In the fall of 2022, I began a deep dive into mnemonics! Here is some personal context:
In middle school, I was inspired by Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein​, which is when I first began tinkering with mnemonics. I occasionally used mnemonics to study for exams throughout high school. ​​​​​Over the summer before college, I made palaces containing ideas from my journals and quotations from my favorite books. Upon entering college, I met a research scientist for the first time and immediately became captivated by psychology and then neurobiology. I forgot all about mnemonics for the next 5 years as I was busy taking classes and doing actual science and math research.
After the first semester of my master's, I re-read Foer's book and began making palaces containing theorems, definitions, and key steps in the proofs that I was learning. I finished my first-year feeling like I could do and learn anything. But what should I do? What is worth doing?​ I went into a bit of a personal identity crisis and became extremely sad after the first year of my master's! This was 2021 and I think the COVID-19 lockdowns also had a huge effect on my mental health at the time. I could've graduated early because I had already taken all of the requirements, but I didn't know what I would do after graduating so I stayed enrolled. I entered psychotherapy and began using mnemonics to calm my nerves rather than as a study tool. Then, serendipitously, I was introduced to art research​.
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During the second half of my junior year of college, after 8 months at the Broad Institute, I abruptly switched my major to pure math. In five semesters, I went from being a biology undergrad terrified of math to having a master's and feeling like I could work my way into any branch of pure or applied math research. Although I enjoyed the classes and learning new concepts, I felt like math research was simply not my cup of tea. The brain was (and still is) the most fascinating object that I've ever come across or thought about.
What if, instead of abruptly switching fields, I slowly introduce myself to the computational and theoretical sides of neurobiology? What if, given my math and biology background, I take some time to read the literature for breadth rather than commit blindly to someone else's research vision? What if, since the object of investigation is behind my very own eye sockets, I study my own learning & memory as if I were an artist or as if I were a 16th century scientist working alone and without the paradigms of modern science? What if, by following my nose into the phenomena associated with the memory palace, I bump into the paradigms of the present and lay my own foundation for later contributing meaningfully to science? If not, then I'll have read a lot of interesting papers in a variety of distinct research areas, I'll have had a lot of fun, and I'll have reconnected with my inner child! Here is the beginning of my journey so far.
