Memory – Integration – Storage
by pre.
During the second loop around the spiral we examed memory storage, discussing ways to keep a memory from fading by refreshing it often, ensuring that you burn those neural pathways deeply, activating the long perm potentiation of your neurons by re-experiencing the memory over and over again as vividly and powerfully as possible.
The main system you use to refresh your memories is likely to be something similar to the Loki system we discussed back in Lap one. A route or map, a chain of locations in which you mentally place reminders, and which you wonder around often.
The obvious way to extend the Loki system is to use new or longer routes, keep more than one. Perhaps your route to work, and a short walk around the rooms of your home. Having more locations to store things in is a good idea, we encourage this.
It is limiting though, in that you need to remember all the routes that you can take and it doesn’t give any clear order to move from one route to another if you wanted to remember a very long list of things.
Therefore it’s worth thinking of a better way to extend the Loki system. Once you have two different routes you can combine them in a factorial way. Two routes of ten locations can give you over a hundred different holes to put things, 100 different queues to refresh and remember.
How?
Imagine the location in one route as the first digit in a two digit number, and a location in a second route as the second digit. This gives you 100 different combinations, each of which can be recreated by imaging items from the first route in the location of the second. Location 41, for instance, might mean combining the picture that’s always hanging from the wall of room 4 in your home with the first corner on your route to work. When you hang something in that picture, you have placed it in a unique location from that list of 99 possible combinations.
You’ll likely want to imagine something in those locations to represent a way of turning a two digit number into a character or funny image, just as we associated numbers and letters during the first lap. If 1 is eels and 4 is Ra, then seeing the sun-god of the eel-people and imagining him as a character will help you whenever the number 41 comes up. Putting him in that picture hanging on the street corner will further reinforce it.
The Meditation
You’ll gain practice using a loki system during our walking meditation presented at the end of this month. Both practice at storing new things, and at refreshing things which you have previously stored there. As you walk, remember this, the more you practice this the more second nature it will become, like learning to play an instrument, or learning to read.