Infinite Palaces: The True Potential of the Mind

In this episode I discuss the potential of the human mind in terms of assumed versus actual boundaries. People frame their mental potential in terms of space and time complexity (although most don't call it that); in other words, they assume their potential is limited by the speed and space of the task (how much time it takes, the amount of raw information involved). But nature computes in ways that are very different from how computation gets defined and analyzed by scientists. In this episode I extend "memory palace" techniques to infinite palaces, showing that the assumed boundaries on mental processing are more fiction than reality, and that our minds are, for all intents and purposes, infinite, and should be treated as such.

Transcript

Hey everyone, welcome to non trivial. So, I'm, uh, pretty passionate about techniques related to memory. Uh, I think it's a great learning experience about the human mind. It allows me to, uh, do a lot of useful things in the real world. And, uh, things that you might think you could just offload to the machine, but are actually far more effective and efficient when you can do them on the spot. 

Uh, but anyways, that's, uh, it's kind of an ongoing thing that I do. And, uh,  an aspect of these memory techniques is, uh, If you're familiar with them at all, it's often the creation of something called a memory palace. It might go by a few other names. But the basic idea is that, uh,  for those of us that are good at visualizing things in the mind, which should apply to most of us, uh, you can create, uh, what they call a memory palace.

And this would be essentially just visualizing a room that you're familiar with. And if you want to remember a list of concepts or grocery items, or it could even be numbers, really anything, then you can essentially tag or put. peg or pin these concepts as images to the objects that are in the room. And I've talked a little bit about this before.

So for example, you might be, you know, if it's a grocery list, you might be envisioning your kitchen. And so if, uh, you know, you got somebody telling you, you need to go pick up five items. And the first one is apples. Then you would essentially take an image of apples and, you know, Attach those to the first image in, uh, your room, which, uh, in the kitchen might be something like a fridge.

So you would take the apples, you'd mush them into the fridge, and you try to make it kind of dramatic and memorable. So maybe the, uh, the wetness of the apples is, is scrunching into the door of the refrigerator.  And, uh, and I like to do the O, what I call OAR, object, action, reason. So the object is the apples, the action is it's being smushed.

And then the reason could be maybe the juices from the apple are giving a nice glistening gloss to the surface of your fridge. Doesn't matter what the reason is, it's just that's pretty memorable and so forth. And then the next item might be carrots. Next item might be some, you know, red meat, whatever it is, you take the object, you, you  have kind of a dramatic action happening onto a, uh, an object in your memory palace, right? 

So you literally just walk around your room and there's this whole kind of beautiful tapestry  of, of imagery in your mind. And this doesn't just apply to kind of trivial things like grocery lists.  Yeah, you know, it could be your own credit card numbers. It could be, you know, banking information. It could be details about people that you want to remember.

It could be their names. It could be a book that you're reading and you want to anchor the most, what you believe to be the most important concepts of that book onto the various items in your memory palace, right? The, the, the objects that are there, the fridge and the sink. I continue to walk around the room and then there's, uh, you know, cupboards and, and here's a drawer and here's, you know, a little table.

I And so forth. And obviously the larger that palace is that that space that you use in your mind, the more you can anchor and you can keep reusing them anyway. Um, some of you might be familiar with that, perhaps not. And maybe some of you have different versions of doing this, but I, but I highly recommend exercising this.

It's a great exercise for the mind. And, uh, and it, it has a lot of very real world use cases that doing things like recording things on a device just can't give you. Real time recall  and, and richer information than just what you're kind of pegging on to those different objects. Um, you know, grocery list might be kind of trivial, but if you're talking about a book you're reading, you only need a few, uh, images per one concept, but then there's all this kind of emotional context around that one image, so you can kind of go off on it, and there's a lot of great richness there, and you can kind of make connections between concepts, and you can see those connections visually in the mind and all that kind of stuff. 

Anyway, um, one of the things about the memory palace that I think probably people  might find challenging is, uh, they might feel that they don't have enough of them. Right? So, like, maybe I'm using a kitchen as a memory palace and maybe I have another one that's, uh, maybe kind of the park beside the library I go to quite often and, you know, I can kind of keep reusing those.

But at any given time, if you're doing this on a regular basis, then your memory palace might be filled with something, right? Maybe my kitchen already has the grocery items and I don't want to add more to it. Maybe that park beside the library already has the core concepts of that last book I was reading.

I don't know.  But I encourage people to do this all the time. And if you're doing it all the time, then  where are you going to get all these memory palaces from? It seems like you might kind of run out of space. Or it seems like it would be a challenging thing to just think up of a memory  palace on the spot. 

You know, I think this taps into something, a core truth of the human mind,  which is there is really no limit to the space. In fact, you can create these memory palaces on the fly. And that's because you have just countless, um, environments that you could envision. In fact, you can even make the environments up as you go.

As you get better at this, you could create kind of an abstract artificial room and you could think of different items and you could create the items in the room as you're attaching the items that you're trying to remember.  Um, but you don't even have to create abstract ones. I mean, there are parks by libraries.

There are kitchens. There are different rooms in the house. You may have been to a friend's house. It might be your wife's parents house. It might be your grand, you know, grandparents and on and on and on. And, you know, within the school within, uh, you know, different buildings that you visit, maybe it's museums.

Um, Um, you know, different streets that you, you frequent, you have all this three dimensional imagery in your mind that is just there to be used. And by used, I mean, to attach important information about your life, different concepts, to anchor them visually, and to be able to walk around those spaces again in the future at any given time, which just has so much benefit. 

It's not just about recalling information. It's about understanding a visual depth to the things that you read and that you hear, uh, that, that you, you consume through all your senses. And I'm not saying every single thing you do as you go through life, you're going to be anchoring visually in your mind, but it comes, it starts to become kind of a second nature thing that you just do, and it adds a lot of richness to.

To, uh, to, to your life, quite frankly, and your ability to operate in, uh, in various situations, but it would seem challenging to just kind of  constantly have to think up a memory palace. And I think a lot of people that do memory techniques, um, face that challenge and they're not sure if they should reuse the same memory palace or if they should spend a bunch of time trying to, you know, think of, of, of new ones.

or make their existing one longer, right? Like how many objects are in that room?  But this is not supposed to be a stressful thing. This should just be a very easy thing. And I think this teaches us something about the human mind, which it really should be considered an infinite thing.  It's always available.

It's always there. And I think people are not tapping in to the true potential of the human mind because they're thinking about it in the wrong way. And that wrong way, is, is maybe perhaps best understood if we take a look at how computer scientists tend to think of how problems are solved algorithmically, and, and something that they often do, pretty much always do, is take into account space and time complexity, which is really how much space is there available and how much time is it going to take to run the algorithm.

So if you're,  I'm going to sort your clothes and everyday example, right? If you, if you want to, well, let's say find  a shirt for you to wear this day. Um, you could try to optimize this a little bit and think, okay, well, this is a problem I have to solve every day. So how could I go about making this more effective?

And you might think about the time and space complexity. So from a space complexity standpoint, you might say,  uh, well, I'm going to. You know, in the extreme case, put a different shirt in every different drawer and then label every drawer so I know exactly what shirt it is, right?  So, that would be an extremely quick way to solve that problem because you would literally just look at your drawers And, uh, and I don't know, one would say red shirt, one would say black shirt, one would say t shirt.

However that labeling would work, but obviously this is a bit stupid because it would take up a ton of space. You know, unless you just don't own a lot of shirts. But even then, it would just be kind of ridiculous to use that space. But it, in theory, would work, right? You could just look at the labels right away.

In the other extreme, you might try to  Um, put everything into just one spot so you know exactly where all your shirts are and that seems to kind of speed it up. Because then you just go to the one spot, you don't have this big room of drawers to look at. But now, of course, uh, you're gonna have to fumble through this big one single pile to try to find the shirt that you want, right?

So, there's always this trade off between the amount of space that you're using and the amount of time it's going to take. to solve a problem. And this is how computer scientists think about problem solving. So what does this have to do with what I'm talking about in the human mind? Well, I think it's a mistake to think about the computations that nature does, like what we do with the human mind in these terms.

Uh, and you might not think you do this because you're probably not getting up in the morning looking for a shirt and thinking, well, I don't know what the space and time complexity is. You're not doing this for anything that you do, right?  Just because you're not using those words, you might be kind of taking that computational narrative without realizing it.

Um, you know, if I tell you that, uh, you have a,  uh, there's a banquet coming up and I need you to go to this banquet and I need you to kind of schmooze with the people, uh, and there's going to be 500 people there and I want you to know Everyone in that banquets name,  you have to know their name as soon as you look at their face and not just the name, I want you to know some details about them.

I want you to know maybe how much they maybe this is a fundraiser. I want you to know what their contribution was.  I want you to know a little bit about the, you know, the company that they work for. And this is for 500 people and the banquet is in two days. Now, most of you would probably be like, well, no, that's ridiculous.

I can't do that. I can't, you know, how am I going to, you know, I'm,  I'm going to give you the faces and you've got a couple of days to do this. You got to memorize all 500 names and the details of all 500 people. It probably sounds like an impossible task to most, or you would believe you'd be spending, you know, all of the next two days doing nothing else, but trying to commit this information to memory.

And you might not have. Much of a technique to commit that to memory. You might just be trying to do it kind of passively, right? Like you're just going to read it again and again and again. And hopefully through iteration, the stuff will stick.  Um,  the reality is though, this is not hard for a human to do at all. 

Uh, the reality is it is not that challenging to remember 500 names by face and it is not that challenging to attach additional information and context to each of those faces. And it is not that hard to walk into a room and recall all that information, even if that situation is only two days away. But I don't think most people would realize that that that's, that that's, that that's It's not that hard to do that.

One, because they lack the techniques to do it. But two, because they're probably just thinking that's not something a human brain can do, unless maybe you're a genius or a savant or something like this.  But the reality is, those types of quote unquote infinities of the mind are absolutely at your disposal.

And I call them infinities because if you,  in that situation, if you're doubting this is something you can do, then you are actually thinking of a real world situation in terms of time and space complexity, because time wise, you think it's going to take too long to solve this problem longer than two days and or space wise, you probably just don't know how your brain would have that much space to cram it all in, right?

Or kind of a mix of the two. So you are in everyday situations thinking about the human mind, the human brain in terms of space and time complexity, even if you don't know.  And, uh, and I think that's an unfortunate thing because  the amount of time it takes to do something is probably nowhere near  As much as you think it is.

And the space in your mind is for all intents and purposes, infinite.  And so, you know, why am I talking about this technique? Um, well, what I, what I want to say here is that, you know, you can create, uh, these so called memory palaces on the fly,  which gives you an essentially infinite ability to record, or if you will, or to memorize important details.

That matter in your life, and I think that would surprise a lot of people. I think people would think even if they understand the technique of memory palace, they would have to envision their room and they'd have to do that again and again. And then they'd have to use that same room. And that there's, you know, there's only so many spots to put things, but I'm saying that the mind, I'm saying that's a bit of a false narrative.

The mind is actually quite infinite. You have this ability to create three dimensional, uh, rooms in your mind at any given time, they can be as expansive as they need, and you can even do it. in real time and you can do it on the fly.  And that tells us something about the nature of computation. That tells us something about what the human brain is capable of doing.

And I think it's important to understand that. And, uh, and, and, you know,  Obviously, memory plays a role in everything we do. There is a great utility to be able to recall information effectively, to speak to it. Now, going into a banquet hall or a fundraiser, rather, might not be, you know, your real life situation.

Not for most of us. But there's always going to be situations that do call upon the ability to recall information, to recall some details,  or even just high level information. abstract things and to be able to go off on them and speak about them.  There's great utility in being able to, uh, to, to get up in front of people and just talk and not look at your notes.

There's great utility to be able to walk into a room, know everyone's name and know some details about them and be able to speak to those and help people make connections. There's great utility to not just read your books and get entertained and leave it at that, but to be able to recall some of that imagery and see some connective tissue between the different concepts that you read.

Now, again, you might thinking this is all very kind of. arduous, deliberate things. But if I told you this is very free flowing, second nature, infinite things that the mind just does automatically, then it probably sounds a lot more attractive to you. And it should, this is actually the way that we evolved to, to remember things.

Yes, there's a deliberate technique there, but it's tapping into, to, to, to things that we've gotten away from, uh, because of this modern narrative. of every problem takes up a certain amount of time and there's only so much space, you know, there's only so much space, there's only so much time.  The human mind really collapses space and time complexity into a single thing.

That really means space and time complexity is a bit of a goofy conversation. It's a, it's a goofy way to think about problem solving. It works in computer science because computer scientists are working with, for the most part, Deterministic algorithms. In fact, that's the only situation that that suits.

Very step by step, causal, deterministic,  this bumps into this, bumps into this, type algorithms. But that's not how the human mind works.  You should be thinking of your human mind, your human brain, however you want to frame that, as an infinite thing with infinite space. And, uh, you know, obviously this gets into the use of heuristics and the use of pattern recognition and all this good stuff, but I don't even, I don't even want to get into all that right now. 

I'm just saying that.  You know, I started off by saying, look, there's a technique that people do in memory. It's called the memory palace. But a lot of people who try to do that probably think they have to use the same palace again and again. And there's this interesting aspect of this technique,  which is that you can just create these things on the fly, and there's an infinite amount of visual space you can use in your mind.

And if you tap into that, it becomes a really, really powerful tool for you to memorize and recall information later, which is a very real world thing.  It's not a, oh, it's like a fun parlor trick. No, it's a very real world thing that you can use all the time.  Use it in your speaking, use it in your writing, use it in your conversing with people.

Obviously use it academically if it's passing exams, but, you know, much more real world things.  And it's teaching you about the computation of the mind. It's teaching you about how your brain works. And that's important. I don't even, I don't mean that academically. I mean, it's important to understand what the mind does and does not do.

Because that's a very effective tool for you to use and utilize throughout your life. Anyway, so I'm saying create memory palaces on the fly. Okay. Understand the mind is infinite. It's not bound by the space time complexities as the modern kind of computational narrative would be. And I know that you're not going through life thinking about space and time complexity of your brain, but you might not be using those labels, but actually you probably are thinking like that.

You are often thinking that, you know, things take a certain amount of time, which of course there's some truth to, uh, but on the space side as well, you're probably thinking, well, maybe my brain can't fit all that, or maybe it would take too long to memorize 500 names in two days. And I'm telling you it's not true.

Uh, if you actually understand the nature of the human mind, these things are quite natural to do. And, and really, that shouldn't. Surprise you because if you think about what your ancestors were doing, right? They might not have been deliberately memorizing lists of information, but they were going through forests and remembering hallmarks  You know way signs whatever want to call them these  these these markers in the in the bush They're picking up on subtle cues  and on and on and learning how to hunt learning how to survive learning how to build shelters And learning how to communicate all this stuff Is just loaded and packed with information and infinite for all intents and purposes.

I mean, it's so much information. You couldn't possibly measure it in any reasonable way.  Um, you know, computational information, theoretic approaches notwithstanding, there's no way to measure that amount of information. That's the reality of how the human mind works. And that can be brought to bear on modern real world situations.

So, um,  so.  In the course of doing techniques that matter in life, one of which is doing things akin to the memory palace, you should be aware that these are not limited things. These are infinite things that you can create on the fly. There's no lack of space. And when you get really good at using them, they become second nature.

You could do it at any given time.  And I think that surprises a lot of people because they think. Even though they're not using these words in terms of the space time bounds, right, the complexity on things. They think things take too long. They think it would take too much space to fill it all. But that's what I'm telling you is that that's not how the human mind works.

That that kind of dichotomy between space and time is actually a bit goofy when you talk about the computation  in nature and and which is also becoming the computation now as we look at deep learning.  You know that space and time complexity, those start to collapse in deep learning as well. Because deep learning is not using deterministic bit by bit.

I mean, it uses those two, but ultimately the meat of AI is coming from, uh, abstract, uh, pattern recognition, heuristically, meta heuristically applied things. And if that's too jargony for you, don't worry. It just means it's, it's not about deterministic algorithms. It's about high level abstract patterns that are recognized in ways that cannot be decomposed deterministically, because it's not a deterministic thing.

So the point is, how much space something takes and how much time something takes is no longer language that's appropriate to use in the computation we're doing in modern life, and especially in nature, because those are converging.  Now, what does all this have to do with real life? You might not care about memory techniques.

You might not care about thinking about how the brain works. You might not care about what computer scientists are calling things. And so, And, uh, you might not be, you know, trying to optimize the time or space versions of what you do. Um, but the, the broader perspective here  is that I think it's important to understand that your potential as a human being is not bound by these kind of goofy academic dichotomies like space and time complexity.

Uh, you know, or if they are, they're so, you know, Expansive and vast and near infinite that for all intents and purposes. There's no point in in thinking you are bound by that And I think people are thinking they are bound by things like that You might might might not be in terms of memory that you're thinking but as you go through life You know You're getting asked to do things all the time and you keep offloading so much of what you do to the machine, right?

I'd be Probably guaranteed you don't remember your credit card numbers and your banking information and maybe you don't remember all the birthdays on the calendar and you maybe and you don't think you need to because you're right you could just put that into a Computer but  when you take into account all the things that go on in life You should be utilizing your mind to do these things.

It's got to be healthier. We, you know, there's lots of studies that show to ward off dementia, you should be using your brain, right? Maybe that's Sudoku puzzles for you. Maybe that's crosswords. Why not tap into memory itself and the infinite capability of that memory to, uh, to do things in the real world? 

Um, I think that's important and, and you can choose what you want to remember. You can choose how you want to visualize that. I think we should be taking tours through that three dimensional visual space in our mind on a regular basis. It's not just lists of items. It's not just trying to do something quicker than you could by pulling out your phone.

Although that does have a massive advantage in the real world. It's learning something about how the mind works. It's got. Uh, you know,  emotional facets and textures in there that will teach you more about concepts and on and on. And maybe all that sounds a bit abstract to a lot of people, but I would recommend that you don't cap or bound the potential of you as a human being by, you know, the way they tend to get analyzed academically.

You know, this is how smart you can be. This is how much you can remember. You think about the distinction between, I mean, people say,  you know, if you weren't using any kind of technique, uh, you can remember about seven things at once. So that's kind of the thing, right? Like most people are seven, maybe you're nine or 10, if you're, you're, you're a bit better. 

Well, the world record for the number of digits of PI that are memorized are over 80, 000.  Okay, so how did you go from 7 to 80, 000? Now we're not even in the same category anymore. This is completely blows the 7 out of the water and the only difference is someone was implementing a technique,  okay? And the technique is something that is obviously tapping into how the brain actually works.

The 7 things at a time has nothing to do with how the brain works. That's a goofy, uh, If you literally care nothing about how you memorize and you just do things, you know,  based on the bounds that maybe you're told, then yeah, you're going to remember seven things. If you actually put a little effort into it, you go from seven to 80, 000.

Now, of course, it takes a long time to, uh, to, to commit 80, 000 things. I'm not telling you to go commit 80, 000 things to memory. I'm saying that the human brain is far, far more capable than, uh, than anything that could be analyzed by computer scientists. Okay. And I think it is important for everyday people to understand that.

You're not limited the way you are, the way you might think you are limited.  And I think it's important, I think it's healthy to do things the way your body and mind are supposed to be doing them.  Okay, so just a quick recap.  Uh, just one of many examples of the things that, you know, the human brain is capable of.

You might not care about this particularly. That's fine. But one of those things is, is memory techniques and those techniques are very natural. One is called the memory palace. But I think a lot of people even who do this regularly might think the memory palace is kind of limited. It's not. It's for all intents and purposes infinite.

You can make as many as you want. You can even make them on the fly. And that kind of goes against this modern narrative that, You know, well, everything takes a certain amount of time and there's only so much space to do it. And that kind of collapses. I'm not saying things happen immediately, but the, the, it's kind of like the 80, 000 versus the seven.

It's so much beyond how you're probably thinking that you need to explore those vast spaces. You need to start assuming that you could remember Uh, anything, uh, to an infinite amount, to an infinite degree. Don't go do that because your life would come to a stop. Most things are not worth remembering. But the point is, by understanding that you are capable of these things, then all of a sudden a lot of doors will open.

Uh, you'll realize what you can recall. You'll realize that you can go off on them. Don't be limited because you think you fit into some box. You know, I'm the person that can do seven things. Ridiculous. The category is so far beyond what you've been told that it's just not even worth paying attention to those old school narratives. 

Your mind is infinite. Your brain is infinite.  And there's even physical versions like this too, right? So I think that's the broader perspective and I think it's important to understand that. Okay? So go in and go in life and just assuming that there's no lack of space. And, uh, and the ability to solve real world hard problems is actually pretty instant, right?

Because the thing, you know, if you're running away from a tiger, you're not running computations. If you're searching for food, it's gonna take time to search for food. Um, but the ability to just do that search is happening right here, right now.  And, and, and real modern world examples of this all the time.

You can memorize 500 names, that's nothing.  You don't need to write down your grocery list. You don't need to write down all your credit card numbers. You don't need to write down your passwords. You don't Stop offloading  your brain. To machines. When you have the most unbelievable machine inside your skull right now, use it, learn from it.

It's not just about memory. You'll learn about life. You'll learn about information. You'll learn about how concepts relate to each other. You will live a life of visualization and concepts that you're supposed to be. It leaks into all other areas of life. It's not just about memory techniques. It's about life.

Okay. That's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And, uh, until the next one,  take care.