Marcus Kincaid from the game Borderlands, skating over the top of a pile of beehives to remember the number 185 for example. Again, the specifics you chose will be down to your individual cultural references and favorite media. Whatever you're familiar with, use it for this purpose. Don’t be afraid to change this system as you go and customize it to your liking. Over the years I’ve changed heaven to Kevin from ben ten, and then later Kevin the Minion from despicable me.
If you need to remember particularly large strings of numbers or need to be able to memorize them quickly it could be beneficial to invest extra time in learning the Major system. It takes a lot longer to learn and is easier to memorize using the above number systems, but once in place can make memorizing numbers far more flexible and fast all while saving space in the mind palace. The major system converts each number 0-9 into consonants that you can use to create words by filling in the vowels.
0 = soft c, s or z
1 = d, t
2 = n
3 = m
4 = r
5 = l
6 = ch, j, or sh
7 = k
8 = f or v
9 = b or p
While this is an additional step that takes time to get down, I’ve found that it’s helpful once properly learned as you can create complex images that store multiple numbers at the same time with an automatic way of remembering which one comes next. Some people go as far as to create a PAO with this system to get even more out of it but unless you're in a memory completion, having that fully realized and formalized isn’t necessary. Even still the Major method helped me in my college studies to more quickly memorize dates that things happened as well as the number of participants in Psycological studies, and would make memorizing license plate numbers easier.
Real-time memory training
Before I go I wanted to mention that I’ve also used mind palaces to store real-time information on numerous occasions both in training and in real life. When training with Ben Cardall we would sometimes watch I Literally Just Told You and try to answer all of the situational and environmental questions by using mind palaces to store as much information as possible about people’s names, locations mentioned, odd details of the environment, info shown in pictures, etc. I also participated in Anthony Mettiuver’s memory detective game (not live I’m afraid).
I’ve also used this in real-time conversations with officials I needed to engage with. When attempting this, you will miss things, forget others, and overall get things wrong. With the amount of information flying out at you prioritization and quick image generation are all critical. The more time you get to memorize things the stronger you can make the imagery and the fewer mistakes you make. Even still this is something you can get better at with practice as I did during the training and it can be extremely helpful. You can use the more formal memory palace for this, or even simply use your environment around you as the mind palace to quickly store things. Linking is also great in this context.
A brief note on alternative memory techniques
The sky is the limit when it comes to enchanting your memory as well as many alternative use cases. While we focused on memory exclusively, people such as Giordano Bruno have devised methods of using mnemonics to enhance reasoning ability, develop new ideas, or even change the practitioner’s personality for the better. Furthermore, you can use outdoor paths, familiar objects, specialized Lacasa boards, your own body, or even other people to pin mnemonic imagery to. One of these days we may get into some of the more exciting applications of these techniques and push the boundaries of what memory techniques can accomplish but for now start applying what I have taught you and see your academic, professional, and personal lives improve. The only limit is the time and energy you're willing to put in and your willingness to experiment with the techniques.