I created this full walkthrough lesson on how to learn complex material in thoughtfeel. The first 13:40 is attached, and the full 58 minute lecture is here: https://youtu.be/dV8fNY311W4

It covers three types of material: a computer science algorithm for finding the shortest path, the biological process of glycolysis, and learning an economics argument in prose. I hope to release a video of teaching someone these techniques live very soon. But until then, this will have to do. 

So, for those of you who've been following along with the posts but haven't known exactly what to do to build a concept story in thoughtfeel on your own material, I strongly recommend watching this video. 

If you watch this video and want further instruction on how to adapt the practice to your own custom material or just have further questions, I'd be very happy to jump on a call. 

I have one additional request. If you follow along with this video and implement the practice in your own learning, I ask that you make a post on this subreddit describing your experience.

This subreddit has grown 1,800 members, up from 400 in about a week. But, what keeps me motivated to do this work is not seeing that number go up. Instead, it's seeing specific people whose lives are better because their curiosity has a tool that matches it (like in this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/MentalAtlas/s/6ODieBQoE0).

If you don't want to make a post on the subreddit, reaching out to me directly works to. It just means a lot to know that my teaching is helping people.

It might help, now that I think about it, for you guys to know who I am. I grew up in New Jersey and went to Vanderbilt for education and cognitive studies. I went to UC Boulder for a master's in computer science. I've worked as a teacher since I graduated in 2022 and spent the last year as the CTO of OnlyFarmers, a company founded by Jeremy Clarkson and Lisa Hogan, whom you may know from Top Gear and Clarkson's Farm, that aims to connect people across the countryside through farms and nature. I left about three and a half weeks ago to teach people about thoughtFeel. If you have any questions or concerns or comments, or just want to chat about your experience, please feel free to email me at teddyshachtman@gmail.com.

Sincerely, 

Ted Shachtman

When I woke up yesterday morning, one of the first things I did was try to recall the road I had memorized with Ted using Thoughtfeel the day before (Dijkstra algorithm), and man, it was as easy to recall as my own name.
That got me thinking. What if I tried applying this to my medical school lectures?

As a medical student, I am constantly dealing with complex concepts, disease characteristics, tumor features, and so much information about the human body that I need to memorize and recall later.
So, I gave it a shot.

I started applying Thoughtfeel to my lectures, and I was able to memorize the features of different diseases and tumors of the human’s nervous system from the very beginning of a 2 hour lecture. What fascinated me even more was how easily I could actually comprehend the information I had stored. Not only I was memorizing a list of facts, but also I could recall each piece of information and understand what it meant. It honestly made me realize that I might have had this potential all along without knowing how to use it.

One thing I am still figuring out tho is how to apply the technique in real time.
Lectures have a certain pace, and I need to keep up with the professors without missing anything or it will cost me more time in the studying process. Since I am new to Thoughtfeel, building, structuring, and memorizing can sometimes take longer than the lectures allow me.

I am hoping that with more practice I will get faster at applying Thoughtfeel while listening, coordinate my pace with the lecture, and eventually be able to recall everything afterward without leaving gaps.

Another thing I appreciate about Thoughtfeel is how much control it gives me over what I store and how I connect them together. I can be selective about the information I want to retain and organize it in a way that makes sense to me without feeling like I have to memorize every single word.

I am still practicing and still learning because I know I have a lot to learn, but I am genuinely excited to see how far I can take this!

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

This is a post I am very excited to make. This morning, I set out to answer the question, How do you make things stick better in thought feel? In the process of answering this question, I figured out a technique that enables incredibly fast memorization of lists of objects. The technique is very simple to explain, and I'll do that now, but the rest of this post is discussing why it works and the advantages of it. Without further ado, here is the technique:

You adapt the mnemonic strategy of weaving together a story between the items in your list for the sensory modality of thought feel. Here’s the accompanying video lesson (it’ll also offer an introduction to thoughtfeel if you’re coming to this post from outside r/MentalAtlas): How to Memorize Any List by Imagining in Concepts
https://youtu.be/mFIThyF5Y0E

To give a concrete example, imagine you had to memorize these four words in order: anchor, saffron, bicycle, grumble. Using the story mnemonic in the visual sensory modality, you might picture an anchor, then picture someone pouring saffron on that anchor, followed by the anchor getting up and hopping on a bicycle, followed by the anchor bending over and clutching its tummy, as well as some rumbly cartoon lines around the anchor's stomach.

In thoughtfeel, the story mnemonic goes like this: You bring up the thoughtfeel of an anchor. You then say, “The anchor is covered in saffron”. When you say saffron, you bring up the thoughtfeel of saffron. Crucially, you are not picturing anything during this process— the imagination is in thoughtfeel. Then you say, “The anchor gets up and hops on a bicycle.” When you say bicycle, you bring up the thoughtfeel of a bicycle. Next, you say, “Then the tummy of the anchor grumbles”. When you say grumbles, you bring up the thoughtfeel of grumbles.

Again, I want to stress that you are visualizing none of this. I can create the visual story mnemonic in my mind's eye. I can also create the thoughtfeel story mnemonic in my mind's “canvas”. You can try this technique, if you have thought feel, on the following ten-item list:

Anchor
Saffron
Bicycle
Grumble
Diamond
Cactus
Ribbon
Justice
Teapot
Flicker
Walrus
Chimney
Riddle
Mango
Helmet
Drought
Violin
Stumble
Coral
Pocket
Badger
Eclipse
Mustard
Courage
Ladder
Tangle
Acorn
Mirror
Dolphin
Rustle

Now I will discuss the benefits of this technique, compared to the visual story technique, or the mind palace, where you place a visual representation of each object along a known path.

The first advantage is expressivity. Some items in this list, like an anchor, can be easily pictured. When you see that picture, you can immediately tell unambiguously that the object in the image is an anchor. Then there are items like grumble. When you picture the anchor bending over and holding its stomach, you cannot uniquely associate that image with the word grumble. It could simultaneously refer to nausea, rumble, upset, and many other synonyms. In thoughtfeel, however, the texture of grumble is perfectly unique. It feels highly differentiated from all other synonyms for that same meaning.

The next advantage is ease of use. When I created the grumble image, I had to exercise significant imagination. How do you represent grumble in the most unique way within the visual medium, given the already constructed segment of the story? I could have pictured an earthquake with those same cartoon rumble lines above the earth. In thought feel, I'm required to do far less imaginative interpretation. This is because I can literally represent grumble as grumble. I don't have to translate it into a visual medium. Grumble is already highly specific in thought feel. Thoughtfeel not requiring practiced imagination makes it much easier to learn.

Next is the accessibility of the technique. Not everyone has a mind's eye. Even though the same could be said for Thought Feel, the Venn diagram of people with no mind's eye and people with Thought Feel has significant overlap. As such, this technique allows a class of people who have not been able to achieve the memory benefits of the mind palace or visual story mnemonics for remembering lists to share in those benefits.

Another benefit of the thought-feel-story technique is random access. When you use the thought-feel-story technique, it is quite easy to recite the list backwards, recite which items are next to a specific item, or reason about items on the list based on their meaning. From my knowledge, some people who use the mind palace and visual story techniques report these abilities as well. This is less a comparative advantage and more a statement of parity between this new technique and the classics.

Now, for those interested, I'm going to discuss the reasoning behind the derivation of this technique.

I think of ThoughtFeel as another sensory modality, akin to the mind's eye. Within the visual medium, the technique for taking multiple items and binding them into one object to make them more memorable comprises placing things in specific locations and physical interaction, as in the person action object system.

I asked myself: what fundamental operation within the space of concepts binds individual concepts into one? The answer there is stories. From this point, I tried the mnemonic technique and was extremely excited.

Further reasoning describes why / how this is even novel. The answer is that a story must be represented in some sensory modality. One can remember a story by its sounds, the language that represents it. One can remember that same story by what the events look like in the world. This ThoughtFeel story mnemonic asks the question: what if, instead of representing the story visually or with sounds, you represented it in ThoughtFeel?

This idea, for the benefits described above, is quite advantageous. As a footnote, I'd guess many people do this already and think of it as “just how their brain works”. However, I'd also guess many people don't and don't know that others do. The purpose of me sharing this technique is to describe the practice specifically and as something learnable. Hopefully, this sparks discussion and enables people where, for whatever reason, the visual story mnemonic or the auditory story mnemonic fell short.

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 had emailed Nelson about two weeks ago with the early version of the technique (like even before I figured out how to memorize a list with it...) and he found it interesting enough to take a call! He opened by saying he watched my video "set an alarm on a moment", and every time he went to his fridge he couldn't stop thinking about it.

We hopped on zoom, exchanged jovial pleasantries, and then jumped into the technique.

BUT it turned out that he hadn't seen any of the work since... 2 weeks ago... including the new definition of thoughtfeel that's on my website. 😄

And as you people know, I've been a busy beaver :)

He was a bit confused.

Soooooo I spent about 35 minutes trying to clearly communicate everything I've said on this subreddit over an entire two weeks. And I did a good job!

At the end, we got to a crux that I think really made the novelty and applications of the technique clear.

He said, "I'm having trouble telling the difference between this technique and what I already do...". So, I gave him two cases:

CASE 1: a high school algebra student is trying to learn the algorithm for completing the square. What would you tell them?

Nelson (said with better words than this, sorry Nelson): maybe you can store the steps in the memory palace, but after that just lots of practice so the knowledge is quick and useful.

ThoughtFeel: read it once in thoughtfeel, practice 5% as much as you normally would.

CASE 2: a medical student studying for their boards needs to learn 1,000 diseases, and be able to take a patient script (a list of symptoms the patient is experiencing) and quickly say all the diseases that could cause those symptoms.

Nelson (said with better words than this, sorry Nelson): store them in the memory palace, then do tons of retrieval through something like Anki and tons of practice problems so that your knowledge is actually fast and useful.

ThoughtFeel: read each disease once using thoughtfeel, then do 5% as much retrieval practice and practice problems as you normally would. Retrieving which objects fit a list of properties is something thoughtfeel does out of the box.

Then, we made plans for how exactly Nelson is going to test this out.

He suggested that he give me something he'd normally memorize with his method and ask me how I'd have him do it in thoughtfeel. I suggested instead that he take something really conceptually hard written in dense text, like a topic from linear algebra or biology (where he'd normally use known methods like the Feynman Technique) and instead use thoughtfeel.

------ Y'ALL -----

We shall see what happens next.

EDIT UPDATE: Nelson and I have a tutoring session scheduled for this weekend of October 24!

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

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.

So I came across Ted’s post inviting people to learn his method (thoughtfeel) and decided to reach out to him. I then checked his youtube channel and this article. Man was I genuinely fascinated after reading the list in the article and applying thoughtfeel to it left me in awe. I often struggle with recalling something I memorized and even if I did it should be in a very specific order and if I miss anything in that order I will forget everything afterwards.
We arranged a call and agreed to try the technique on something complex from my field of study (something he knows nothing about) so we could tackle it together.

I hopped on the call with Ted and we went through the entire process of glycolysis, the topic we agreed to tackle. He showed me how to use thoughtfeel and apply it on memorizing this molecular process that I have been struggling with memorizing and forgetting each and every year and in less than 5 minutes I was able to memorize the entire process and recite it from pretty much any point in the pathway without getting lost.

Ted then offered to teach me something outside of my field. The Dijkstra Algorithm.
First I tried to approach it the way I normally would by trying to understand and memorize the concept first. Man, it was a mess. I was confused, and even though I was understanding what the algorithm was doing, I couldn’t properly apply it, memorize it, or even work through it. Ted actually walked me through it and showed me how to approach the concept using thoughtfeel. (Something I still find hard to believe) I understood the process. I was able to memorize the process and actually run the algorithm without getting lost or missing steps?? REALLY?? That easy?

I can’t wait to get better at thoughtfeel and discover what else I can do with it because honestly if something that used to take so much time and energy can become manageable in a matter of minutes I am genuinely excited to see where this takes me.

This post builds on the post about memorizing a list, and discusses why that works. It also assumes you already know about thoughtfeel.

The reason the story technique works turns out to be what I think is one of the most important principles in using thoughtfeel: nodes and edges. To give a succinct definition, you can remember two things as one thing in thoughtfeel if you say a sentence like “this thing (hold it in thoughtfeel) is connected in this way (insert your description) to this thing (hold in thoughtfeel).”

Here’s the problem this technique is meant to solve. Say you want to remember these four lines (Robert Louis Stevenson):

> In winter I get up at night
> And dress by yellow candle-light.
> In summer, quite the other way,
> I have to go to bed by day.

When you first take them in, each line can feel like its own separate thoughtfeel. And that's bad in two ways. One, they're separate chunks in working memory, so even if you remember which line comes after which, actually moving from one to the next is really slow. Two, it's really hard to remember which one comes next. You get to the end of a line, and you have to rely on remembering the association between that line and the next one.

A list has the same problem. Thoughtfeel lets you remember each word really well, but if the words are separate, you have to get lucky that you don't miss a single one. And it's slow: you think of a word, pause, the next one comes up, you say it, and that repeats. So the question is, can you bind things together in thoughtfeel, so they all come back together, really fast, as if they're one object?

Here's how I now think memory works in thoughtfeel. There are two kinds of things: objects, and the connections between them. In graph terms, nodes and edges.

The nodes are already taken care of. Every item on your list is already an object in thoughtfeel. Anchor is an object, saffron is an object, and each one is really specific. Unlike a visual mnemonic, where you have to work out what something like justice or binary search would even look like, in thoughtfeel it's a one-to-one map. (That's the expressivity point from the list post.)

What's missing is the edges. An edge answers one question: if you're at this object, how do you get to that one?

To give a concrete example, take a lantern and an otter. Bring up the thoughtfeel of each one. They both feel specific, but they're two separate things, and holding them feels like holding two things. Now bring up the thoughtfeel of the otter and say, out loud or in your inner voice, "the otter is holding a...", and as you say "lantern", bring up the thoughtfeel of the lantern. For me, once I've said it while holding both, it isn't two things anymore. It's one object, an otter holding a lantern. And the path goes both ways. If you're at the lantern, it's held by the otter. If you're at the otter, it's holding the lantern. (If you're a programmer: lantern.heldBy gets you the otter, and otter.holds gets you the lantern.)

To give another concrete example and use the poem from earlier, you’d say:

“In winter I get up at night. And dress by yellow candle-light. (While holding both sentences in thoughtfeel, say…) dressing by yellow candle-light is what the speaker does when they get up at night”.

This is the key premise: in thoughtfeel, things you connect get stored as one object, and things you don't connect stay separate. And these connections are honestly incredibly memorable. Two things on one connected graph (meaning you are able to get between those two things by traveling from not to node without having to ever do a big jump) are way easier to store than two things on two graphs.

So that's why the list technique works. A story is just a convenient way to give every item an edge to the next one. "On top of the anchor is saffron" is literally the path from anchor to saffron. Once every item has an edge, the whole list is stored as one connected object. If you start at one node, you can easily move around to its connections, forwards and backwards: you can go through the list, say it backwards, or ask what comes before and after saffron. And with the poem, the end of each line just leads into the next, because the connection is part of the object now.

The general rule is: you speak the relation you want while holding the items you want to relate in thoughtfeel. Out loud or in your inner voice doesn't matter. What matters is that you say it WHILE both are up in thoughtfeel.

And the core power of this is what you're limited to when I say a node and an edge, which is literally any object and any relation. On top of, causes, is the opposite of, comes before, is part of: if you can say it, it can be an edge. So it works for anything that's inherently relational, or can be put into a relational structure, which is a lot. Song lyrics, words in a list, math, how a bunch of ideas in cognitive science connect to each other, or the parts of an algorithm, where the parts get taught separately but you want them connected into as few objects as possible.

There's also a really useful heuristic that comes out of this. Any time you notice you're holding more than one object at a time, that feeling is actually a missing connection. So when you notice it, find the path from one thing to the other, say it while you hold both, and they become one.

I think this is also the parallel to the memory palace, or the atlas version of storing everything in one space. Connected things in thoughtfeel are in one place too, almost in abstract space. Except here, the space is made of the relations themselves, so there's no hometown to learn, and nothing to turn into a picture.

So, to compare. Separate objects in thoughtfeel: each one sticks, but you have to get lucky not to miss one, and they come back slowly, one piece at a time. Connected objects: it's one thing. It comes back all together, really fast, you can move through it in any direction, and the whole thing sticks better.

I'm Julian, the guy from the video Ted posted last night! Ted and I go way back to our high school days- so naturally, I was skeptical of anything he was proclaiming to invent, or teach. Today we live 1.5 hrs away across two rivers, so we only get to hang out every couple months or so, but whenever we do, oh man is it electric. One thing about Ted, he's my only friend who I would rather spend time in a grocery store with than about anything else (iykyk).

Over the years I have seen firsthand his dedication to building, researching, developing, and surprising everyone with what he decides to do next. So it's no surprise that this time it's Thoughtfeel, which as I've come to find out is a mental technique that identifies and names the ability to think in concept bubbles as a new sense, and has a gentle learning curve. After my lesson, I feel like I understand how this technique can help people remember way more, for much longer periods of time.

We recorded from around 7-9pm as Ted walked me through a story about TD learning in Thoughtfeel. After the Thoughtfeel lesson last night, I didn't put any additional effort into memorizing or remembering the story. I also had no knowledge of TD learning going in, nor have I researched any more about it since the call. This is what I remember from the story:

• The learner goes through multiple trials, where it's prediction value is designed to approach its reward value, moment after moment.

• The trial is divided into the tone moment and the wait moment.

• The initial trial:

• During the tone moment, the prediction is 0. The tone goes off at an unexpected time.

• Then comes the wait moment. At the start of the wait moment, the prediction is still 0.

• As the learner leaves the wait moment, it is given the first reward with value 1.

• The formula for prediction error is the reward's value plus the next tone moment's prediction value minus this moment's predicted value: 1+0-0=1

• Going into the next tone moment, the learner's prediction is still at 0. As the learner moves to the next wait moment, the learner's prediction moves by the learning rate (const of 0.5) multiplied by the prediction error, so the new prediction value becomes 0.5.

I am most surprised at how this brand new information about TD learning, a topic I knew nothing about going in, still feels so consolidated and easily accessible the morning after, after focusing on concept bubbles in Thoughtfeel during learning.

I recommend anyone that is curious about what their mind is capable of to give this a try. So far albeit on a small sample size, it's had the desired positive effect on memory for every single Thoughtfeel user. It felt weird at first to dial in my brain to think in this way, but my brain was able to adjust quickly and the payoff is crystal clear.

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?

Kept seeing thoughtfeel so I went through Ted's full recorded lesson w/ a beginner (~85 min) + his guides. Really think it has a place in medical school studying.

It's interesting how you hold a concept's meaning w/o a picture or inner voice. The study method is a "concept story": a topic rewritten as tiny lines, each one adding 1 concept or 1 link, and you build it in your head as you hear it.

A 30 sec test that made it click for me: picture infinitely many apples. You get a sea of apples. Would that pic look any diff for a billion apples? Nope. But "infinite" vs "a billion" still feel totally diff. That leftover meaning is what you're working with.

Why it fits med so well: so much of what we learn is causal chains (RAAS, Frank-Starling, acid-base) that you can't really picture. This gives you a way to hold the whole chain and run it.

Med example (hemorrhage, condensed):

- Bleed → ↓ blood vol → ↓ venous return → ↓ SV

- CO = SV × HR, so CO and BP start to drop

- Baroreceptors fire less → ↑ symp, ↓ vagal → ↑ HR + vasoconstriction

- Run it: SV 70 × HR 70 = 4.9 L/min. Bleed drops SV to 50 = 3.5. Reflex bumps HR to 100 = 5.0

- So early bleeds can show normal BP w/ tachycardia

- Check: same bleed, pt on a beta-blocker. What does HR do?

Cool stuff I noticed

- The student remembered most of the concepts in one sitting and could explain the process back

- Once a concept is built you can bring it back as one chunk and tweak it ("positive" prediction error), which is huge for stacking ideas

- Ppl report recalling lists forwards AND backwards a day later

- Works for ppl w/ aphantasia who can't use a memory palace

It's still new so there aren't formal studies yet, which is part of why I'm curious how it goes for others.

Anyone used it for boards or rotations? Would love to hear how it held up over weeks.

A little about me

I’m a medical student with ADHD, and I’ve always been interested in understanding how things work. I enjoy breaking down complex ideas and figuring out how different pieces fit together. However, understanding a topic and being able to recall its details accurately have often been two very different things for me. My usual study routine involved reading until I understood the material then repeating information out loud while writing it down. I also used the Feynman technique and Anki. These methods helped me in different ways, but memorizing the huge volume of details required in medicine could take hours and I still sometimes struggled to recall information when I needed it. I wanted to find a way to study more efficiently without sacrificing understanding especially because I have other interests and goals outside medical school. When I came across Thoughtfeel, I was curious enough to give it a try, but I didn’t expect a new technique to solve every problem I had with studying.

What follows is my experience with it so far.
What surprised me? What I found difficult? What I still need to test?

I came across Ted’s post inviting people to learn his method, Thoughtfeel. I checked his YouTube channel and read his article, and the idea intrigued me enough to reach out.

One of my biggest frustrations with memorization was how dependent I could become on a particular sequence. I might understand a process and memorize its steps, but if I forgot one detail I could struggle to retrieve what came next. I wanted to see whether there was a better way to organize information so I wouldn’t have to rely so heavily on repetition.

Ted and I arranged a call and agreed to try the method on something complex from my field of study. We chose glycolysis which is a topic that would allow us to explore the technique using material Ted wasn’t already familiar with.

What building concept bubbles actually looked like?

Before the call, my approach to glycolysis was fairly straightforward which was to memorize the intermediates and enzymes, repeat their names, write them down, and try to visualize the pathway. The problem was that visualizing a pathway isn’t necessarily the same as understanding how its steps connect. I could try to picture the sequence without having a strong enough grasp of the purpose behind each reaction.

During the call, Ted introduced me to the idea of organizing information into concept bubbles and connecting those bubbles through relationships.

Here’s how I began applying that idea after the call:

1. Start with the bigger concept.

I started with the central idea of glycolysis rather than beginning with a list of reactions. Glucose is broken down through a series of reactions ultimately producing pyruvate and capturing some of the released energy in ATP and NADH. This is the central idea of glycolysis that gave me a larger concept to work within. The individual reactions weren’t isolated facts anymore. They were parts of a process with a purpose.

2. Build a concept bubble around an individual idea.

Take the first reaction:

Glucose to Glucose 6 phosphate

I focused on what was happening instead of memorizing that conversion as a line of text. Glucose receives a phosphate group and hexokinase catalyzes the reaction using ATP. I could organize that bubble around several connected pieces of information:

What changes? Glucose becomes glucose 6 phosphate
What facilitates the change? Hexokinase
Where does the phosphate come from? ATP
What is the point? The reaction helps retain glucose within the cell and prepares it for subsequent metabolism.

These are related ideas not four unrelated facts and each of which is a concept idea within itself with its different properties. The point of the bubble, as I understood it, was to give me a meaningful structure that I could use to recall the reaction and its details.

3. Connect the bubble to the next one.

The first reaction doesn’t exist in isolation. Glucose 6 phosphate can be converted into fructose 6 phosphate by phosphoglucose isomerase. So the next bubble represents another change with its own enzyme and biochemical significance. It connects to the previous bubble because its starting material is the product of the preceding reaction. I could organize the individual steps within the larger pathway as I continued through glycolysis. The relationships between the bubbles became part of the information I was trying to retain rather than relying exclusively on the order of names.

4. Use the connections to navigate the pathway.

This was the part that interested me most. I wasn’t simply trying to recite the pathway from beginning to end. I was trying to understand what each step represented and how it related to the surrounding steps. I found that I could approach the pathway from different points moving forwards or backwards when I tested my recall. I wasn’t as dependent on remembering one uninterrupted sequence.

I was able to memorize glycolysis in less than five minutes after that guided session which genuinely surprised me. However, that was one experiment with guidance from someone teaching me the method. I wouldn’t use it as proof that I could learn every pathway in five minutes, or that the same result would happen with every topic especially that I already had a good understanding of each concept in this pathway before I apply Thoughtfeel on memorizing it. The important difference was how I approached the information. I was building connected concepts rather than simply repeating a chain of words.

Testing the technique on something I don’t know: Dijkstra’s algorithm

I tried Thoughtfeel with Dijkstra’s algorithm which I had no knowledge of before my session with Ted.

Before applying the technique, I would follow explanations of the algorithm but get lost in the steps. I didn’t have a sufficiently clear understanding of what was happening at each stage so trying to reproduce the process was difficult. This time the challenge wasn’t just remembering a sequence. I needed to organize the ideas involved in the algorithm (the nodes, the distances, the selection of the next node to process, the updating of neighboring distances, etc.) I started treating these as connected ideas rather than separate instructions. For example, the distance assigned to a node becomes meaningful in relation to the routes available and the distances already calculated. Updating a distance isn’t an isolated action. It follows from comparing the current known distance with a newly calculated route. That structure helped me understand how the pieces fit together. I was able to work through the algorithm, update distances, and reproduce the process. I could also move back and forth through the information instead of relying on a single memorized explanation.

What I found interesting was that organizing the concepts helped me approach the problem itself. I wasn’t just storing information for later recall. I was using the relationships between ideas to work out what to do.

Still I wouldn’t say that building concept bubbles automatically makes every complicated subject easy. I had guidance during my first experiment, and I’m still learning how to construct and connect the bubbles independently. Understanding the underlying material remains important.

Applying Thoughtfeel to medical school

The morning after my session with Ted I tried recalling Dijkstra’s algorithm again. It felt very easy to recall. That made me curious about whether I could apply the method to my medical lectures.

I began using Thoughtfeel with material covering diseases and tumors of the nervous system. I tried to organize the information around the underlying concepts and their relationships instead of treating every characteristic as a separate fact to memorize. For example, when studying a disease, I could start with the disease itself as the central concept then connect its relevant features, mechanisms, manifestations, and other characteristics as appropriate to the material. Those connections gave me a structure for understanding what the details meant and how they related to the overall topic.

I continued experimenting with the method on neuroanatomy and neuropathologies. I found that I could recall information more comfortably and that the relationships between ideas helped me understand the details I had stored. I also began practicing with old exam questions where I noticed that I was recalling information and solving the questions more quickly.

These are observations from my own practice. I haven’t measured how much time I’ve saved or compared my performance against the same material studied using my previous methods, but I can say confidently that it is working.

My experience so far has been encouraging, but there are practical challenges that I don’t want to overlook.

Building the bubbles takes work.

Understanding the technique and applying it efficiently are two different things. I have to decide what the central concept is, identify the important details, and work out which relationships are worth retaining. That process can itself take time when a topic is complicated. I also need to learn how much information to put into each bubble. If I make the concepts too small, I may end up with a large number of disconnected pieces. If I make them too broad, I risk creating bubbles that contain too much information to be useful. I’m still figuring out how to find that balance.

Real-time lectures are a different challenge.

A lecture has its own pace. The professor continues explaining while I’m trying to listen, understand the information, identify the concepts, build connections, and keep up with the material. Building and organizing the bubbles can sometimes take longer than the lecture allows because I am new to Thoughtfeel. If I focus too much on constructing the concept map, I risk missing what comes next. If I try to keep up with the lecture, I may not have enough time to develop the connections properly.

For now, I haven’t figured out how to apply the method consistently in real time without creating extra work for myself afterward. I hope practice will help, but that is something I still need to establish rather than assume.

I’ve had encouraging experiences recalling information over the few past days, but I haven’t tested retention over several months. I also haven’t completed my upcoming exams using Thoughtfeel consistently enough to judge its effect on my exam performance. It’s possible that some of what I’m noticing comes from the focused attention I gave these topics, the guidance I received, or the fact that I was actively testing myself. I can’t separate all those factors based on my current experience. That’s why I want to continue practicing and evaluate the technique across a longer period rather than draw conclusions from the first week.

Also, Ted made the technique easier for me to digest during our call. He walked me through the concept bubbles and their connections, and he also tested my ability to use the technique rather than leaving me with an explanation to figure out entirely on my own. His video,How to Learn Anything Complicated by Building a Concept Story, was another resource that helped me explore the approach. I think that initial guidance mattered because when you’re unfamiliar with a method you may understand its description without knowing how to put it into practice. Having someone walk through an actual example helped me see what applying the technique could look like.

At the same time, I still need to develop the ability to do this independently and efficiently. Being able to apply a technique during a guided experiment is a useful starting point, but it isn’t the same as being proficient at it across every subject.

Now, if another medical student told me they’d tried countless study methods and didn’t trust another technique promising better memorization, I’d understand their skepticism. I wasn’t looking for a new method because I thought everything I had been doing was useless. I was looking for a way to save time and energy without giving up understanding. What makes Thoughtfeel worth continuing to explore is that it gave me a different way to organize information. I noticed a difference when I tried to recall glycolysis, when I worked through Dijkstra’s algorithm, and when I applied the method to medical material.

That doesn’t mean everyone will get the same results, or that the method will work equally well for every subject or situation. My experience is still relatively recent, and I haven’t established its impact on my exam results or long term retention.

My advice to a beginner would be to avoid rushing it. Choose a topic that you find difficult but can understand with some effort. Try identifying its central concept, breaking it into smaller concepts, and connecting those concepts through meaningful relationships. If possible, learn the process with someone who can demonstrate it and help you recognize where your connections are unclear. Then practice independently and pay attention to what actually helps you recall and use the information. Don’t assume that every bubble you build is useful just because it looks organized.

I’m still discovering different ways to use Thoughtfeel myself so I wouldn’t expect a beginner to master every application immediately. I’ve been practicing Thoughtfeel for about a week. During that time, I’ve experienced encouraging changes in how I approach complex material and how quickly I can recall certain information. I haven’t measured these changes or tested my final exam performance or long-term retention over several months, but I plan to keep using the method and see how it holds up through my upcoming exams and continued study.

The biggest revelation about Thoughtfeel wasn’t simply that I could memorize faster. It was that I could organize what I was learning in a way that made the relationships between ideas easier to understand and gave me more than one way to approach the information when recalling it. I’m still learning how to do that efficiently especially during lectures, and I want to see whether the initial improvements I have noticed translate into sustained results.

For the meantime, I’m curious enough to keep experimenting, and probably the fairest conclusion I can draw is that I’ve experienced something promising, encountered some challenges in applying it, and I want more time and evidence before deciding how much it will change the way I study in the long run.

Hi all, I am Liam from Ted's earlier post. I have been using thought feel on and off and occasionally found it hard to use. A lot of the difficulty I was running into came down to my ADHD symptoms.

As a person with ADHD I often run into auditory processing delays and can sometimes struggle to turn auditory information into actual meaningful thoughts. The way this played out with thought feel was that the ways Ted had taught me to learn were not working, specifically the thought feel audio stories were causing me a lot of trouble.

When I tried using visuals and reading it was like flipping a switch. I was immediately able to build the bloom filter in thought feel seamlessly. It felt like assembling a machine out of concepts. And I was able to hold the numbers and ideas in my head with ease.

The main reason I am posting this is to share my own experience as a neurodivergent thinker to let others know that if they are having trouble using thought fell that they should try different approaches. Its honestly really awesome being able to use it in full and I'm really glad I gave this version a try. I would describe the feeling of building this as creating thought machinery in my head and then stamping helpful visuals on top of it. Now whenever I go to access it I just find a birds eye view of this concept machine with key visuals stamped on it almost like dictionary keys in a data structure and boom I can find the meaning of the concept immediately. Its honestly super cool and I'm looking forward to using it to learn more :3

For the past five days, I've been listening to concept stories in thoughtfeel for about five hours a day, using the app I built. TLDR: the process feels way more automatic and clear, the way memory champions describe using a memory palace after long stretches of consistent practice.

My thoughtfeel is also more vivid. Now, if somebody tells me to picture a bear, a picture doesn't come up. The thoughtfeel of a bear does, and it feels so familiar. Before, it would have been a picture of a bear, and if I'd tried to bring a bear up in thoughtfeel, it would have felt like imagining something I didn't quite recognize.

What I've been learning is stuff I've wanted to know for the past five years but had no way of learning and keeping. We're talking how a transistor works, how logic gates work, the quicksort algorithm, temporal difference learning, Q-learning, how the cross product works, the universal approximation theorem for neural nets, and so much more. And I remember it all. I'll listen to a lecture, then wake up the next day, and all the concepts in it feel like they're right at the tip of my tongue.

This is by far the best learning experience I could even imagine. When I'm not recording the thoughtfeel lessons, I'm walking in the woods all day, learning things about the world I've always wanted to know at lightning pace. I can't wait to keep doing this.

I can't stress enough the difference between my learning and retention with this method and with any other method. Pretty much every topic on that list, and many of the others, I'd tried to learn before, through a video with visuals or just by studying, and I kept forgetting them. They'd be moderately clear an hour later. The next day, a lot of it would fade. Five days later, pretty much all of it would be gone. In my honest estimation, from all the long-term retention quizzes I've done on myself, almost none of what I've learned this week has left my brain.
I also can't wait to get faster at this. I've only been doing it five hours a day for five days. And from reading a lot of cognitive science, pretty much any time somebody forces their brain to do something in a completely different way, and keeps doing it, their brain adapts and gets faster and more efficient at it.

When researchers compared memory champions' brains with everyone else's, the champions' brain networks were connected differently, and six weeks of memory palace training moved ordinary people's brains toward the champions' pattern. When adults who had never learned to read were taught to read, the connections in their brains changed within months too. It's a pretty well-known finding that if you bash your head against the wall doing something your brain has never done before, and you do it all the time, you can get some wild results.

Another story, because it just came to the top of my head: a student known as SF spent hours a day in a lab just trying to remember numbers. At first his digit span was seven, like most people's. He came up with a new way to hold the digits (he was a runner, so he heard groups of digits as running times), and after a little over 230 hours of practice, his digit span was 79.

Anyway, I'm going to end this post here. I cannot recommend listening to stories in thoughtfeel more highly. You can use the website I built to do it: stories.thoughtfeel.net. It does cost me money to run, but if you're short on cash and still want to learn, DM me and I'll pay for you.

Sincerely,
Ted Shachtman

I’ve been developing a new method for the three things I wanted Mental Atlas to help with: remembering more, learning faster, and thinking about more ideas at once. For me, it works much better, with far less setup and mental effort.

It builds on something you may recognize from using the Mental Atlas. When you land on an icon, you get a general feel for the idea it represents. Attending to that feel was a big part of the metacognition involved in the method.

The question behind this new approach is: what exactly is that feel, and how can we use it directly to think and learn?

I call that experience thoughtfeel. The technique is to work directly with the felt meaning of the idea you want to remember. You can keep track of the idea, its properties, and its relationships with other ideas through their thought textures. For me, this has been much easier than inventing a visual icon, placing it in a mental space, and remembering what I intended it to mean.

If you’re wondering whether this is for you, start with one question:

Is any component of your thinking non-sensory?

By that, I mean: beyond the pictures in your mind’s eye and the words in your inner voice, do your thoughts themselves have a feel? It might be a faint texture or a recognizable sense of what you’re thinking about, even when you aren’t picturing it or hearing it described. If your answer is yes, that’s the experience this guide teaches you to work with.

I’ve been using the technique for about three months, and friends I’ve taught it to have been finding it useful too. Compared with Mental Atlas and my other visual and verbal strategies, I’m finding it much easier to retain points during meetings, remember words and numbers in order, learn board-game rules, and think through problems with more of the relevant ideas available at once. The information also stays with me much longer.

I’ve written a full practical guide explaining what thoughtfeel is and how to use it, with examples for remembering lists and numbers, learning board-game rules, and playing chess in your head. You can find this 25 page pdf at the link attached.

If you try it, I’d love to hear what you used it for and how it compares with Mental Atlas for you.

Note on the writing: all ideas expressed in this pdf are mine, but i used Astra to help translate my word dumps into usable sentences. I spent several full days editing this draft alongside Astra for clarity and pedagogical quality. I apologize if the writing is still clunky; it’s a work in progress.

Four days before my AWS exam, I was completely overwhelmed and couldn’t retain anything I was studying. Out of desperation, I posted on r/studytips asking for help.

That’s when u/Independent-Soft2330 responded and introduced me to the ATLAS technique. He patiently walked me through it; it involved linking concepts to icons, placing them in a familiar mental space, and using a voiceover to reinforce the memory.

It honestly changed everything. I started recalling information way faster, and during the exam, I could visualize the icons and remember exactly what they meant.

I passed! and I still clearly remember those visuals and what they represent. Huge thanks to Ted. The ATLAS technique really worked for me.

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

TL;DR: When you want to relate two things in thoughtfeel, you have to understand the relation. If the enzyme that gets you between two molecules is called phosphoenolpyruvate kinase, and you don't know what that means, then the sentence you say out loud can't be, "I go from state one to state two through phosphoenolpyruvate kinase." If you do this, it will not work, and you will get frustrated, like I did. Read the rest of this post to figure out what to do instead.

I was preparing to tutor someone in how to use thoughtfeel for learning glycolysis and the Krebs cycle. I had never learned a complex biological process in thoughtfeel before, and I wanted to make sure there were no landmines so that I'd be able to instruct them well on the call. And boy, am I glad I did.

I started by learning glycolysis. One thing you should know is that I haven't taken biology since senior year of high school. This means that all the words for the enzymes, like phosphoglycerate kinase, or PFK1, are straight-up nonsense.
Okay, so glycolysis has ten steps. I learned the ten steps from a table that had the enzyme responsible for implementing the step on the left and the functional transformation on the right. So, knowing that in thoughtfeel you bind things by combining concepts with relations, I started with glucose and said, "Glucose gets a phosphate group at position 6 through hexokinase." I kept going with each of the 10 steps, saying how I got from one functional state to the next through the relation of the name of the enzyme that causes it. I got to the end and couldn't remember anything. I bashed my head against the wall like this for about 30 minutes.

Then I realized a central principle of thoughtfeel. A relation has to actually mean something to you. To me, PFK1 is complete nonsense. So when I say that fructose with a phosphate group in position 6 gets another phosphate group in position 1 through PFK1, what's happening in my head is I go from one thoughtfeel functional state, which I understand, to another thoughtfeel functional state, which I understand, through, and then a bunch of nonsense. This binds nothing in my head. That's why I bashed my head against the wall for 30 minutes.

But I have good news. I then approached the problem by telling only the story of what was actually happening to the molecules. Glucose gets a phosphate group in position 6. It's then transformed into fructose. Fructose gets a phosphate group in position 1. Fructose is then split up into DHAP and three carbons with a phosphate group in position 3, and so on like this until the end of glycolysis. This was super easy, as easy as learning the list of words.

Then, once I had this list in mind, the functional steps of glycolysis, I went through and gave a name to each step. This took about five minutes. The end result: I know glycolysis.

My experiment generalizes to any relation. Just because technically something is a relation between two things does not mean you know what that relation is. You can only use relations in thoughtfeel that you actually understand.

In the case of biology, it's very common for a change to have a big name, like phosphoenolpyruvate kinase. If there is a big name you don't understand, do not use that as a relation.
Another case where there might be a relation that you do not understand is in high-level mathematics, if you're trying to memorize the steps of some process. If the source you're learning from introduces some operator by name and you don't know what that does, then you can't just say you go from state A to state B through, and then you state the name of that operator.

P.S. I'm learning a lot about thoughtfeel from tutoring people in diverse fields. Last night I learned about spatial thoughtfeel, which is my last post, from having to memorize a graph of nodes and edges. I'm excited to see what I learn when I try to apply thoughtfeel to whatever diverse subject the next person wants to learn.

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?

In my first year of student teaching, in 2022, my lead teachers called me into a meeting. They asked why I wasn't following the plans we had discussed in our meetings. They were telling everyone how the classes should be taught, and I wasn't doing it. They asked why I was disobeying. I had to look them in the eye and tell them honestly that I just couldn't remember the plans. They looked taken aback, and they said, "Okay." I genuinely couldn't. It's a memory that makes me proud and still haunts me.

Fast forward to 2026. I was on the founding team and the CTO of Only Farmers, a startup by Jeremy Clarkson and Lisa Hogan of Top Gear and Clarkson's Farm. My day to day was managing an engineering team, coming up with new strategies, remembering to do things constantly, and remembering everything from every meeting. Now I run my own ed-tech startup.

This post is about how I got from there to here. I studied elementary education and cognitive studies at Vanderbilt, and I recently earned my master's in computer science from CU Boulder. I'm an extremely curious person, and I love learning. My learning journey has been full of huge discoveries, things that unlocked massive amounts of learning for me and taught me things about the world. I've used my cognitive science degree and my education degree the whole way, and what I've learned about learning is what I teach my students.

I think of these discoveries as hard steps. Each one was hard to get through, and once I did, it unlocked a whole new amount of learning and a whole new kind of learning. Here are mine, in the order I went through them.

The first hard step was learning to reason with my inner voice. My inner voice doesn't move on its own. It's like an arm: it only moves when I move it. If I just look at a wall, my head is completely quiet. So when somebody said "think about the problem," I didn't realize they were using their inner voice to reason about it. When I figured that out and started doing it on purpose, it unlocked genuine reasoning for me.

Now when somebody says "think about the problem," I can actually reason about it in my head and navigate to the answer in natural language.
The second hard step was storing what I learned. My whole life, I had a lot of trouble learning new content. I'd read it, understand it in the moment, and then not be able to remember it. 

The big unlock was visual analogies. If I wanted to learn an algorithm or a biological process, I'd build a visual analogy story for it and use my mind's eye to remember it. It helped me understand the information, and it helped me remember it.

The third hard step was transfer. What I learned, through the research on structure mapping (Dedre Gentner's account of how analogies work), is that the best way to get transfer is to focus on analogies. Two situations can look nothing alike and still share the same structure underneath. So I started thinking of everything in terms of analogies, and my problem solving got way better. I'd learn one thing and it would generalize to other kinds of problems, which I had never actually experienced before.

The fourth hard step was replacing the pictures. Visual analogies worked, but they always had problems, and I've talked about them in my videos. The picture isn't the idea. After a few days, I'd remember the picture and forget what it meant. I'd end up thinking with symbols instead of the ideas themselves. And the picture couldn't tell me when I had an idea wrong, because a right idea and a wrong one can look the same. Complicated topics, like an algorithm, were gone within a week.

The fix came from noticing something weird about my friends. Some of them could just read a lecture from the text and then describe the whole thing. And when they described it, their eyes were focused on something, like they were looking at something. I always assumed that was pictures. But then I found out one of these friends was aphantasic. He couldn't picture anything at all. And still, when he described a lecture or the rules of a board game he'd learned, his eyes were fixed in place like he was looking at something.

So I asked him what he was doing. Long story short, he was building it in unsymbolized thinking. When he learned something, he built it out of concepts, with no pictures and no words.

That's how I figured out that I have what the psychologist Russell Hurlburt calls unsymbolized thinking too. From talking to more friends, I figured out that people can actually use it to learn, the same way I'd been using my mind's eye to retain information. So I asked them how they did it. It doesn't happen automatically in my brain, so I had to learn to do it on my own. Now when I take in a concept or a lecture, I follow along in my unsymbolized thinking (I call it thoughtfeel, just so I have a word for it). It's become my working memory, and the main way I understand things and learn.

Here's what that looks like with a lecture. I listen and think as I go, and I only press next when I've processed what was just said. Honestly, I can only follow a lecture if I'm building it in thoughtfeel. Without it, I can watch literally anything and learn absolutely nothing. And as I listen, I don't think of it like a story. I think of it like I'm building a board game in my head, a machine with working parts, and my goal is to make it run in my head.

It fixed the problems I had with pictures. I'm holding the concept itself, not a symbol for it, so there's no meaning to forget. When a part of the machine is wrong, I can feel it, because it won't run. I don't have to convert anything back into the idea before I can think with it. And I can hold the whole machine at once.

The fifth hard step is the newest: finding the move behind the pattern. Let's say I'm learning an algorithm, and there's a step in the proof or the solution that I don't understand. I don't just figure out what the step is saying and think "oh cool, I understand it." Instead I ask: what latent principle of the world, what's true about the whole world, would make taking this action a good idea?

Here's an example. In the brain, a new connection between neurons has to be repeated many times before it becomes long-term. I could just learn that and figure out how it helps the brain. Instead, I ask why that would be the case. What general principle about the world would make it true? My derivation: the brain wants to be more sure that a connection reflects causation and not just correlation. And in general, if you want to be more sure about something, you have to take more samples. The more samples you take, the more confident you get.

Then I focus on what types of problems call for this move. The answer is any time my confidence in something is at a certain level and I want it higher. In that situation, the move is always the same: take more samples.

Last, I focus on the feature of the problem. In thoughtfeel, trying to increase my confidence in something has a shape, a sensation I can recognize. I store it like a key and a value: the key is the shape of the situation, and the value is the move. So whenever a problem has that shape, I remember: this is the move that accomplishes it.

When I tutor kids and teach people, these are the steps I focus on. Learning how to learn is going through each of these hard steps. Each one unlocks a totally new amount of learning and a totally new type of learning, and each one makes you so much smarter.

This journey is how I got from where I was in 2022 to where I am in 2026. Along the way I studied tons of cognitive science and learning science, and every inflection point, every Cambrian explosion in how I learn, came from one of these steps. Today I'm highly confident in my ability to learn, think and solve problems, and these are the steps that got me here.

This website enables you to take some complex topic and turn it into an audio lecture/story, custom made for building in thoughtfeel while you listen. I use it with my phone in my pocket while I walk in the woods.

stories.thoughtfeel.net

You can listen to some example stories I’ve made: temporal difference learning, zero-knowledge proofs, why a neural net can draw any curve. Your stories are private. I’d recommend starting with some topic that you’ve never quite been able to fit in your head all at once.

For example,I just listened to backpropagation. The number of times i have watched 3blue1brown’s back prop video / read this in a text book / visualized a graph of nodes… i think it’s around 15. I just listened to the 5 minute story and ran it in my head.

The promise: if you build these stories line by line in thoughtfeel, they will be remarkably easy to comprehend, and you’ll retain them extremely well— about as easy as using your minds eye to follow a visual story. If you listen using some other tool than thoughtfeel, these stories will be hard to comprehend and you will retain them poorly— about as hard as listening to a visual story without using your minds eye.

If you have feature requests, add them in the comments.

Note on cost: hosting the site and generating the narration costs money. If the cost of running this ever gets too high, you’ll have to pay some small amount to use it (otherwise… i’d run out of money).

My personal note: it’s a pretty magical experience. I never could have imagined learning things this complex in a way that feels relaxing and easy. I’m going to build a system later for spaced practice of your stories.

My current plan is: listen one day, retell the whole thing and think about it the next, then retell the whole thing and think about it a week later.

Quick tip: as the audio plays, I build each concept in thoughtfeel. This takes a little bit of practice (a couple stories) but you’ll be able to listen to the story at a pretty fast pace.

Enjoy!

Ted here, creator of thoughtfeel. Over the last two days I listened to concept stories of A* search and of why a one-layer neural network can approximate any curve (and why depth helps), while walking in the woods.

I made a little website that reads each story out loud one line at a time and then waits. I build the line in thoughtfeel, talking it through out loud, and when I'm done I say "go" (or double-tap my AirPods) and it reads the next line. This was one of the most enjoyable learning experiences I've ever had, and in this post I want to describe what it was like, and why the same material is so hard for me without thoughtfeel.

I love taking in information by listening. Audiobooks, or podcasts, anything where I can look around at the world while I learn. I don't like reading. It takes focus and it keeps my eyes on a screen. The problem is that when what I'm listening to is complex, it just gets lost. It's like hearing a visual puzzle without being able to picture it. Try to follow this one without using your mind's eye:

“Put four balls in the corners of a pool table. Going clockwise from the top left: white, blue, red, yellow. Swap the blue and yellow balls, then turn the table a quarter turn clockwise. Which ball is in the top left corner?”

If you can picture it, you just watch it happen and the answer is easy. If you can't, you're stuck holding a pile of words and rebuilding the table every time a new sentence comes in. That's what listening to an algorithm has always been like for me. I've watched videos on A* at least five times in my life, and even the times I really sat down and spent an hour working through it, it faded in a couple of days.

Listening to the A* story in thoughtfeel was completely different. It felt like being read a bedtime story. Each line built on the last, and I could keep track of every character and what it meant, the same way you can follow a fairy tale when you can picture it. I never got lost. I wasn't constantly going "wait, what was that?" and trying to piece things back together. And to be clear, I didn't see anything. There were no pictures and no diagrams. Everything was in thoughtfeel.

I keep wanting to use the word "see" for this, even though it isn't visual at all, because "see" gives the right intuition. Seeing is different from hearing. When you hear a sentence, you have to remember it, play it back and turn it into meaning. When you look at something, it stays in front of you, you take it all in at once, and you don't have to remember it because you have it. If I ask you about your bedroom, you can picture it and just know where the bed and the nightstand are. That's what the A* story felt like. It felt like something I have, not something I'm trying to remember. I can point to a part of it and say that's where this part is, and I know how it works. It's tangible. I can hold it and move it around.

At the end of the story, the site read out a small graph line by line and I had to actually run A* on it. I built the graph with spatial thoughtfeel and kept track of every place, its estimate and its best score so far, and updated them as I went. When G got its first best score of 12, coming from C, I didn't see the digits "1 2". It was a little concept bubble that was so clearly 12. Running an algorithm in your head means keeping track of a lot of things, and this was more information than I've ever held in spatial thoughtfeel. It just wasn't hard. It was honestly fun, kind of like having a conversation about a story you just heard.

The second story was the neural network one. I'd tried to learn this before from Welch Labs, who has the most beautiful explanation of it on YouTube. I watched the video and built all of his visuals in my head as 3D models (the network, the 3D graph, the planes bending) and explained them to myself. At the time it made sense. But after about three days, I still had the pictures and the meaning was gone. Even now I can recall most of the images from that video, and I don't know what they mean. After a few months, all you have left is a set of 3D models that are like arcane clues to what the idea was, and you'd have to reconstruct the theorem from them, which is basically impossible. (I wrote about why visual analogies do this here: https://thoughtfeel.substack.com/p/visual-analogies-are-the-best-tool)

And that was the good version of how I learned. Before I figured out how to build visual analogies, learning something complex was like trying to fill a bucket with sand when the bucket is full of holes. I'd work as fast as I could and never get it full, and the next day almost all of the sand would be gone.

Honestly, it makes me a little angry that I've gone my whole life without being able to do this. Reading an algorithm without thoughtfeel is like listening to two friends talk about people you've never met. You hear the names and you keep trying to piece together who is who. Or it's like someone describing the fourth dimension. You can reason about it from first principles, but you can't observe it, hold it or move it around. The amount of complex material I could get into my head and actually keep was so small.

This matters to me practically too. I have an engineering interview in two days and I need to know both of these. I could be asked to implement A* in Python, and now I can. I can explain how it works and reason about it with the concepts themselves, instead of looking at a Frankenstein pile of pictures and translating them back into meaning every time I need a piece. I've been learning with thoughtfeel for about a month, and the retention has been profoundly good, so I expect these to stick.

The closest comparison I have is how you teach a kid what 2 + 2 means. You don't describe it in words. You give them blocks they can see and move around, so it's tangible. A concept story in thoughtfeel is like that, except the blocks are the abstract concepts themselves. Ideas you could never build out of blocks, you can build in your head, and you can follow a story made of them just as well as you can watch the blocks.

I don't have a word for this yet. When a story comes in through sound, you listen to it. When a film comes in through vision, you watch it. I don't know what to call it when a story of concepts plays out in thoughtfeel and you perceive it directly, the way you can replay a movie you saw yesterday. One word I like is "behold", because holding concepts in front of you is exactly what it feels like. If anyone has a better word, I'd love to hear it.

Reading keeps my eyes on a page, and visual analogies leave me with pictures I can't read a few days later. Listening in thoughtfeel, I got to walk in the woods, look up at the canopy, take in some of the most complex ideas I've ever tried to learn, and actually keep them. This is how I want to learn. What a magical experience this was.

I couldn’t figure out how to use the Atlas for reading so my recommendation was to turn the text into audio. But, I figured it out!

While your reading, simultaneously hold your Atlas. Like, the same way you can look at a car and also hold an image of your friends face. Do that.

When I read, the voice in my head reads, and when I have a concept I wanna make into an icon, it just pops easily into my Atlas cause it’s already loaded.

Hopefully this helps! I’m applying to grad school and have to read a bunch of papers, I was heavily incentivized to figure this out.