The mind palace, also known as the memory palace or the memory theater, is something I want badly! Ever since I read the incredible book, the Art of Memory by Frances Yates, I have dreamed of building a mind palace. But in medicine, we should be able to externalize the palace–in fact, we must! The method of loci will not suffice.
Technology should surely have advanced to the point where this is simple–the programming requirements are trivial.
My current mind palace is at CrashingPatient.com. It is quite good, but not perfect.
Factors
Storage
We need a place to store all of the literature, books, and internet posts/media we feel will be valuable. The storage must be durable (if an internet site goes down, the work remains). If we lose our paid access, we retain the full text of the literature.
Readability
The medium should allow comfortable reading of the literature, viewing of the media, etc.
Accessibility
Should be immediately accessible offline or online. Should be firewall resistant.
Ease of Commenting/Summarizing
Need to put the take-home message somewhere. Additional thoughts, new findings. Really two separate things:
- We need the ability to comment on, by which I mean literally on the paper (i.e. scribblings, marginalia, highlighting)
- But also the ability to summarize a Topic and add those papers as citations in a way that would link to the scribbled on paper
Ease of the Edit
Front end editing
Open Source
Or at the very least, immediately exportable to open source
Search
All information should be easily retrievable with logic, operator, and fuzzy logic based searches
Option to Publish
Should you want to share your memory palace
The Mind Palace Cycle
- Discovery
- Storage for to-be-read/to-be-viewed
- Process=Read/Comment/Summarize
- Storage
- Retrieval/Search
- Publish or Protect as Desired
Possibilities
- WordPress
- Evernote
- Zotero
- Papers
- Mendeley
image from memorise.org
Want to read more about memory?
The Art of Memory, mentioned above, is amazing–but oh so dense. For a lighter, contemporary read:
Update
Some additional requirements/desires:
- Self-Updating TOC as frontpage (see crashingpatient.com)
- Search must be browsable by either google or a plug-in and updates in real time
- Need to be able to do edits/additions on firewalled computers in any computer in the hospital.
- Want, but not essential–evernote's real time search of the contents of embedded pdfs would be pretty swell
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If you come up with a mind palace like you discussed, let me know. Anymore, I try to save as much as I can on a flash drive. Some things I will save to my OneDrive folder. I use Microsoft Word, Evernote, and Endnote. If a website doesn’t offer an option to save as a PDF, I will copy and paste the document to Word with the URL at the bottom for future reference. I have tried to keep things organized, but this proves quite difficult with items saved in numerous locations. I am trying to be more diligent with… Read more »
Greg
the one I already built is as close to perfect as I can get right now
Having been a Sherlock Holmes fan from an early age I too have been fascinated by the idea of a mind palace. Josh Foer’s book is interesting and I think one his major points is that it isn’t easy. Being able to memorize reams of information (and access it) is an active not a passive process. This is echoed in Maria Konnikova’s Mastermind:How to think like Sherlock Holmes. One of the best techniques I had heard of was from Dominic O’Brien, one of more prolific and well known mnemonists. He created his Mind Palace (using loci) and then mapped them… Read more »
every article I read, every book, every FOAM gets added. It has been constantly updated for 13 years.
Thanks for this post, really nice to see this out in the open. I’ve tried recommending this to trainees, but they generally think I’m insane. My mind palace has a brutally rudimentary format, perhaps more of a “mind bunker”: It consists of ~10,000 files in a single folder (including .html documents, images, .pdf files). The most important files are html documents which contains notes and are hyper-text linked to each other, creating an intra-net. There is an index as well which helps navigate through the files. The html files contain embedded graphics and links to .pdf articles within this folder.… Read more »
v. nice! there are actually mac programs that will take rtf or markdown or html and make them into the backend of a constantly updated website without any programming knowledge at all. Also ones that will take text files kept in dropbox and do the same. Also will be updating with some recs from my name brother.
Remember when residents carried around those small notebooks supplied by drug rep that they filled with useful tools and sometimes random medical trivia just in case? Yeah that on steroids. This is the second time that Scott had posted something that directly related to something I was working on. He always has impeccable timming. I used to keep my palace for others, to have the references when students and orientees needed, or when I needed to do patient teaching. But it has become more important to me and my professional developments. Besides the list Scott has I’ve added OmniFocus and… Read more »
Great cast and topic. I’m an MS2 and have gone through many resources trying to find something similar to what you discuss. One key feature that I want is the ability to cross link among many different ideas, without having to make those connections individually. For me, at the point I am in in my training, small facts are the predominant need. Making connections between those facts is what puts the big picture together. Knowing the mechanism of drug A is great, knowing how that mechanism affects drug B is not always immediately apparent. A web of linking topics that… Read more »
Here is a good example I think: https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/D36749F1-3A40-09FA-957F-41294B88CB70#-910
Hi Daniel, I’ve been using FreePlane to make mind maps and now I’m trying to develop something similar to what you described. I’m in the planning phase and I don’t have really that much experience in coding but it’s worth a try! If anyone knows a project that deals with a biomedical knowledge base built over available literature I’m curious to hear about it 🙂
I have two tools I use for quickly preserving everything that I think will be useful, but that I just don’t have time to vet out immediately.
Both are apps for your phone, with companion websites. Pocket also has a desktop plugin that allows me to save any webpage I find while working on the computer.
– Pocket – Great for storing anything I find online for later review. http://www.getpocket.com
– REV – An audio recorder for your phone that automatically syncs with dropbox and that offers translation services. https://www.rev.com/voicerecorder
I’ve experimented going back-and-forth between using Evernote and Google Drive. Drive is nice for the more traditional filing cabinet method, but I think Evernote is probably the closest exstant structure to the mind palace you describe. Because of its popularity, capturing web pages, PDFs, etc., is terribly easy (I have everything dump into my _inbox prior to processing), and the tagging would promote maneuverability between topics. Notebooks could be used as Chapters, Notes as topics. They also have new annotation features for adding notes, highlighting, etc., on PDFs. (Should they be paying me for this?) And like you said, it’s… Read more »
if you have no programming chops, evernote is the win
Mark Ragoo (@markragoo) EM Consultant, Staffordshire. I’m an EM physician with a specialist interest in medical informatics. Hi Scott, you sound like you know exactly what you want. This is great because that’s mainly the biggest problem that people have when they go to talk to a developer. All you need to do is go on and build it. The features of the product that you describe will be useful to all EM academics around the world. I’m in Cape Town for ICEM2016 and one of the recognised issues for the global development of EM is knowledge translation issue. I… Read more »
fantastic ideas!
Hi all, I am a graduated engineer/computer scientist who afterwards did a PhD in computer science while being in medical school. As an informatics ‘nerd’ I have something similar to a mind palace since many years in terms of a version control system (I still use svn since I am too lazy to move to git but Ill do it sooner or later), but working in actual emergency medicine now I also needed some way to easily access any of my data from anywhere. For me something like wordpress will never do it, but I added owncloud to my system,… Read more »
Alexander,
Where do you feel wordpress has failed. I am 99% sure wordpress with some key plugins will eventually be the path I take to the ultimate external palace.
Hi Scott, I personally don’t find a solely web-based solution convenient, for many reasons. The feature to have web access from anywhere in the world is nice and possibly a must, but when I am working on my computer or at home I want to be able to work directly with the data on the computer or at least on my local network. For instance to do big changes or work with many or big files is just much more convenient on a (local/lan) filesystem than over the browser. Or things like being able to use egrep and pdfgrep on… Read more »
makes sense. I should have added the one additional requirement–Need to be able to do edits/additions on firewalled computers in any computer in the hospital.
If you find yourself stuck between two platforms and/or using a suite of tools that don’t seamlessly communicate (e.g. you want to comment and store a synopsis in Evernote but you prefer to publish on WordPress), I’d recommend If This Then That (ifttt.com), which uses the APIs from various platforms to force them to play nice.
It’s a great way to use the strengths of a variety of platforms without having to duplicate your own work.
That said, I think Evernote (especially with the paid features) meets all Scott’s criteria, with the exception of full open source status.
Rob Jones, I think you would likely get more out of Evernote if you checked out an on-line course “Evernote Made Easy” by a Canadian named Steve Dotto. He does charge for his course, but I found it to be well worth it. Steve has no medical background, but definitely shows us how to accomplish most of the things you would like to build into your mind palace by using Evernote in conjunction with other software like Skitch which is a great tool to edit articles like you want, and without changing the original. This is what I use. I… Read more »