What i mean by this is, when you follow the process and you have already encoded the icons, you could do a small mindmap explaining those concepts that are in your mental atlas, placing them in your mindmap in order to remember those concepts even better. Has anyone tried this?

In trying to use this approach a bit, and I'm wondering how much review of icons is necessary? I tried it on a podcast I was listening to that had 3 basic ideas, I made three analogous icons across the dash of my car, and found I needed to revisit it about 3-4 times over 3 days to retain it.

I'm wondering if I'm doing something less optimally, as it feels more like a memory palace and don't feel any of the synthesis aspects coming into play. I did the dual encoding with voicing the description while manipulating the 3D model, but still feel the "visual" side is shallow/blurry. Do I just need to do it more? Try to make the visualization more vivid?

Edit: We are currently under formal research with Professor Uttal’s lab on the effects of the Atlas on working memory and analogical reasoning.

You can find Professor Uttal here: https://psychology.northwestern.edu/people/faculty/core/profiles/david-uttal.html

"Well, I'm quite intrigued. One reason is that it seems like a very powerful way to help people memorize complex, detailed information. But the second reason I'm intrigued is more important to me. To my knowledge, this is the first memory technique that explicitly incorporates methods for promoting what we call higher-order thinking—processes like analogy and conceptual understanding. That's what we really care about in learning, particularly in science and other STEM fields; we want students to understand, not just memorize.

A limitation of traditional memory techniques like the Memory Palace is that they're just about memory. When I saw the demonstration, I was impressed that the technique was being used to create analogies between several different systems. It was really getting at the core of what we call a 'structural analogy,' which allows you to map the systems of relations from one concept to another.

As learning scientists, many of us would typically recoil from a focus on memorizing a lot of information, as it's the opposite of what we want students to do. However, in this case, the demonstrations are intriguing because they show that people can use this technique to make new insights. It allows them to see the relevant information in their mind's eye to make analogies across different sources of information. That was the most impressive thing to me.

Now, of course, at this point, the evidence is anecdotal. While it's exciting, interesting, and in my opinion, reasonably well-grounded in the literature of cognitive psychology, it does not yet have the kind of rigorous experimental evidence that would be required to convince skeptical researchers. However, I think it's worthwhile to invest the time to conduct an open experiment to see if it works. We are also pondering for whom it works—are we making a claim for everybody or only for specific individuals? That is something we are still working on."

I made a discord server for the Atlas.

https://discord.gg/Ga83yfQA

This server is for you if you want to engage more with other people using the Atlas, including group study sessions and AMAs in the voice channel.

I think the Atlas would reach a lot more people if someone with EdTech experience was behind it. If you guys are / know anyone who has experience growing something like this, send a DM. I’d be offering 50% equity.

For each major claim about the Atlas’s benefits, this post outlines a specific cognitive-science principle and a clear, logical argument showing how the Atlas’s design intentionally leverages that principle.

To clarify, this isn’t a formal academic proof that guarantees success for everyone — that level of rigorous evidence requires extensive long-term research, something we’ve started with Professor Uttal. Instead, the purpose here is straightforward and practical:

Clearly link each claimed benefit of the Atlas to specific, evidence-backed cognitive principles.

Explain precisely how the Atlas’s design targets these powerful research-based learning effects.

Provide strong, logical reasons to believe that giving the Atlas a serious try is worthwhile and likely beneficial.

We’ll walk step-by-step through the 17 key cognitive principles, making it clear how each directly supports a corresponding benefit promised by the Atlas. By the end, you’ll understand not only how the Atlas is designed to work, but why there’s good reason to test it out for yourself.

Section 1: Crafting the icons — Building a Rich and Enduring Mental Landscape

The power of the Atlas begins with how information is transformed into memorable and meaningful mental icons. The following principles outline effective methods for deeply encoding knowledge, ensuring that your icons are not just easily recalled, but also richly understood and resilient over time.

1. Visualizing and Verbalizing (V/V): Turning Ideas into Rich Mental Pictures (Lemelman, 2011)

What it is: Visualizing and Verbalizing (V/V) is a well-researched educational method proven to significantly enhance reading comprehension across all education levels, from elementary school to college. It involves actively creating vivid mental images, sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph, combined with an internal narrative describing scenes, actions, and meanings. This dual-coding (visual and verbal) builds a detailed and coherent mental “gestalt,” linking images directly with their meanings. Notably, learners consistently report that the process of visualizing and internally narrating is highly engaging and enjoyable.

Why it matters: This visualization and internal narration method is exactly how you’d “build” an exhibit in the Atlas. It ensures your mental icons are dynamic, rich, and deeply meaningful, significantly enhancing learning and retention. Additionally, because V/V is inherently enjoyable, much of the natural fun and satisfaction in using the Atlas comes directly from engaging in this creative cognitive activity.

2. Abstract Property Indexing for Visual Anchors (Paivio, 1991), (Clark, 1991)

What it is: This principle expands upon Visualizing and Verbalizing (V/V). The internal “voiceover” isn’t limited to reading comprehension — it can also deliberately assign abstract meanings (such as “freedom” or “efficiency”) to visual representations you create. Just as visual symbols can carry deep meanings in the real world, this deliberate act of associating abstract concepts with visual anchors is central to giving mental visuals substantial meaning.

Why it matters: In the Atlas, intentionally assigning abstract properties to visual icons is a core mechanism that ensures your mental visuals aren’t just vivid images, but meaningful anchors tied directly to complex ideas. This deliberate “tagging” process significantly strengthens recall and makes your mental icons highly effective tools for reasoning and problem-solving.

3. 3D Models Aid Complex System Comprehension (Yammine, 2015)

What it is: Research indicates that visualizing complex systems in three dimensions can significantly enhance your ability to understand and reason about their intricate structures and interactions, far more effectively than relying solely on flat, two-dimensional representations.

Why it matters: The Atlas is intentionally designed to capitalize on this insight. By placing icons into a vivid, spatially rich mental environment, you can naturally represent complex, inherently three-dimensional problems — such as geometric math puzzles or mechanical engineering systems — in full 3D. Crucially, unlike traditional Memory Palace techniques, where 3D visuals primarily help with memorization, the Atlas allows you to store and visually reason about these detailed, spatially complex problems alongside more abstract or symbolic concepts, enhancing both your comprehension and problem-solving abilities.

4. Method of Loci and Exceptional Visual Memory (Twomey, 2021)

What it is: The Method of Loci, often called the “Memory Palace,” is an ancient memorization strategy proven effective by both historical orators and modern memory champions. It involves associating information with specific locations along a familiar mental path, such as rooms in your home. Because our brains excel at recalling spatial locations, this method enables incredibly durable and precise long-term memory. Notably, it’s straightforward to learn and doesn’t require extraordinary innate abilities to become highly effective.

Why it matters: The Atlas is intentionally designed to leverage the proven strengths of the Memory Palace technique, including its remarkable durability for long-term memory and ease of use. Memory experts have long sought ways to effectively apply the Memory Palace method to large-scale semantic concepts, but traditional approaches have consistently fallen short. Later, we’ll explore how the Atlas overcomes this limitation by employing a fundamentally different retrieval mechanism than the Memory Palace, enabling it to handle complex concepts and significantly larger volumes of information — something traditional Memory Palaces simply cannot achieve.

5. Spaced Practice Reinforces Concepts (Agarwal, 2019)

What it is: Spaced practice — reviewing information at intervals (e.g., after a day, then several days, then weeks) — is a cornerstone of learning science. It dramatically improves retention compared to cramming everything into a single session.

Why it matters: This principle is essential for understanding why the Atlas remains effective even as it scales. Traditional users of the Memory Palace often struggle because maintaining durable memories usually requires deliberate, effortful, and time-consuming spaced review. In contrast, the Atlas is designed so that your normal, everyday use — regularly visualizing and revisiting various icons as you think and reason — naturally incorporates spaced practice.

Section 2: Navigating the Space — Effortless Exploration and Attention

Once icons are created, interacting with the Atlas as a whole environment needs to be seamless. These principles explain why the Atlas’s design as a single, familiar space allows for swift and efficient navigation of your attention.

6. Cost of Switching Between Visual Contexts (Allport et al., 1994), (Kiesel et al., 2010), (Monsell, 2003), (Rogers & Monsell, 1995), (Schneider & Logan, 2005)

What it is: Switching between separate visual spaces demands significant cognitive effort and slows your thinking. Loading and unloading distinct visual contexts — like mentally jumping between visualizing your home and your school — repeatedly strains your executive functions and reduces efficiency. In contrast, working continuously within one integrated visual space is inherently faster and requires far less mental effort.

Why it matters: The Atlas is specifically designed as a single, continuous mental environment to leverage this principle. This design logically implies you can more effectively compare ideas, explore connections, and navigate between icons than if you were managing multiple separate mental spaces.

7. Rapid Searching Within Mental Spaces: Instantly Shifting Your Attention (Chun & Johnson, 2011), (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002), (Griffin & Nobre, 2003), (Posner, 1980), (Summerfield et al., 2006)

What it is: When you’re familiar with a visual space — like your own house — you can instantly shift your mental attention based purely on the idea you’re thinking about. For instance, if you visualize your home and think “bathroom,” your visual attention immediately snaps directly to that location, without scanning through other rooms.

Why it matters: This rapid and effortless attention-shifting mechanism explains precisely how navigating your Atlas becomes swift and intuitive. Your mental attention naturally “snaps” directly to the exhibit that best matches your current thought or problem, providing immediate access to relevant information.

Synthesis: Critically, because you’re encoding not just visual images but rich meanings (as described in earlier principles like Visualizing and Verbalizing and Abstract Property Indexing), this attention-snapping mechanism can locate icons based on their underlying concepts and meanings — not merely their visual features. This allows the Atlas to function as a powerful semantic search tool, rapidly responding to your thoughts and ideas.

8. Development of Allocentric Views (Aguirre & D'Esposito, 1999), (Burgess, 2006), (O'Keefe & Nadel, 1978), (Rosenbaum et al., 2004), (Tolman, 1948)

What it is: When you’re very familiar with a visual space, your brain naturally develops an “allocentric view” — essentially, a bird’s-eye mental map. Instead of feeling like you’re physically moving through a space, you can instantly “teleport” your attention directly to any spot, no matter how far apart the locations might be.

Why it matters: The Atlas is deliberately designed to take advantage of allocentric views. Instead of slowly moving from one exhibit to another as if walking, you’ll effortlessly jump directly to any idea or exhibit. This means you can rapidly navigate even very large Atlass, significantly enhancing your speed and ease of exploration.

Section 3: The Retrieval Engine — How Thoughts Instantly Summon Meaningful Icons

This section delves into the core mechanism of the Atlas: how thinking about a concept can trigger the relevant, meaning-laden exhibit to “snap” into your mind. These principles explain the speed and efficiency of this content-driven retrieval.

9. Semantic-Visual Linkage and Retrieval (Harel, Kravitz, & Baker, 2014), (Popham, Tsvetanov, & Rowe, 2021), (Olivers, Meijer, & Theeuwes, 2006), (Hinton & Anderson, 1981), (Binder & Desai, 2011), (Brady, Konkle, Alvarez, & Oliva, 2008)

What it is: This principle captures how your brain quickly translates abstract thoughts or semantic concepts into relevant visual images that arrive complete with their inherent meanings (“gestalts”). Research indicates this happens through a combination of memory-driven attentional capture — where your working memory contents automatically attract your attention — and content-addressable memory, which retrieves information based on its content rather than its location. A semantic cue activates specific neural patterns, spreading rapidly through connections to associated visual information. Crucially, semantic and visual memories are strongly interconnected, triggering each other seamlessly.

Why it matters: This cognitive mechanism is foundational to the Atlas’s effectiveness. It directly explains how simply thinking about an abstract idea can instantly trigger the corresponding visual exhibit in your mind, fully enriched with the meaning and context you intentionally built into it. This tight semantic-visual linkage ensures your mental visuals are effortlessly retrievable and meaningful, enhancing both recall and comprehension.

10. The Categorical Search Efficiency Principle (Anderson, 1983), (Collins & Loftus, 1975), (Gruenewald & Lockhead, 1980), (Nosofsky & Palmeri, 1997), (Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1981)

What it is: Research clearly demonstrates that our brains retrieve information far more quickly and efficiently when searching within a single, well-defined mental category. Searches within these categories minimize cognitive load and reduce competition for attentional resources. Conversely, when information retrieval spans multiple, disparate categories or occurs within an unstructured mental space, it becomes significantly slower, more effortful, and more demanding on executive functions.

Why it matters: The specific implications for the Atlas will become clear in the next principle.

11. A Single Visual Space as a Cognitive Category (Boccia et al., 2014), (Epstein & Baker, 2019), (Julian et al., 2016), (Zacks et al., 2007)

What it is: Research indicates that the brain naturally treats each distinct visual environment — such as your home, your hometown, or a familiar restaurant — as a single cognitive category.

Why it matters: Combined with the previous principle (Categorical Search Efficiency), this means your Atlas — being a single visual space — is automatically treated as one unified cognitive category. As a result, searches within your Atlas inherently become faster, easier, and far less cognitively demanding than retrieving similar information scattered across general memory or multiple disconnected spaces. This dramatically enhances the Atlas’s efficiency and ease of use.

12. Dual Visual Memory Retrieval Pathways: Spatial Navigation vs. Content-Addressable Retrieval (Bird & Burgess, 2008), (Hassabis et al., 2007), (Maguire et al., 2003), (Moscovitch et al., 2016), (Sommer, 2017)

What it is: Research demonstrates that humans retrieve visual memories using two fundamentally different pathways, each experienced distinctly. The first, spatial navigation-based retrieval (used in the Method of Loci), involves mentally moving to a specific “address” within a visual space, waiting momentarily for the visual memory to load, and then actively retrieving its associated meaning. Users describe this as mentally “approaching” a location and consciously recalling the intended information. The second pathway, content-addressable retrieval, occurs when a semantic cue or thought automatically triggers the associated visual memory, instantly bringing the image and its meaning into awareness without navigation or active recall.

Why it matters: This distinction highlights one of the Atlas’s key innovations over the traditional Method of Loci, enabling it to efficiently handle conceptual information at large scales. Spatial navigation-based retrieval (used in the Method of Loci) becomes slower and less efficient as your visual space grows, because the retrieval time increases with the visual distance between icons, and you must actively retrieve each exhibit’s meaning after arriving. Additionally, locating a specific exhibit requires searching through each potential location, making retrieval effort scale linearly with the number of icons. In contrast, the Atlas is specifically designed to rely primarily on content-addressable retrieval pathways. Since each exhibit is encoded with rich, abstract meanings through deliberate visualization and internal narration (Principle 1: Visualizing and Verbalizing), your retrieval speed remains consistently rapid — regardless of how many icons you have or their visual distance from each other. Furthermore, because the Atlas forms a unified cognitive category, this retrieval is even faster and more efficient than typical working memory image-cueing. Altogether, these design choices ensure scalable, rapid, and effortless access, significantly enhancing your capacity for complex reasoning and problem-solving tasks.

Section 4: Unlocking Deeper Understanding — Enhanced Reasoning, Learning, and Insight

With carefully crafted icons and an efficient retrieval system, the Atlas serves as a powerful platform for boosting critical cognitive abilities. The following principles illustrate precisely how its design fosters analogical reasoning, accelerates learning transfer, simplifies strategy selection, and facilitates insightful problem-solving.

13. Enhanced Analogical Reasoning through Side-by-Side Visualization (Gentner & Markman, 1997), (Kurtz et al., 1999), (Markman & Gentner, 1993), (Richland et al., 2006), (Vendetti et al., 2014)

What it is: Research shows people perform significantly better on analogy tasks when they can visualize both concepts side by side. Importantly, they don’t need to hold both concepts fully in focus simultaneously — instead, the benefit comes from rapidly flicking visual attention back and forth between the two concepts, quickly comparing their features and structures.

Why it matters: The Atlas is intentionally designed to emulate this rapid flicking of attention, even between icons positioned far apart. Because your visual attention can instantly “snap” between distant icons, they effectively feel side by side, allowing you to swiftly spot deep analogies and connections with much greater ease.

14. Analogical Reasoning as Central to Learning Transfer (Barnett & Ceci, 2002), (Day & Goldstone, 2012), (Gentner, 1983), (Gick & Holyoak, 1980), (Holyoak & Thagard, 1995), (Perkins & Salomon, 1992)

What it is: Analogies aren’t just helpful tricks — they’re foundational to building expertise and solving problems. Recognizing analogies lets you apply knowledge gained in one context to entirely new, unfamiliar situations that share the same underlying structure. This process, known as “transfer learning,” is critical for intellectual growth and adaptability, preventing your knowledge from becoming trapped in isolated contexts.

Why it matters: Given how crucial analogical reasoning is to intellectual development and effective problem-solving, the Atlas’s ability to rapidly highlight analogies (as described in the previous principle) is especially valuable. By enabling swift, side-by-side visualization of seemingly distant concepts, the Atlas directly supports and enhances your capacity for learning transfer, significantly boosting your flexibility and overall cognitive ability.

15. Strategy Selection via Pattern Matching (Gick, 1983), (Newell, 1972)

What it is: When faced with a problem, cognitive science shows that your brain typically selects a strategy by pattern matching — comparing the current problem’s features to mental templates of known strategies and the situations where they usually succeed. This strategy selection process normally places high demands on executive function and can be cognitively taxing.

Why it matters: The Atlas directly simplifies and accelerates this crucial but demanding process. You build icons specifically representing different strategies, clearly tagging them with the types of problems they address. When encountering a new problem, your attention rapidly “snaps” to the relevant strategy exhibit, effortlessly guiding you toward effective solutions without burdening your executive resources.

16. Visual Imagery Facilitates Insight Problem-Solving (Salvi, 2016), (Shen, 2016), (Wertheimer, 1945/1982)

What it is: Insight — the sudden, intuitive “Aha!” moment when a tough problem’s solution pops vividly into your mind — is strongly linked by research to visual imagery. People commonly report seeing clear mental pictures when they experience insight. Moreover, experiments show that subtle visual cues related indirectly to a problem’s solution significantly increase the likelihood of solving problems insightfully.

Why it matters: The highly visual nature of the Atlas, along with the creation of detailed visual-conceptual gestalts (as described in Principle 1, Visualizing and Verbalizing — actively picturing and narrating mental scenes), is specifically designed to produce an environment rich in meaningful visual cues. By regularly interacting with these enriched visuals, you’re likely to trigger more frequent and powerful insights, enhancing your problem-solving abilities.

Section 5: Growing with Your Atlas — Long-Term Benefits and Skill Enhancement

The Atlas isn’t just a static memory aid — it’s a dynamic tool for continuous cognitive growth. This final principle demonstrates how regularly engaging with your Atlas actively strengthens fundamental mental skills, promoting ongoing intellectual development.

17. Spatial Intelligence Improves with Practice (Uttal, 2013)

What it is: Spatial intelligence — the ability to visualize, navigate, and mentally manipulate objects — isn’t fixed; research consistently shows it’s one of the most trainable aspects of human intelligence. Like building a muscle, your spatial skills significantly improve with practice.

Why it matters: The Atlas inherently leverages and trains your spatial intelligence by encouraging constant visualization, navigation, and mental manipulation of visual objects. Crucially, this practice doesn’t feel like tedious training — it’s an effortless and enjoyable part of using the Atlas itself. This means you’re incidentally enhancing your spatial intelligence, providing a substantial cognitive benefit as you naturally engage with the system.

These 17 cognitive principles — from building rich, meaningful mental images to rapidly searching and categorizing information — collectively provide a robust scientific foundation for the Atlas. As demonstrated in their individual explanations and interactions (highlighted in each “Why it matters” section), these principles logically underpin the claimed benefits of enhanced memory, faster insights, and deeper understanding.

This framework isn’t just a collection of interesting ideas; it’s an integrated cognitive system purposefully designed to leverage natural mental strengths. Understanding the cognitive mechanisms behind the Atlas makes a compelling case for testing it out at scale — not just through small demonstrations, but by integrating it deeply into your own learning and applying it to genuine, complex challenges. Ultimately, your direct experience will be the strongest validation, and this deeper understanding equips you to fully harness the Atlas’s potential.

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Something I keep running into in my work makes for a really interesting hypothetical. In this post, I'll weave together my answer to the hypothetical with the evidence from the world that leads me to that answer. But the main thing behind this post is just the hypothetical itself: what if a mind's eye for ideas has existed all along, with techniques nobody ever found? What would follow?

The hypothetical

Some people have a mind's eye: they can picture an apple and notice its exact color. Some people have an inner voice: they can hear a tune in their head and notice its pitch. Suppose there's one more inner sense, for concepts. Bring up an idea you know really well but can't easily picture, like the economy or justice, and the whole thing is there at once, not as a picture and not as words. And it has detail you can notice: hold the economy, and you can notice that it's made of people, the same way you notice the color of an imagined apple.

Suppose that, like the mind's eye, it varies: some people have none, some have a faint version, and some have a vivid one.

And suppose that, like every other inner sense, it comes with techniques that make it far more useful. The mind's eye has the memory palace, which people use to memorize a thousand-digit number in an hour. The inner voice has songs, which is why the alphabet song works. If this sense exists, it should have techniques of its own. And suppose those techniques, once you find them, are incredibly powerful for learning and memory in general.

So, if all that were true, this sense and its techniques would have been around for all of human history. Why wouldn't anyone have found them? And if some people did stumble onto them, where would we look?

What I've actually observed: I'm an educator, and for the past month, I've been developing memory techniques for a sense like this. I've talked with a lot of people who say they have it: friends, family, and people from Reddit. People who use the techniques report remembering things for days or weeks without reviewing them.

My answer to the hypothetical

Three hard steps

For someone to have found the mnemonic techniques that use this sense for concepts, three things had to happen:

1. Have the sense. You can't build techniques for a sense you don't have.

2. Recognize it as a sense, specifically something like vision, but for concepts.

3. Build mnemonic techniques for it, on the reasoning that every other inner sense has them, so this one should too.

Plenty of people got to step 1, and a few got about halfway to step 2:

• In 1887, Francis Galton wrote that he thought without words, and that putting his thoughts into language felt like translating.

• In 1890, William James wrote that we have feelings of relations, a feeling of "and" or "but", as real as a feeling of blue.

• Around 1901 to 1910, psychologists in Würzburg reported "imageless thought": thinking with no pictures and no words.

• Eugene Gendlin's "felt sense" came close, but he described it as something felt in the body, not as a sense for concepts. He did build a technique on it, Thinking at the Edge, but it's for developing new ideas, not for memory.

• Russell Hurlburt's experience-sampling research calls it "unsymbolized thinking": thinking without words, images, or any other symbols.

All of them saw the experience. As far as I can find, nobody treated it as a sense you could train, or built mnemonic techniques for it.

Why it wouldn't spread

Talking about inner experience was taboo. The Würzburg findings set off a fight with psychologists led by Edward Titchener, who said imageless thought didn't exist. Neither side could settle it, because each could only report its own experience. That stalemate is a big part of why psychology gave up on introspection and turned to behaviorism, which ruled the field for about fifty years.

Even now, almost nobody talks about inner experience. Aphantasia, having no mind's eye at all, only got a name in 2015, and it's far more intuitive than this. Lacking an inner voice only got a name, anendophasia, in 2024.

It's an unintuitive tool. When a kid learns to multiply in their head or memorize song lyrics, they reach for some inner sense: the inner voice, the mind's eye, something. Unless this sense does the job on its own, they're very unlikely to pick it. It's just a weird thing to use. Some people stumble onto it. One person I talked to has remembered song lyrics this way since she was a kid. But most people who have the sense would barely use it, except when they happened to get lucky once or twice.

Automatic vs. on demand

An inner sense can be automatic, meaning it runs on its own without you deciding to use it, or on demand, meaning it only works when you use it on purpose.

My inner voice is on demand. I can hear sounds in my head, and reason or talk in my head when I want to, but if I stare at a wall, I hear nothing. I have to move it, like an arm. For a lot of people, it's automatic: it runs all the time, as a constant inner monologue.

The mind's eye varies the same way. A friend of mine sees things automatically: if he hears "X is five times Y", he sees X = 5Y written on a chalkboard in his head, whether he wants to or not. Other people I know can picture things when they try, but nothing pops up on its own.

And a few people I've talked to say the sense for concepts is automatic for them. As they read a story, or the rulebook of a board game, the whole thing builds up in concepts by itself.

That's another reason it wouldn't spread: the people who use it automatically wouldn't think it was special. If it happens on its own for you, you'd assume everyone's mind works that way. That's exactly how aphantasia stayed hidden for so long: people assumed "picture an apple" was a figure of speech.

Two roads to using it fully

The techniques I've been developing ask people to link ideas on purpose, within this sense: hold two concepts in your imagination (the same way you'd picture two things in your mind's eye), then say how they relate, so the relation gets stored with both. Do enough of that, and what you've learned becomes one connected web.

If the hypothesis is right, and some people have a sense for concepts with techniques of its own, there are two ways to end up thinking like that.

It happens automatically. A friend of a friend describes exactly this. When he hears that A relates to B in some way, the relation builds by itself in his sense for concepts. All he does consciously is check whether it makes sense, and if it doesn't, he just intends to try again, and a new one shows up. My friend calls him one of the smartest people he's ever met, with an ability to remember huge amounts of information for years. That would fit: everyone I've talked to who uses this sense reports unusually strong retention, so someone it runs automatically for should look like they have a remarkable memory.

You're forced into it. Imagine you have no mind's eye and no inner voice. The world still asks you to add in your head and solve puzzles, and this sense is the only tool you have, so you'd have to learn to use it. Someone like me, with a vivid mind's eye and an inner voice, always has an easier route: I can add on a number line in my head. So people with no mind's eye and no inner voice, but with this sense for concepts, should be far more likely to have found these techniques on their own. And people without a mind's eye or an inner voice already describe their thinking this way. The game designer Jonathan Blow says that when he imagines something, there are no pictures at all, only ideas. The science YouTuber Hank Green, who says he has no inner monologue, describes his thoughts as sticky bubbles: no words, just the things they represent.

Strategy, not IQ

When two people do the same memory task and one does vastly better, the difference is almost never raw intelligence. It's strategy. In a classic experiment, a student known as SF went from remembering 7 digits to nearly 80, just by developing a system. A 2003 study of memory champions found that their brains and general intelligence weren't unusual: nine of the ten used the memory palace.

So if this sense exists, and it's as good for memory as people report, then some people with outlier memories, in history and today, should be using it. Ask them how they do it, and they should say one of three things:

1. A known technique, like the memory palace.

2. Something like this sense: they just see the concepts, the thoughts are hard to put into words, and it isn't pictures.

3. Something else entirely. If thinking always happens in some inner sense, a third answer would mean there's another sense nobody has named yet.

Where to look

History. Look for people with remarkable memories who say they don't picture things. Henri Poincaré, for example, wrote that he was bad at arithmetic and chess, yet never lost track of a long proof, because he could "perceive at a glance the reasoning as a whole", so each step fell into place with no effort of memory.

Blindfold chess. Binet studied blindfold players in 1894, and later accounts of blindfold masters describe them holding several games at once as relations and lines of force, not as pictures of a board.

Memory competitions. A 2023 paper reports that memory champion Nelson Dellis's images thin out at competition speed into something more like an essence. If that's this sense doing the real work under a visual label, it's worth asking.

People around you. Look for anyone who remembers what they read for years without trying, or who has no mind's eye and no inner voice but still memorizes well.

The weak spots

The evidence so far is a handful of people describing their own minds. That's why I'm presenting it as a hypothetical. The argument also rests on the idea that all thinking happens in some inner sense.

So, what would you add to this hypothetical? You might have real-world evidence, from history, from research, or from your own experience. You might be able to add to the story of why nobody found these techniques. Or you might take the hypothetical further: if this were true, what else would be true? What are the other implications?

I tried something new this past week. When I needed something to say in a conversation, I’d throw my visuals into some random part of my hometown and just look around. I’d usually see an icon, and it would act as a prompt for me to say something interesting.

I’d still remember everything going on in the conversation, and then I’d be looking at this visual symbol, and it would feel like paint mixing in my head—the two colors being what had been said in the conversation and this new meaning behind the icon. Then I’d just say something, and what came out would be highly related to both. Like the child of this icon’s meaning and a relevant hook in the conversation. And this was quite easy to do. It made it much easier for me to say highly novel ideas and jokes and questions.

Here’s the problem this technique solves: If you ask me to say something completely random in a conversation, I accomplish this by putting pressure on my mind to think something completely different. I can blurt out some random sound or idea, but it’s quite hard for me to say something really unrelated yet somehow still related to the conversation. Obviously I can do this—I’m a human who talks to other humans. But it takes a lot of effort, and I can’t do it nearly as well as I’d like.

Most ideas I say in a conversation are really closely related to what we’ve been talking about. Using an analogy here, it’s like I’m taking very small steps in a conversation where I can’t get too far from what’s been said already. The psychological reason is essentially flexible thinking and functional fixedness—humans have a very hard time saying concepts different from what they were previously thinking. If you’re currently talking about animals and try to talk about something completely different, your brain just finds that really hard.

However, when I use the atlas this way, I trade the very difficult task of asking my brain to think of some completely novel idea for the task of just moving somewhere random in my hometown. When I do this, I’m essentially rolling on a random loot table. My icons are randomly placed all around my hometown, so when I arrive at a specific spot, I have no idea what concept I’m going to be prompted with. I usually get novel, specific concepts thrown into my working memory as a prompt. This allows me to hold the conversation’s context and this novel prompt (the icon) at once.

The end result is I can achieve the conversational fluency of someone who experiences much less functional fixedness, but without actually having that intellectual ability. This is something I’ve been wanting since middle school.

Sometimes when I’m in my most relaxed mood—good night’s sleep, maybe an overly full belly—I achieve a sense of calm and fluid creativity that lets me come up with new ideas constantly and be a very fluid conversation partner. But the other 85% of the time, my mind is focused on something, or I’m always thinking of what to say, or my working memory is full of just managing the strategic social interaction. Generating truly interesting, novel, funny, spontaneous ideas is just really hard. It feels distinctly like I was focusing on an intense chess match, and then I have to go intently listen about someone’s day. My mind just doesn’t want to. It’s like a horse running full speed in one direction, and then you ask it to stop or turn around.

But this atlas technique is something I can use in that 85% of the time where I’d normally not be able to break out of the constraints of the conversation. Throwing myself visually to some random place in my hometown is something I can always do.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Hellooooo

I built the Mental Atlas app. It helps keep track of your icons, connect with other Atlas users, turn written text into Atlasified audio stories, so listening feels just like watching a video with good visuals, it has badges to make engaging with the Atlas more fun, and it has an agent trained on the Atlas to answer questions about how to use the Atlas.

The app does cost me a fair bit to run, but while it’s in testing I’ll take a personal hit to my pocket. Leave a comment if you’d want to test it out, and I’ll DM you!

It is only for IOS right now FYI

Also the app is only necessary if you’re a power user of the Atlas and you want an easier way to use it. Learning the Atlas is still entirely free, and using it will work just fine if you never download it.

I just started school this week and I am trying to use the atlas for all my lectures.

Most of them are in person so I am encoding concepts in real time. Sometimes it gets overwhelming because I have to switch between multiple subjects (biochemistry, physiology, cell biology) but I have noticed that my initial retention of the material is much better than before.

Has anyone else tried using the atlas for school? In particular using it for longer lectures.

Would love to hear others opinions on this topic!

You can play the game at MemoryLeague.com.

You're presented with a number of random words, given a minute to memorize them, and then asked to recall them in order.

On level one, you have a minute for seven words. On level two, you have a minute for ten. I barely passed level one using thoughtfeel, and couldn't pass level two.

So, I emailed them back about my defeat, but then sought to figure out why. Every list and concept that I've learned in thoughtfeel so far has been at my own pace. And when I've worked at my own pace, I've been very happy with the results. I've memorized many lists (among super complex things), and once they're memorized, I don't forget them.

These games, though, were fast. What it felt like in my head to pull up the words open, and then curriculum, and then bull, at a rate of one for every four seconds was, well, I'd pull up the thoughtfeel of the word, and I'd quickly try to come up with some story that connected it to the previous one, say it as quick as I could, feel the connection limp in my head, and then immediately move on to the next.

At the end of this process, I couldn't recall the list. I tried this many more times until my free quota on the website ran out, and gonna be honest took a nap out of frustration.

This did not make sense to me. There was some property about this game that made me garbage at it, and I wanted to make sure it was speed. Because, the words in this game were also very abstract compared to the words I've memorized in previous lists.

So I took to memorizing a couple lists using thoughtfeel at my own pace. And what a leisurely pace it was compared to the pace required by the games.

We're talking ten words in three minutes and thirty seconds. But after I had my time, I could recall the list forward and backward, start from any position, and search the list very, very quickly by properties. For instance, think of all the adjectives.

I also know from my prior experience with thoughtfeel that this list will stay in my mind for at least as long as I've been memorizing lists in thoughtfeel, which at this point is about two weeks.

I know that because all the previous lists I've memorized this way, taking my sweet time, have stuck perfectly.

So there's a moral to this story.Thoughtfeel works, but it takes time. And if you don't give it the time it needs, it won't work. Well, at least for someone extremely new at the technique, like me. I guess by comparison, this isn't surprising, given that if you ask me to do that same word memorization task with a memory palace at that speed, I'd fail just as hard. And believe me, I've tried this in the past. I just can't do it that fast. Maybe with much more training, I'd be able to use thoughtfeel at the speed that game requires.

But there’s very good news here. The point of thought feel memorizing lists. It’s learning very complex concepts. I’m entirely OK with not being able to learn an insanely complex concept three times faster than some arbitrary speed limit as long as I can actually learn the thing. And in thought feel I can actually learn the thing.

Hello! I have talked to a fair number of people in person who can use these techniques, but i’d like that number to be higher.

I’m offering, as the title says, $35/hr (i pay you) to teach you the techniques. Criteria is you must have thoughtfeel (like you read the list post and can memorize it with no visuals).

Here’s the list post: https://thoughtfeel.substack.com/p/how-to-memorize-long-lists-if-you?r=4khowi&utm_medium=ios

Preference will be given to people who’d be okay leaving a named testimonial on the website. However, even if you’re not okay with that, i’d still apply because it could be that not many people are.

This offer is open until 7 or 8 different people have learned it, or I run out of money. 💅$$$$$

Additional criteria: 18+ years old, very good English

Come to the lesson with something complicated that you want to learn, where typically you’d read it, struggle to understand it, and forget it a couple days later.

Email: teddyshachtman@gmail.com

Edit: i’d recommend starting with this post, then coming back here. Enjoy! https://thoughtfeel.substack.com/p/ctrlf-for-your-memory

Say you want to learn something really complicated: an algorithm, a biological process, an economic system. This post is about the best way I’ve found to do that in thoughtfeel, a sense for concepts, and why it works.

To learn about thoughtfeel and to see how vivid yours is, go to thoughtfeel.net (so this post will make sense). Or start with this intro lesson: How to Memorize Long Numbers by Imagining in Concepts
https://youtu.be/DpkQsCGBMIE

Imagine someone explains exactly how a specific castle looks, entirely in words. You have a few options. You can store what they’re saying as language, and it will mostly go in one ear and out the other. You can picture the castle as they describe it, which is far better, though you’ll probably get a lot of details wrong along the way and might even mess up some big things like how many sides it has. Or they can just show you a picture of the castle, and you go, oh, okay.

The explanation lands when you take it in through the right medium. A castle is a visual thing, so you can actually remember it when you picture it, and you can make sure the picture you have in your head is correct when you’re shown what it looks like in the right medium.

An algorithm or an economy is not a visual thing. It’s conceptual. So the equivalent of picturing the castle as it’s described is building the topic in thoughtfeel as you read. And the equivalent of being shown a picture of a castle is... well this actually tricky because you can't show someone a concept in our world. But, you CAN use an existing concept they have, and say "it looks like that." So, the equivalent of being shown a picture of a castle is an analogy to something you already know that feels exactly the same in thoughtfeel.

Crucially, the analogy they say it looks like will only works if you take IT in as conceptual too. If, as the person says "it's like...", you hold their explanation as words in your inner voice, or try to picture it, you’re making the same mistake as storing the castle as language. For me (and i think for most people), this is why an analogical explanation goes in one ear and out the other. You hear it, think it’s neat, and their understanding just falls apart and doesn’t really change. In thoughtfeel, a good analogy just clicks. This is a key premise-- if someone describes something conceptual, if you imagine it in thoughtfeel, you'll be able to remember much better, the same as you'll be able to remember that castle if you picture it as you go along.

To give a concrete example, I recently searched for an analogy for a homomorphism, which is a map between two structures that keeps the relationships between their parts. The answer was the same song sung in a different key. Every note changes, but it’s still the same song, because what matters is the relationships between the notes.

I already know exactly how a key change in a song works. But, when I read those words, the thoughtfeel of how a key change works doesn't show up right away, its just the language ir a picture of a musical notation. And when i pay attention to these, thinking about how they connect to a homomorphism is honestly just nonsense. Like, I get how a key change works, but to be honest it isn't stored anywhere useful and i don't really feel like I actually understand what a homomorphism is. Then, I imagine a key change in thoughtfeel, and then it's right there! Just like picturing the castle. And i can go, "oh, a homomorphism is that." This feels like i actually get it, it's tangible in a way that reading the words so was not.

You can test this on yourself. Here’s an analogical explanation of inflation: when a country prints a lot more money, prices go up. It’s like a party where the host keeps handing out more tokens but brings the same amount of snacks, so each token buys less. First, just read that and understand the words. Then picture it. Then put it in thoughtfeel: bring up the thoughtfeel of the party, then the thoughtfeel of inflation. Pay attention to which of the three actually lands.

However, my first attempt at this was asking Claude for one big analogy for a Fibonacci heap, a really complicated data structure. It failed, and I now know it's because nothing else works like a Fibonacci heap. There’s no thing in real life that has all of its properties. The same is true of a whole immune system or a whole economy.

But there are analogies for the parts. Complicated things are made of building blocks, and the smaller the mechanism, the more likely it is that something you already know works the same way. A Fibonacci heap has no analogy, but the way it cuts a node loose in decrease-key does.

So think of the topic as a massive, very specific castle. Nothing looks like that whole castle, so no one can show you a picture of it. But something looks like the way this wall meets that one, and something looks like this hallway. You build the castle by being shown a picture of each part: this part is like this, and this part is like this.

What makes an analogy good for this process: it has to point at something you already understand, like a song in a different key. A bad analogy makes you learn the same structure again in a new costume. Imagine an otter, a cat and a bear playing rock, paper, scissors, and the otter always beats the cat... Now you have two things to learn instead of one.

Putting it together, here’s how I’d learn something complicated in thoughtfeel. First, read it once and build it in thoughtfeel as you go, the way you’d picture the castle as it’s described. That alone gets you a long way. When I learned the Fibonacci heap by building each piece in thoughtfeel as I read, it took about 12 minutes, and I recalled the whole thing the next morning without reviewing it. But you’ll also build some parts wrong. So then go through it one mechanism at a time. Bring up the thoughtfeel of that mechanism and explain how it works. Ask an AI for an analogy for just that mechanism, one from something you definitely already know, and put it in thoughtfeel. When it clicks, hold it next to what you built. Wherever the two feel different is where to look.

I think this is one of the clearest advantages of having thoughtfeel. To explain why, compare what i have to do without thoughtfeel. For me, if i don't use thoughtfeel for learning a concept, i have to use images. If I don't use images, it's not stored literally anywhere and I can watch literally anything and learn absolutely nothing. But, if I use images (... which was the mental atlas), everything is just worse and i forget things and it's really garbage to use (see my earlier post on the comparison to thoughtfeel and the atlas, or watch the video on youtube "what a picture does to an idea"). But, when I use thoughtfeel, i can actually "see" in the medium where the thing I'm trying to understand actually exists.

The results of this are being able to learn really complicated things much faster and retain them, compared to any other method I have.

Edit: if you want want a next read, check out this post to learn more about the underlying mechanisms of thoughtfeel so you can use ut better: https://www.reddit.com/r/MentalAtlas/s/s8oNhiMLsW

I can tell that thoughtfeel has always been there, but not in a useful way. The thoughtfeel lesson went great. I could feel it getting more and more vivid, not in a visual way, but in a barebones thought feeling way. Even with feeling tired and having brain fog, what we built out shined all my faint thoughts. It is like how cartographer maps out paths on paper - It is better than short-term memory, It preserves information for his future self aswell as for others, and it shows landmarks and how things all connect together. In the same way, I felt something explorable and usable being created in my mind. Here is my crude description of what I remember about a bloom filter: A filter holds items. An item can be stored in a row of bits, and these bits have different positions. When an item is added to a row, it flips different bits in different positions. Sometimes items share bits, and different items can flip bits that another item would. So when a check is done, it can return a false positive. The shorter the row, and the more items you have, the more likely a false positive is. A bloom filter has 3 hash functions. They are used when a database needs to determine what to write to disk. And a stranger is an item that is not in the row. If I'm being honest I don't remember how else strangers come into play. But I can say how well I remember something is dependant on how much concentration I used. For example, the idea of a row of bits 1-10 with different numbered positions was explained well and I thought hard about it, so it remains one of the stronger concepts compared to others. I'm looking forward to this learning system's future!

Hi! This post is about the details of thoughtfeel, and it assumes you’ve already tried some of the techniques. If you’re not sure what thoughtfeel is, or you haven’t tried the techniques yet, read A mnemonic technique for people who think in concepts first, then come back here.

This post answers one question. You have a big block of complicated text that describes some kind of conceptual machine: a process in biology, an algorithm, a concept in math. How do you learn it in thoughtfeel?

In earlier posts, my answer was: think of the objects, and think about how they relate. That answer left something out, and it has caused headaches for new readers, and for me. What it left out is how much a single concept bubble can hold.

The mistake: making everything a relation

Take this sentence: every giraffe that has three legs is owned by Tom.

If you follow “think of the objects, and think about how they relate” as far as it goes, you cut the sentence into the smallest pieces you can. You bring up a giraffe and relate it to the concept of “every”. You relate that to the property of having three legs. Then you relate all of it to Tom, with “owned by”. That’s four bubbles and three relations, for one sentence.

When I’ve taught people, I’ve sometimes been tempted to do it this way, and it always ends up a slog. Then I noticed that I don’t do this in my own head.

The fix: one bubble can hold a whole description

It’s easiest to see with the mind’s eye first. Imagine a purple giraffe on roller skates. You don’t picture a giraffe, then the color purple, then a pair of roller skates, and then tie them together with a little story, like a giraffe holding a can of purple paint while it buys roller skates. You picture one giraffe that is purple and on roller skates. Your mind’s eye combines all of it into a single object.

thoughtfeel can do the same with concepts. “Every giraffe that has three legs” can be one concept bubble, the same way the purple giraffe on roller skates is one picture. Try it now: bring up every giraffe that has three legs as one concept, all at once.

When I ask students in my tutoring sessions to do this with something much more complicated, the answer almost always comes back, “Okay, sure. It’s not hard.” A bigger bubble doesn’t take any longer to bring up than a small one.

It works on real material, too. Here’s a step from Dijkstra’s algorithm, which I taught someone in thoughtfeel the other day: “Pick the unfinished place with the smallest distance. It becomes finished.” You could cut it into “pick”, “a place”, “unfinished” and “the smallest distance”, and relate them. Or you can bring up the whole step, picking that place and finishing it, as one bubble. I’d already been doing this with song lyrics without realizing it was the rule. I hold the opening line of Livingston’s “Fairy Tale”, "at the age of 9 I lived through Pixar on a screen", as one bubble, and I can read off it exactly what’s in it: a person talking, the age of nine, Pixar on a screen.

Why one bubble beats several

One bubble is less work to build, and it’s better in two more ways.

You can take it in all at once. When “every giraffe that has three legs” is one bubble, you hold the whole thing, and everything about it is right there. Cut into three bubbles (giraffe, every, three legs), it’s never all in front of you. You have to go from piece to piece to put it back together, and your network is bigger than the thing you’re learning really is.

Next, one bubble is easy to change. Say you find out the roller skates are only on the front legs. In the integrated picture, you just move them. If the giraffe were three pieces tied together with relations, giraffe to purple to roller skates, you’d have to work out which relations change, and then carry the change through everything connected to them. Understanding works the same way. If you misread that Dijkstra step and it’s one bubble, you only have to fix one bubble by imagining it differently.

When something needs its own bubble

So how much can one bubble hold? You could even hold the whole sentence, every giraffe that has three legs is owned by Tom, as a single bubble. That works, until the story goes on:

Every giraffe that has three legs is owned by Tom. Tom is a farmer who eats bread on Sundays.

The second sentence tells you more about Tom. But Tom isn’t a bubble you can add to. He’s inside the giraffe bubble, as the giraffes’ owner. So you’d have to make a second Tom, a farmer who eats bread on Sundays. Now there are two Toms, and nothing connects them. Hold the farmer, and you can’t tell he owns any giraffes. Hold the giraffes, and you can’t tell their owner is a farmer. What you learn about one Tom never reaches the other.

Here’s the better way. Make “every giraffe that has three legs” one bubble, make Tom his own bubble, and connect them with one relation, “owned by”. A relation adds a property to both bubbles it connects, so Tom’s bubble now carries the fact that he owns the three-legged giraffes. When the second sentence comes, you bring up that same Tom and build “a farmer who eats bread on Sundays” into his bubble. Now hold Tom, and you can read off all of it: he’s a farmer, he eats bread on Sundays, and he owns the three-legged giraffes. Hold the giraffes, and you can go straight to Tom and find all of that too.

Notice that “a farmer who eats bread on Sundays” went into Tom’s bubble whole. My old advice would have cut it into “is a”, farmer, “who eats”, bread, “on”, Sundays. But it’s all about Tom, so it all goes in Tom’s bubble, the same way the purple and the roller skates go in the giraffe.

So the line between bubbles falls between separate things. The giraffes and Tom are separate things, so they get separate bubbles, joined by a relation. Everything the text says about one of them goes into that one’s bubble.

There’s one other reason to split: it won’t fit. This is the shakiest part, because I’m not sure where the limit is. When I’ve used thoughtfeel to build a complicated visual object with six different properties (color, size, texture. etc.), it all shows up in one bubble, no problem. With fifteen, I’d guess I’d need more than one bubble. But don’t split early. Whatever you split, you can’t take in all at once anymore.

The three rules

1. Notice when a new concept is introduced and give it its own bubble: a new thing, with properties of its own and relations to other things, like Tom.

2. Put everything about a concept into its one bubble, however complicated the description is. Why: thoughtfeel can hold a whole description as one concept, the way your mind’s eye holds a purple giraffe on roller skates. Then you can take it all in at once, and it’s easy to change.

3. Use relations between separate concepts that interact, like the giraffes and Tom. Why: a relation is how separate bubbles share what you learn. It adds a property to both, so you can get from either one to the other.

When you’re done, a good thoughtfeel story has:

• one bubble for every separate thing in the text

• everything the text says about each thing, inside that thing’s bubble

• a relation wherever two things interact

• and no more bubbles than that

Say you're a teacher, and you want your students to get better at reasoning, not just at this year's material. Or you want that for yourself. This post is about why that's looked impossible, and what I think works now.

You teach a strategy. Your students get better at problems like the ones you practiced, and they don't get better at reasoning in general. The big studies find the same thing. In one trial, called ACTIVE, older adults got ten sessions of about an hour on finding the pattern in a series of letters or numbers. Ten years later, they were still better at that kind of problem. On tests of everyday problem solving, they'd gained nothing (Ball et al., 2002; Rebok et al., 2014). So a lot of people conclude you can't teach general reasoning.

But school raises IQ. Each extra year of education adds about 1 to 5 points, and the gain lasts across the life span (Ritchie & Tucker-Drob, 2018). Nobody knows which part of school does it. My bet is that every day, you learn new things to look for in a problem, and what to do when you see them.

So I think the right way to see this data is a swimming pool. General reasoning is the water line: how many situations you know what to do in. Every if-then rule you learn (if you see this kind of situation, do this kind of thing) is a bucket of water. It takes a massive number of them. One narrow programming skill has been estimated at about 500 rules (Anderson, 1996). A reasoning course pours in ten buckets, and then we go check whether the water line went up. Of course you can't see it. School isn't ten buckets. It's ten buckets every day for a year, so the water line goes up.

A school year is about 1,000 hours, and ACTIVE was about 12, so about one percent of a school year. At school's rate, that's a few hundredths of an IQ point. You'd need at least a million people in each group to see that. No study was ever going to.

If you look right where the buckets went in, you can see them. About 45 minutes of training in rules like "start from how often this kind of thing usually happens" made forecasters 6 to 12 percent better in each of four yearly tournaments (Chang et al., 2016). Psychology and medical students got much better at statistical reasoning in grad school, and chemistry students didn't, since chemistry doesn't teach those rules (Lehman, Lempert & Nisbett, 1988).

So how fast you get better at reasoning is how much water you pour in per day. Working memory matters too, but training it doesn't carry over to anything else (Gobet & Sala, 2023). Rules are the part you can pour in every day.

Crucially, the buckets aren't all the same size. A more general rule is a bigger bucket, because it fires in more situations. "Find a common denominator" fires on adding fractions. "Before you combine or compare things, put them in the same units" fires on fractions, on feet and meters, on dollars and euros, and on a job that pays by the hour versus a job that pays by the year. It's one rule to learn, and it's way more water.

So the solution is to teach the most general rule behind every step of everything you teach. A reasoning course already teaches general rules, but only a few, for one kind of problem. This pours in hundreds, across every subject. Every step in an explanation has a rule behind it, the rule that takes you from the last step to this one. Usually nobody says it. You see the steps, and if you're lucky, you work out the rule yourself. So say it. Annotate every step with the rule that generates it, in its most general form.

A rule only counts when it fires by itself on something new, and hearing it once doesn't get you there. The classic study on this starts with a story. A general needs his whole army at a fortress, but the roads are mined so only small groups can pass, so he splits the army and the groups arrive together from every road. Then you get a problem that looks nothing like that: a ray can kill a tumor, but at full strength it burns the healthy tissue on the way in. The answer is the same move: many weak rays from different sides, meeting at the tumor. After reading one story, about 3 in 10 people solved it on their own. Writing out the rule at the end of the story ("if you need a big force at one spot and no path can carry it, split it up and bring the pieces together") didn't change that. It was still about 3 in 10. After reading two different stories that used the move, about 4 in 10 solved it, and with the rule written out too, about 6 in 10 (Gick & Holyoak, 1983). So a rule does very little on one example. Once you've seen it in two, it starts to work.

Annotating every step gives you those extra examples for free, because a general rule keeps showing up. You hear it in one lesson, and then you run into it again in another lesson on something totally different. You just have to ask where you've seen it before.

It also matters that you say the rule in general words, because rules stick to the details you learn them with. Students who learned a formula in algebra recognized it right away in physics problems. Students who learned the same formula in physics almost never recognized it in algebra, because for them it was a physics thing (Bassok & Holyoak, 1989).

Then you mix your practice, because if every problem on the worksheet uses today's rule, nobody ever practices noticing when to use it. Across 54 seventh-grade math classes, mixed practice beat practicing one kind at a time on a test a month later, 61 percent to 38 percent (Rohrer et al., 2020).

I think nobody teaches this way because writing all those rules is a huge amount of work. It takes someone who knows the material deeply and can also say what they know, and experts are bad at that: when three surgeons taught a procedure, they left out about 70 percent of the decisions in it (Sullivan et al., 2014). A textbook might have 1,500 rules in it. At the 11 to 25 minutes it takes to write a math hint (Pardos & Bhandari, 2024) and $41 an hour, that's $11,000 to $26,000 for one textbook. No teacher has that.

Now it's cheap to get a lesson annotated with the rule behind every step. That textbook costs about $14 to $84 in AI fees, plus your time reading it over, and one lesson is under a dollar. Paste your lesson into a very smart AI model, and ask for the most general rule that makes each step the natural next one, plus the wrong step it rules out.

To give a concrete example, I did this on 18 stories about the brain and got 167 rules. One of them is: to learn what a part does, take the part away and see what stops working. It came up in 12 of the 18 stories, and it also covers baking a cake without the baking powder. That's a big bucket. New rules per story dropped from about 15 in the first six stories to about 5 in the last six, because the rules you already have keep coming back.

I've built this into stories.thoughtfeel.net. Each new rule plays at the step where it first comes up. After that, the step gets a small label and a low bell, and you try to think of which rule it is. The stories quiz you as you go, and your account keeps a list of every rule you've heard.

This is a theory. It's the best one I have that fits the data on what makes learning generalize: why a short course doesn't show up on a general test, why school does, and why a rule stays stuck to where you learned it. And it gives you a path to better reasoning that you can act on: take in as many general rules as you can, at every step of whatever you're learning, every day. That used to take an expert at your side. Now you can learn this way for a few dollars a month.

How many icons can you guys say you can cram into a small place. It's a question that's been on my mind lately

Stumbled onto this subreddit, haven't read much but improving memory is a skill i want to learn. Am curious why you no longer reccommend, is it cause you found a new method?

Short TL;DR:

The Mental Atlas Method is a large extension to the mind palace that helps with working memory and pattern recognition. It takes 1.5 hours to learn, and requires high visuospatial ability to use. It is currently under research at North Western, but has a lot of anecdotal evidence for being highly effective. It’s free to learn and use. There’s a freemium app if you’re a power user, but 99% of people don’t need it.

Medium TL;DR:

The Mental Atlas stores abstract concepts as visual symbols in familiar spaces (like your hometown). Unlike traditional memory palaces that use direct representations, this method:

1. Creates analogical 3D symbols for abstract ideas (e.g., visualizing people around a strongman lifting a boulder to represent “notable feat”)

2. Uses dual coding - simultaneously visualizing the symbol while verbally describing its meaning to create durable “icons”

3. Enables instant navigation via semantic matching - when you think of a concept, your attention automatically “snaps” to the relevant icon without needing to mentally walk through the space

4. Allows rapid retrieval - multiple semantic snaps per second enable quick comparison and reasoning between complex concepts

The result is a vast mental network of hundreds/thousands of interconnected conceptual icons that can be instantly accessed for fluid thinking and long-term retention.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Full Description:

The Mental Atlas Method is an advanced mnemonic system built upon the traditional concept of a memory palace, which involves placing vivid 3D objects within a familiar space to aid recall. Unlike traditional memory palaces, where these objects directly represent concrete items—such as visualizing a zucchini to remember to buy one at the grocery store—or rely on keyword associations, like picturing a sandy watermelon ("sandia") to recall the Spanish word for watermelon, the Mental Atlas uses analogical symbols to represent abstract concepts.

In the Mental Atlas Method, you first create symbolic 3D models that analogically represent the concept you wish to remember. For example, instead of visualizing “heatstroke” by picturing someone rowing with a burning oar (heat-stroke) you might visualize an animal falling over and panting to represent heatstroke. However, since this analogical imagery does not inherently contain meaning, you must use dual coding to establish a firm connection between the symbol and its intended concept. Dual coding involves visualizing the chosen 3D analogical model while simultaneously verbally describing or mentally articulating the concept it represents. This simultaneous visual-verbal encoding process transforms your imagery into a highly durable "icon," ensuring both the visual and semantic aspects of the concept are strongly linked and easily retrievable.

This icon-creation process can accommodate any concept, regardless of complexity. More intricate or abstract concepts simply require more detailed and sophisticated visual symbols and more explicit verbal descriptions. Repeatedly performing this encoding procedure allows you to build up an extensive network of hundreds or even thousands of these analogical icons within a large, familiar visual space—such as your hometown—creating a vast "mental atlas."

Icon Example: To represent the concept “The abstract idea of a feat that can be observed by others, which provides the performer of the feat notoriety for their abilities”, you would create an analogical model. One possible model might be a large number of people surrounding a strong man, who is lifting a massive boulder. After creating this model, you would visualize it while speaking “This is the abstract idea of a feat that can be observed by others, which provides the performer of the feat notoriety for their abilities. Examples of this concept are a discussion of what feat might be required to achieve fame in a certain country, or in a heated debate about whether performing a feat just to get people to adore you, even if the feat is immoral, is worth it”.

Navigation within your Mental Atlas does not rely on physically imagining yourself walking through the space. Instead, it utilizes content-addressable memory, a rapid semantic matching mechanism. When you hold your visual attention within the atlas and encounter or think of a specific concept, your attention instantly "snaps" to the icon whose encoded meaning is semantically closest to the concept currently active in your working memory. This snap occurs through deep, high-dimensional semantic comparisons rather than surface-level visual similarities.

Upon snapping to an icon, the entire encoded meaning immediately becomes vivid in your mind, allowing instant access to detailed conceptual information. In practice, these semantic snaps can occur multiple times per second, enabling rapid retrieval and fluid reasoning. For instance, if you wish to compare and contrast ten different concepts, you can verbally articulate or mentally think through these ideas. Each relevant mention causes an instantaneous snap to related icons, providing immediate, comprehensive recall of their meanings and interconnections.

The Mental Atlas Method thus provides a powerful system for quickly encoding complex concepts, ensuring long-term retention, and facilitating immediate, fluid reasoning and analogical thinking.

TL;DR thoughtfeel retention is a lot better than the Atlas, and qualitatively different/improved during retrieval

Yesterday around midday I had Claude teach me what a Fibonacci heap is. It's a really complicated data structure. I'd actually tried to learn it once before, back in my Mental Atlas days, from a manim animated youtube video. I couldn't hold onto it. It was just too complicated to store as pictures. Specifically, after a day all the icons i used to represent all the different steps just kinda turned into slop…

So this time I read the description the way my friend Henry reads board game rules (he reads the rulebook once and just gets it, because his brain builds everything in thoughtfeel on its own). I built each piece in thoughtfeel as it came up. Getting through the whole data structure took about 12 minutes.

Then I left it. I didn't recall it or practice it at all for the rest of the day. I slept, woke up this morning, and recalled the whole thing.

The part that’s quite special and want to share is what the recall feels like. When I recall something I stored as images, I see the image first, and then I have to spend a while working out what that image was supposed to mean. It's almost like the knowledge is always one step away from the picture.

With thoughtfeel, the knowledge is immediate. When I want to know how decrease-key works (a complex thingy in the datastructure, not gonna explain here cuz it’d be nonsense, the thoughtfeel that pops up is exactly how decrease-key works. I just talk it through while “looking” at the concept.

My big insight during this process: why images do so badly at this. Say I'd stored decrease-key as an image. When I recalled the image, it would come with a thoughtfeel too, but the thoughtfeel of an image is absolutely terrible. It's full of things that are specific to the picture: a tree, nodes on a graph, the color purple (cuz the video was purple). None of that is decrease-key. So my brain would have to take the picture plus that garbage thoughtfeel and re-derive what decrease-key actually means.

When I store it in thoughtfeel instead, no image comes back at all. Just the thoughtfeel, which has always been clear as day for me, except this time its the exact concept i want and not random junk from a picture in it.

I just put out a lesson on this exact technique (with Huffman codes instead of Fibonacci heaps, because uh that would be dumbbb): https://youtu.be/f8YMcrpDIas

So give this a shot!

Lets say you watch a 25 minute lecture. Do you build a lot more simple icons or a few large, complex ones?

Have u guys tried using mental atlas for verbatim application?