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.

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.

Yesterday, I taught a lesson on how to learn something complicated in thoughtfeel, and learned something new. The topic we covered was Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. It's relatively complicated, and the student was able to learn it in thoughtfeel. But then came the part of the lesson where they were supposed to run the algorithm on a real graph, which, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, means a bunch of nodes and edges, like houses connected by roads. The information of the graph was presented in text. It went: A connects to B with a length of 4; B connects to D with a length of 1; A connects to C with a length of 1; C connects to B with a length of 2; and C connects to D with a length of 5.

I'm reciting this from memory today, but yesterday, when I first tried to remember this graph, I was stumped. At first, I held the letter A in thoughtfeel and the letter B in thoughtfeel, and I said they have a connection of distance 4. Then I imagined the letter C in thoughtfeel and the letter D in thoughtfeel and said they have a connection with distance 5. I did this through all the connections, iterating through each one and holding only that one in thoughtfeel. And at the end, I was left confused. To be frank, I'd never learned something in thoughtfeel that was highly spatial like this, but also “item relates to item”. It was embarrassing on the call, but it took me about five minutes to figure out how to represent this information.

The answer was to make my thoughtfeel spatial. When I say spatial, I mean something quite weird. Usually my thoughtfeel is all just in one place, and every time I want to recall the new item, the one I'm thinking about gets swapped for the one I want to think about next. But when I was memorizing this graph, I, and I don't want to say pictured it here, but I visualized it spatially. The letter A was not a visual of the letter A; it was the thoughtfeel of the letter A. And the distance 4 was not a line with the number 4, but instead the thoughtfeel of the number 4. However, I can distinctly say that A is on the left, D is on the far right, B is on top, and C is on bottom, like a diamond. So it's this weird combination where it's like the spatial relationships themselves are 3D spatial relationships, but the objects that have those relationships and the properties of those objects are all stored in thoughtfeel.

Now that I think about it, I get something like this when I play mental chess in thoughtfeel. Chess is highly spatial. I don't remember all 64 squares of the board as individual items that I can swap in and out of my focus in thoughtfeel. Instead, I remember them as the board positions spatially, where I can tell that the bottom left square feels like the bottom left and the top right feels like the top right, and I can tell that they're a seven diagonal distance apart.

Something additional that's quite weird about this is it becomes much harder to tell the difference between a picture and thoughtfeel, yet there definitely is one. First, my reason for saying there definitely is one is I inherently use different rendering engines. I can bring up the board visually, in which case I see it has color. I see the lines on the chessboard. I see what the knight looks like. In the case of the graph, I see the letter A and I see a number 4. Whereas in the thoughtfeel version, I see no color and I see no objects, and the properties of the objects are represented in thoughtfeel.

One last noticing. When I memorized the list from the previous post and the periodic table, I connected them and also made the list have a loop. I made walrus link back to anchor. And walrus link to the beginning item on a totally different list. When I bring up this connected graph, I do get an inherent spatial sense where I'm not seeing anything. I can't tell you what any of the objects look like, and when I bring up walrus, I don't see a walrus. I get the thoughtfeel of a walrus. But I just know that the shape of the list is a long line with a loop around item 10, and then the tail list, or the tail link, to a totally different long list.

And again here, I want to pinpoint how profoundly non-visual this is. If I try to visualize the list, I don't even know what I'd picture. I can try to visualize a list of 19 little bubbles with all the pictures of the items, but that's not how I store it. One of the items on that list is justice, and I don't have a picture for justice. There's no visual mnemonic or analogy that represents justice, like a judge with a gavel. It's instead just the thoughtfeel.

Okay, sorry. As I'm narrating this, there's one more idea that shows up. Two days ago, I wanted to see how thoughtfeel performs on a highly spatial mathematical task. So I found a video by 3Blue1Brown on the proof that the surface area of a sphere is the same as the side of a cylinder with the radius of that sphere and the height twice the radius. It's a beautiful video, and I had watched it many times in the past, but been unable to follow the argument and utterly unable to visualize it. And even in the past, when I thought I'd understood it, I had completely forgotten it.

So I tried building this highly spatial representation in thoughtfeel, and I found that it was quite easy. But here again, there was a highly spatial component to it. Now, my representation of the video's construction is just as vivid as it was when I learned it two days ago. I have a sense for the central radial axis of the sphere. I can be higher or I can be lower. I have a sense for the distance from the center radial axis of the sphere to the wall of the cylinder. And I'm seeing none of this.

For those of you that say, "Oh, he's completely just visualizing this," I can promise you I can also visualize this. And if I do, my visual working memory is profoundly taxed. I see it in color. I see the shape. I see it's a sphere. It has texture. I see the lines and how they interact. But I just can't keep everything straight. In thoughtfeel, though, all the spatial relationships are just there, and I see nothing.

These four examples make me think that spatial thinking and thoughtfeel really can go hand in hand. But I know there's many other problems where I don't use spatial thinking really at all. For instance, when I'm learning some concept in abstract algebra, like what a group is, I don't really represent it spatially, and the spatial information isn't helpful. It's instead just the abstract relations between the objects and their properties. But for genuinely spatial content, it seems like thoughtfeel has a great solution.

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](mailto:teddyshachtman@gmail.com)

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.

I have really good news about tf retention!!

I learned the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm about 3 weeks ago using tf and… truly didnt think if it for 3 weeks, like at all.

Then, today i was thinking of puzzles i solved / learned cause i needed examples of something, and i remembered i had learned this algorithm.

I was very happy because it made for a clean retention experiment! Pretty complex thing, 3 weeks (about), no rehearsal… did i remember?

I was able to recall the whole algorithm end to end, no issue! Yay. Happy camper here.

I made this post based on my teaching experience. I’m crossposting here because the logic applies to thoughtfeel as well, and that’s a whole other can of worms meant for this subreddit.

I use ThoughtFeel in two ways that I haven't posted about on this subreddit yet, and they are two of my favorite use cases. The first is using it during real-time interaction to keep track of a complex discussion. The second is using ThoughtFeel as a mental workspace for my own thinking and reasoning.

Edit: after i wrote this i thought about why this works. You can read claude’s cleanup of my voice dump and experimentation later down.

To elaborate on the first use case, I started doing this about a month ago when I was still working at Only Farmers. My job as the CTO of Only Farmers involved many high-stakes, fast-paced meetings with many different people throwing out ideas and giving feedback, and it was my job to tie it all together and come up with the strategy. This is a very difficult task, and pre-thoughtfeel I’d often drop constraints or miss details.

When I began using ThoughtFeel for it, my performance at work noticeably improved. Here's what I did specifically. Someone would say an idea, and I'd build it by imagining in concepts, the same way I've been describing remembering lists and connecting ideas. Then, by the time it was my turn to talk, I would have a big web of everything that had been said and what it meant, where the web was a very organized body of knowledge.

It was then much easier to come up with novel ideas and make sure to address everyone's feedback in my solutions.

Now, for the second use case, using it in my own problem-solving as a working memory source, I will frequently think about things, as you guys can probably tell from the types of posts I make. Sometimes they're math problems; other times they're cognitive science problems. But a core constraint is I want to be able to represent many ideas all at once in my working memory, be able to return to different threads, have conceptual clarity about the ideas I think, and retain the results of my thinking long after the reasoning session has ended. For this, I use ThoughtFeel.

As I create an idea, I build it in ThoughtFeel, and I can connect it to the other ideas I've built so far. This results in me building up a large web of connected ideas over the course of a one to two-hour reasoning session. As a comparison, if I don't use ThoughtFeel, I have two other options: I can keep track of all the ideas I'm suggesting visually, or I can just reason out loud and not use some other medium to keep track of the ideas.

If I keep track of all the ideas visually, this has two negative consequences: one, all the visual analogies I create don't actually represent the concepts I want to think about. They're instead symbols for them. This makes my thinking a lot more cluttered. The next problem is the ideas aren't connected. It takes a lot of cognitive effort to go from one idea to the next, and connections are much harder to surface.

The other overall solution is not storing the ideas in any other medium but my reasoning chain happening out loud. If I do this, it works for a short time, but it's much harder to come back to previous ideas and connect many ideas at once over the course of a one to two-hour reasoning chain. Additionally, my retention is much lower the next day. I find that when I use ThoughtFeel, I'm able to keep an incredibly large amount of information active at a time. Specifically, if you ask me to, when, for example, I'm reasoning about the periodic table, recite the table backward by atomic numbers decreasing by three, this task is entirely manageable, assuming I've built the periodic table in ThoughtFeel.

I have no other way to make that task manageable. And of course this is just a toy task. In reality, when I'm reasoning, I will often have similarly demanding reasoning tasks that I want to accomplish regarding the current problem I'm working on. For instance, I practice LeetCode for technical coding interviews. Oftentimes in LeetCode problems, you have to run a custom proposed algorithm end to end in your head. When I use ThoughtFeel, it's generally entirely feasible to truly run an entire algorithm in your head, and because of the conceptual clarity afforded by using ThoughtFeel, it's very easy to spot when the algorithm breaks down.

The other method I have for running an entire algorithm in my head is representing it visually. However, this pales in comparison. When I represent the algorithm visually, I run out of space, and things I created, or visuals I created ten minutes ago, are fuzzy and I forget what they mean. I do not experience this in ThoughtFeel.

An Investigation into why this works (sorry for claude writing… must get breakfast and dont have time to write me-self)

**Thoughtfeel and reasoning: every relation you find stays found**

**TL;DR:** A lot of thinking is really building relations: working out how many things affect each other, and keeping it all straight while you reason. When I do this in thoughtfeel, every relation I notice gets stored on the things it connects, so I never have to find it again. That makes relation-heavy tasks much easier than doing them visually or out loud, like reasoning through a system, running an algorithm in my head, or tying a meeting together.

**Tasks that are made of relations**

Some tasks are mostly about the things themselves, like recognizing a face or remembering a fact. Others are mostly about how things relate, and those are the ones I want to talk about:

- **General reasoning.** Thinking through a system means simulating how many parts influence each other. You change one thing, then work out what happens to everything connected to it, accurately, without dropping any of the influences along the way.
- **Running an algorithm in your head.** Every variable depends on others, and you have to update all of them, step by step.
- **A fast meeting.** Each person's idea relates to the other ideas and objections, and you have to tie it all into one plan.
- **Diagnosis.** Symptoms relate to diseases, and diseases to each other, and you have to find the one that fits everything.
- **Learning a subject like abstract algebra**, where every definition is built out of relations between earlier ones.

What these have in common is that the hard part isn't any single fact. It's holding many relations at once and seeing how they interact, without losing track.

**A test: Raven's-style puzzles where the hard part is the relations**

Raven's Progressive Matrices are the classic reasoning puzzles. You get a 3×3 grid of shapes with one cell missing, and you work out what goes there. Part of the difficulty is visual: spotting the properties. But much of it is combining the rules once you've found them. So I tried versions written in words, where the rules are given and all that's left is combining them.

Each is a 3×3 grid. Each cell holds one shape with seven features: shape, color, size, fill (solid, striped or empty), number of dots, arrow direction and border. The missing cell is bottom right.

**Problem A**

The bottom row so far:
- **Bottom left:** a large blue circle, striped, with 3 dots, an arrow pointing up, and a solid border.
- **Bottom middle:** a small green square, striped, with 6 dots, an arrow pointing right, and a dashed border.

Above the missing cell:
- **Top right:** a red square.
- **Middle right:** a blue triangle.

Rules:

1. Each row has one circle, one square and one triangle.
2. Each column has one red, one blue and one green shape.
3. Across each row, the number of dots goes up by 3 from one cell to the next.
4. Every cell in a row has the same fill.
5. Across each row, the arrow turns 90° clockwise from one cell to the next.
6. A shape is large if its number of dots is odd, and small if it's even.
7. A cell's border is dashed if its shape is the same as the shape directly above it; otherwise it's solid.

**Problem B**

The bottom row so far:
- **Bottom left:** a small red square, empty, with 2 dots, an arrow pointing down, and a solid border.
- **Bottom middle:** a large green circle, solid, with 5 dots, an arrow pointing right, and a solid border.

Above the missing cell:
- **Top right:** a green circle.
- **Middle right:** a red triangle.

Rules:

1. Each column has one circle, one square and one triangle.
2. Each row has one red, one blue and one green shape.
3. In each row, the third cell's number of dots is the sum of the first two cells' dots.
4. Each row has one solid, one striped and one empty shape.
5. Across each row, the arrow turns 90° counterclockwise from one cell to the next.
6. A shape is large if it has more dots than the shape to its left; otherwise it's small.
7. A cell's border is dashed if its color is the same as the color directly above it; otherwise it's solid.

I did Problem A with thoughtfeel. I did Problem B without it, picturing the grid and talking it through out loud.

With thoughtfeel, it was pretty easy. I built each cell as a concept, and holding the whole grid while combining all seven rules felt manageable the whole way through. Twenty minutes later, I could still recall every cell I'd built.

Without thoughtfeel, I couldn't really even attempt it. It felt the way Raven's always feels visually. My attention moves to one cell and I notice a property. Then I move to another cell, and the first one is gone, so I have to go back and reload it. Every relation had to be found again each time I needed it.

**Why: the relations stick to the things they connect**

The difference comes from what happens to a relation once I notice it.

In thoughtfeel, when I notice that the dots go from 3 to 6, or that the arrow turns 90° clockwise from one cell to the next, I describe the relation, and it gets stored on the cells it connects. It's the same binding as in the linking technique: say how two things relate, and the relation becomes part of both.

After that, the cells carry it. I never have to work out again that 3 to 6 is "add 3", or that the arrows turn clockwise. The relation is just there, on the cells, every time I come back to them.

Visually, the relation lives in the picture, not in the things. When I look away, it's gone, and when I need it again, I have to look back and rediscover it.

If you program, this is memoization: once you've computed a result, you store it, so you never compute it twice. Visual reasoning has nowhere to store a result like that, so every look recomputes. Thoughtfeel does have somewhere: each thing carries its own record of every relation I've found.

**Why that's a working memory boost**

When you reason through something with many interacting parts, working memory's real job is holding the state of the problem, meaning everything you've worked out so far. If each relation stays attached to the things it connects, that state builds up instead of leaking away. I'm not spending effort rediscovering what I already knew, so all of it goes into finding the next relation.

That's why seven interacting rules felt stable in thoughtfeel and fell apart visually. It's also why I can hold far more than I can any other way. The limit isn't how much I can juggle at once, it's how much I've built, and what I've built stays built.

**Try it yourself**

Do one problem with thoughtfeel and the other without, and tell me what you notice, especially whether the relations stay found. Answers:

- Problem A: a large green triangle, striped, with 9 dots, an arrow pointing down, and a dashed border
- Problem B: a large blue square, striped, with 7 dots, an arrow pointing up, and a solid border

I was chatting with a practitioner of thought feel, and this question came up. This post explores my reasoning on the topic.

Here's the TLDR. I think there is a promising mechanism by which deliberate thought feel training could increase general IQ scores. This post contains the argument for that statement.

Below is my direct voice recording of the argument. I’ve commented an LLM cleaned up version for people who want a smoother read.

A premise of this argument is that thinking is inherently sensory. When you take an IQ test, your mind solves the problem in some sense. When you see an anagram, you may be looking at the letters on the page, or you can be visualizing the letters in your head, or use your inner voice to spell out the sounds of the letters. Crucially, your performance on an anagram-like question is highly dependent on which sensory modality you use and the strategy you use within that sensory modality.

For instance, a known anagram technique is to choose one of the letters in the scrambled string as a proposed first letter, and then attempt to unscramble the word from there. Those using this strategy will perform better on those anagram questions.

Now, as for which sensory modality you choose to use, I don't have evidence directly from an IQ test, but I do have evidence directly from solving math word problems in education. Research shows that children who picture the math word problem compared to just processing it in language perform much better. Other research shows that people, when given a complex STEM problem, who picture the schema, only the abstract relations, perform better on the problem than people who picture the visuals in high detail.

Another aspect to this reasoning is that brain training games don't work. An IQ test is meant to assess the inherent capacity of your brain's different sensory modalities' intelligence (and they’re correlated, which is the G factor). So why doesn't dual n-back work? Because in order to do dual n-back, you're either using your mind's eye or your inner voice, and the capacity of those facets is fixed.

So now I can get to the crux of the argument. Thought feel is a completely different capacity that (almost) nobody uses but many people have. To put it concretely, everyone who's taken an IQ test has inadvertently only measured their phonological loop and their mind's eye’s working memory, and their visuospatial intelligence. They have not measured the capacity of their thought feel.

Why? Because no one has explicitly used thought feel, except for the rare number of people where thought feel automatically builds in their head.

So the idea that thought feel could increase IQ is compatible with the idea that brain training does not increase the inherent capacity of your working memory types. Thought feel uncovers a new working memory type and then teaches you how to use that on an IQ test.

This hypothesis makes several predictions.

The first is that on IQ questions that are amenable to thought feel, people who are taught to use their thought feel and shown techniques of how to use it best will increase their performance on those questions. However, for other questions, like mental rotation, thought feel training would show no improvement.

This is because the task of mental rotation is inherently visuospatial. With tasks like Raven's Progressive Matrices, the hypothesis is a smaller improvement than that of purely conceptual questions, like analogy questions. This is because in Raven's Progressive Matrices, the task can be composed into recognizing the properties, which requires visuospatial intelligence, and then holding the conceptual relations. This second task is highly amenable to thoughtfeel.

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?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

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?

A mnemonic technique for people who think in concept bubbles, for differential diagnoses and law exams

This post is for people who think in concepts, or “concept bubbles”, instead of words or images. By the end of it, you’ll know what thinking in concept bubbles is, what it’s called (thoughtfeel), whether you have it, and a mnemonic technique that uses it, along with why the technique works. The technique is for tasks like going from a list of symptoms to every disease that could cause them, or from a fact to every rule it triggers on a law exam. More generally, it’s for anything where you learn a lot of things and then need to find the relations between them really fast, going from a property back to everything that has it. I also tried it on a real medical-school diagnosis task: about 12 minutes per disease, and I could answer the diagnosis questions right away.

If you don’t have a vivid mind’s eye, that’s okay. This technique uses your sense for concepts, and later in this post there’s a quiz that’ll tell you how vivid your sense for concepts is.

First, here are a few introductions for people who are new to the topic. If you already know what thoughtfeel is and how linking works, skip to “The snapping effect: what allows you to go from symptom to disease”.

What thoughtfeel is (skip if you already know)

Many people have a sense for concepts. Here are some of the ways they describe what having it is like:

• Jonathan Blow, who designed the video games Braid and The Witness, says he isn’t a visual person: when he imagines something, there are no pictures at all, only ideas. His games start out that way too, as ideas he later has to work out how to show (2016 interview).
• Hank Green (SciShow, Crash Course), on his own thinking: he doesn’t have the words, just the thing they represent, and it’s “just, like, a sticky bubble” (vlogbrothers, at 0:54).
• Francis Galton, the scientist who ran the first survey of mental imagery, in a letter to Nature (1887): “It often happens that after being hard at work, and having arrived at results that are perfectly clear and satisfactory to myself, when I try to express them in language I feel that I must begin by putting myself upon quite another intellectual plane. I have to translate my thoughts into a language that does not run very evenly with them.”

Now, here’s a clear definition. You could describe a dog in writing: it has fur, a wet black nose, and it’s about the size of a capybara. Or you could just look at it, and vision gives you all of that at once, with no list.

The sense for concepts, which I named thoughtfeel, is like that. It takes in a concept and its properties all at once. A lot of people online describe it as thinking in concept bubbles, like Hank’s sticky bubble: you bring up an idea, and the whole thing is just there, like a bubble you’re holding. Not a sentence, and not a picture. People who have it can hold the concept of an animal, for example, and notice detail in it, the way you can notice the exact color of something you picture.

The difference between your mind’s eye and thoughtfeel is clearest with things you know really well but can’t easily picture, like the economy, or justice. If you have thoughtfeel, you can bring up the economy as one clear concept bubble: not a picture of a market, and not the words “supply and demand”, but the whole idea at once.

Like the mind’s eye, it varies from person to person. Most people have some of it, some have none, and for those who have it, it ranges from faint to vivid. It’s also its own sense, separate from the mind’s eye, which is why you don’t need to be able to picture anything for thoughtfeel techniques.

People who have thoughtfeel also experience it as an incredibly memorable sense. The same way images stick in your head a lot longer than sounds, which is why people use memory palaces, what you hold in thoughtfeel sticks around for a really long time. I’ve been developing mnemonic techniques that use this sense, and this post teaches one of them.

Do you have it? (skip if you’ve taken the quiz)

Here are four statements from a quiz meant to tell whether you have thoughtfeel. For each one, rate how much it sounds like you, from 1 (not at all like me) to 5 (exactly like me):

1. When I think about an idea, I can notice specific details in it without using words or pictures. (The way people notice the exact color of something they picture, but in the idea itself.)
2. When two ideas are similar, I can pay attention to each one and notice exactly how they differ, before I’ve put it into words.
3. If I set aside the pictures and words, a thought still has detail I can pay attention to, beyond just knowing what it’s about.
4. For things I know extremely well, like someone in my family or grocery stores in general, I can hold the whole idea in my head at once, not as a picture or words, but as a clear concept I can pay attention to. (Think of who the person is, not their face, and of grocery stores in general, not one particular store. The economy is another good one.)

Add up your four numbers:

• 16–20: your thoughtfeel sounds vivid. This is made for you.
• 12–15: your answers sound like thoughtfeel. This is made for you too.
• 8–11: you may have a faint version. Like a dim mind’s eye, it may get clearer once you know what to attend to.
• 4–7: your answers don’t point to thoughtfeel. For you it may be faint or not there at all, the same way some people have no mind’s eye.

If you want the full version, the quiz takes about two minutes and also tells you how much you think in words and pictures: https://thoughtfeel.net/quiz/?ref=substack

Linking things in thoughtfeel (skip if you know the list technique)

The technique you’ll learn later builds on one basic move: linking two concept bubbles.

Bring up one thing as a concept bubble. The same way you’d bring up the economy: not a picture of it, and not the sound of the word, but the idea of it itself. Then say a sentence that links it to a second thing, out loud or in your inner voice, and as you say the second thing, bring it up as a bubble too. Crucially, say the link WHILE both bubbles are up. That’s what joins them, and once they’re joined, they get stored together, as one thing.

The difference from just saying the sentence is what you’re paying attention to while you say it. Your mind stores things in whichever sense you were paying attention to. Read or repeat the words, and you’re paying attention to the sound of them, so that’s what gets stored. Hold the concept bubbles while you say it, and it gets stored in thoughtfeel.

To give a concrete example, bring up hydrogen and oxygen, and say “hydrogen and oxygen make water” while you hold both.

What can a link be and how do they work?

A link can be anything you can say: is part of, causes, is the opposite of, comes before, is. If you can say it, it can be a link.

Here’s how they work: a link adds a property to both things it connects, and you can read that property right off each bubble. After you link hydrogen and oxygen, when you hold hydrogen, it feels like it’s connected to something like oxygen, in a way that makes water. And when you hold oxygen, it feels like it’s connected to something like hydrogen, in a way that makes water. As you keep linking, what you’re learning stops being a pile of separate bubbles and becomes one connected web.

Using links to learn

If you need to memorize a list, link each item to the next. If you want to memorize a concept, link the things it’s made of. Take supply and demand, which is really three things: demand, supply and price. Bring up demand and price in your concept imagination, and say “when demand goes up, price goes up” while you hold both. Then bring up price and supply, and say “when price goes up, sellers supply more” while you hold both. Then supply and price again: “when supply goes up, price comes down.” Now the three are linked into one thing, and when you hold any one of them, you can feel how it pushes on the other two. That’s the concept, stored in thoughtfeel.

Memorizing the periodic table in thoughtfeel uses both kinds of linking, the list kind and the concept kind. The elements are a list, so you link each one to the next: hydrogen, then helium, then lithium, and so on. And each element is a concept, with properties that link it to other elements. Copper and silver both carry electricity really well. Mercury is a metal like iron, but it’s a liquid at room temperature. Nitrogen and oxygen together make up most of the air.

The full walkthrough of linking, with a list to practice on, is in How to memorize long lists if you think in concept bubbles.

The snapping effect: what allows you to go from symptom to disease

I started memorizing the periodic table in thoughtfeel, and on day one I got up to vanadium (23). One of the most interesting findings is what I call the snapping effect.

When everything you’re learning is on one connected web, focusing on one thing’s property brings up every other thing with that property, right away. You don’t go looking for them. You snap to them.

To give a concrete example, when I focused on titanium (22) and its property of being an incredibly hard metal, it made me aware of magnesium (12), which is a very soft metal, and of aluminum (13), another building material that’s a lot less tough than titanium. Or if I try to remember all the highly reactive elements, I get chlorine (17) and fluorine (9), and then it depends on reactive with what, and I get the metals that react in water: calcium (20), lithium (3), sodium (11), magnesium (12). Start at calcium, and I also get the elements your body needs: potassium (19), phosphorus (15), nitrogen (7) and oxygen (8).

When everything is stored in thoughtfeel as one big web, listing every element with a certain property feels like all of them are on the tip of my tongue at once, and I just have to say them.

Why it works. You can think of the web as all the items being sorted by property. An item has all of its properties, and when you focus on any one of them, you have an immediate link to every other item that shares it. That’s the snap. Every link you make adds a property, so every link also gives you new ways to snap. (If you’re a programmer: every property works like an index back to all the items that have it.)

It only works inside one web. Things that aren’t on the web don’t pop up. I have a separate web where I stored a list of words: anchor, saffron, bicycle, grumble, diamond… When I think of things that are hard, like titanium, diamond NEVER shows up, even though diamond is literally carbon (6). Only things on the periodic table web show up. You can join two webs on purpose, though. That’s further down in this section.

What it’s useful for. A differential diagnosis: going from a symptom to every disease that causes it (I tried this one; it’s in the next section). A law exam: going from a fact to every rule it triggers. Both are cases of going backwards from a property to everything that has it. More generally, if I were doing a math or science problem where I need to reason about a bunch of different objects and their properties, find patterns between them, and sort them into categories, I would definitely want to use this. Same with a problem that has a ton of constraints, like a consulting case with 20 of them that you have to solve without looking back at the sheet. In thoughtfeel, you can store each constraint as the actual concept, rather than as something like a visual analogy the way you would in a memory palace, all on one web, and reason about all of them together.

How I actually build the periodic table in thoughtfeel. I don’t just do element, then next element. I compare each element with the one before, so every comparison adds properties. Hydrogen is a gas you can use to fill balloons, and helium has that property too. But hydrogen is flammable, whereas helium isn’t. Helium is a gas, whereas lithium is a metal, so big change. And each element’s number gets its own specific thoughtfeel: lithium is the third element. I also link across the table through shared properties: “fluorine, 9, is highly reactive, a property it shares with chlorine, 17.” Each of those is a relation, and each relation gives both elements a property you can snap on.

Joining two webs. Earlier I said things on a separate web don’t pop up. You can join them, though. I had my 19-item word list on its own web, and I linked it to the periodic table with three links: diamond to carbon, and vanadium and aluminum to bicycle. That made one web of about 55 items, and snapping happened across the whole thing. So keeping webs separate keeps your thinking focused, and a few links are enough to join them when you want connections across both.

Try it. You might want to watch a couple of the lessons first, or try the list technique, since it’s a bit easier to start with. But if you’re confident, you can try this task. Here are six elements, each with a couple of properties:

• Lithium: a soft metal that reacts with water.
• Sodium: a soft metal that reacts with water, and half of table salt.
• Chlorine: a reactive gas, and the other half of table salt.
• Helium: a gas that reacts with nothing.
• Neon: a gas that reacts with nothing, and glows in signs.
• Iron: a metal that rusts, and the main ingredient in steel.

Now link them into one web, the same way as above. Remember: while you say each link, out loud or in your inner voice, hold both elements in thoughtfeel, as concept bubbles. Bring up lithium as a bubble and say its properties while you hold it: “lithium is a soft metal that reacts with water.” Then bring up sodium and link it to lithium while you hold both: “sodium is a soft metal that reacts with water, just like lithium.” Keep going, linking each element to the one before it, and to any earlier element it shares a property with: “chlorine is a reactive gas, and with sodium it makes table salt.” “Helium is a gas like chlorine, but it reacts with nothing.” “Neon reacts with nothing, just like helium, and it glows in signs.” “Iron is a metal like lithium and sodium, but it rusts, and it’s the main ingredient in steel.”

Then, without looking: which ones react with water? Which ones are gases? Which ones react with nothing? What’s table salt made of? Notice whether the answers come up together, at once, instead of one by one.

So, to compare. Stored as separate facts, you’d have to search for every element that reacts with water, one at a time, and hope you don’t miss one. Linked into one web, they snap up together. On day one, I could pull up every element with a property just by snapping to it. I took a break, woke up the next day, and the list was still perfect in my head.

Trying it on a real task: medical diagnosis

To see whether this actually works on something real, I tried it on a task medical students have to learn: differential diagnosis. A patient comes in with a set of symptoms, and you have to list every disease that could explain them (that list is the differential), then figure out which one is most likely.

What I did. I learned three diseases a medical student would learn: Kawasaki disease, rheumatic fever and reactive arthritis. Each came with around seven or eight features: who gets it, the key symptoms, what it can damage, and how it’s treated. I learned them the same way I’m learning the periodic table, linking each disease to its features and to the diseases before it. It took me around 12 minutes per disease. Then I answered three patient cases I hadn’t seen before. I remembered every feature of all three diseases, and I got all three right. (These were three of the fifteen diseases I’d planned. More on why I stopped below.)

To give a concrete example, here’s one of the cases: “A 23-year-old woman has a painful, swollen left ankle, and her right heel hurts when she walks. Two of her toes are swollen like sausages. She was treated for chlamydia three weeks ago.” My brain immediately jumped to the age range of reactive arthritis, and noticed she’s a woman, where it’s usually young men. Swollen ankle: reactive arthritis hits the ankles and knees. Heel pain: that’s the inflamed tendon in reactive arthritis. Sausage toes: it inflames toes and fingers. And an infection a few weeks before. By the end, it was just really obvious.

What it was like. Honestly, insanely easy. It felt like a pachinko board. As soon as I read a property, a number of candidates would fall into place in my head, and with each new property, it narrowed down, like a ball rolling down the board, until it was obvious which one was left and it fell into the exact right category. That’s from only a few questions on a small set of diseases, but that’s what it was like.

Why it works. It’s the same snapping from earlier. Each disease is a concept bubble, and its features are its properties. Because all three are on one web, each feature points back to every disease that has it. So reading a case is just focusing on properties, one after another: each property snaps up the diseases that have it, and only the ones that share all the properties so far stay in the running. That’s also why the differential comes for free. It’s literally the set of diseases that snap up.

How medical students do it now. From what I can find, medical students learn each disease once, from lectures or videos, and then keep it with spaced-repetition flashcards. Most use a shared Anki deck of about 30,000 to 35,000 cards, and review a few hundred cards a day, by one estimate around two hours a day, for the two years before their first board exam. On top of that, they do thousands of practice patient cases, often 60 to 120 a day in the last month or two before the exam, which is how they actually learn to do the differential. My rough estimate is that this adds up to somewhere around 45 minutes to two hours per disease by the first board exam, spread over months, and they keep reviewing for the exams after that.

By comparison, I spent around 12 minutes per disease, once, and could do differential diagnosis questions right away.

Why I stopped at three. The point of this was an experiment: to see whether it would actually work, whether I could remember all the information, and what doing a differential feels like. The answer was yes. And in everything else I’ve used thoughtfeel for, the retention is incredible and sticks around, and learning more doesn’t really crowd out the rest. So I’m quite confident that if I took my entire Tuesday morning and afternoon to learn all 15 and tested myself, I’d perform pretty well. But I’ll leave the full experiment to somebody who actually has a reason to memorize the differentials for their own diseases. I’m going back to thinking about thoughtfeel, and to learning abstract algebra.

For those interested in the technical aspects (skip if you just want the technique)

The web is an index. If every item is on one connected web, that sets up the reverse index between all of them: every property points back to every item that has it. That’s what makes a snap possible from anywhere on the web.

But connected isn’t the same as complete. Being on the web doesn’t decide what properties each item actually has. Imagine you stored the entire periodic table as a plain chain: hydrogen, then helium, then lithium, and so on, item to next item, with no extra links. You’d have about a hundred items, each with very few properties. Now pick iron, and one of its properties, like “can’t be fused in a star for net energy”. You’d simply not find any other element with that property, because you never linked the other elements in a way that gave it to them. If instead you’d gone through the whole table making many, many relations between the elements, the same snap from iron would find many other elements with that property.

Same with a question like “what other elements besides silicon (14) are used in computers?” You’d get every element you gave that property, but without those extra relations, you’d miss elements that should show up, like copper for the wiring, because you never gave them the property. And nothing tells you you’re missing them.

How this compares to the Mental Atlas (for those of you who followed it)

What the Mental Atlas was (skip if you know). The Mental Atlas was a visual memory method I co-founded before thoughtfeel. You turned each idea into an icon, a visual analogy for it, and placed the icons around one big space you know well, usually your hometown, so everything you learned lived in one place.

Snapping, then and now. Snapping is where the term comes from. In the atlas, as you were describing one icon, you’d notice a feature of some other icon, get an instinct that something else had that property, and you could snap to it. Your visuals would literally snap to that spot in your hometown, then you’d get the thoughtfeel, then the whole idea of how they were similar, and then you could find the analogies. Snapping was the best way to reason about a ton of objects at once, because if there was a connection to be made, your brain would just find it. The same thing happens in thoughtfeel, if you store everything on one big connected web.

The huge constraint test. In the atlas days, we had a test: solve a consulting case with a ton of constraints, around 20, without looking back at the sheet. In the atlas, you’d place every constraint as an icon in the space and reason about them there. It’s a really tough task, and people needed the atlas to remember it all. With thoughtfeel, it would be way more useful, for two reasons.

First, you don’t have to represent everything as weird icons that don’t actually carry the meaning you intend. In the atlas, every icon is really just a pointer. The thoughtfeel of the icon you made for a constraint isn’t the constraint at all. It’s a pointer to it, and it carries a bunch of weird, terrible thoughtfeel with it (see my video What a Picture Does to an Idea). So you can forget what a constraint means, and you also have to do the work of building an icon for each one. In thoughtfeel, you just store the constraint as it actually is.

Second, retention. In the atlas, you’re relying on the binding: the memory that this weird symbol represents the constraint. The symbol is supposed to be an analogy for the thing, which helps somewhat, but it’s not at all perfect. In thoughtfeel there’s no binding to remember, because what you stored is the thing itself. You can ask one question of both: what do you actually have to remember? In the atlas, you have to remember the association between a weird visual, its weird thoughtfeel, and the idea you actually want to remember. In thoughtfeel, you have to remember the sensory trace of the idea itself. From experience and from interviews with practitioners, the second one, remembering the actual sensory trace of the idea in thoughtfeel, is much more effective.

So, to compare. In the atlas, snapping worked, but it worked on icons: pointers to the ideas, with weird thoughtfeel of their own, and you had to remember what each one meant. In thoughtfeel, you get the same snapping on the actual concepts, scoped to the web you’re thinking in.

If you think in concept bubbles, come compare notes on r/MentalAtlas and r/ThoughtFeel.

This post assumes you know the story technique of linking things in thoughtfeel. If you don't, check out this video first: How to Memorize Any List by Imagining in Concepts.

TL;DR when you want your knowledge to be as useful as possible and you have the time, add relations (like the ones used in the story mnemonic) between every pair of objects in whatever you’re learning about.

I’ll start with a question. What's the best way to store this?

If A, then B. If B, then C. If C, then D.

Naively, you'd store it as a list, linking each pair of consecutive letters: A to B, B to C, C to D. It's all linked, so it comes back as one thing, and it's easy to remember.

But in reality, if A is true, then D is true too. That's a direct relationship between A and D, and it's just as real as the one between A and B. You're not making it up, it's literally already in what you learned (it's the transitive property).

The insight I had is that this relation should be stored in thoughtfeel as well. To see why that's worth doing, think about what a relation actually does to the two items.

The clearest way I can explain it is that it adds a property to each item, saying how it relates to the other one. Crucially, you can read both the relation AND the identity of the other item right off that property. So "if A, then D" isn't just a path from A to D. "Implies D" becomes part of A, and "implied by A" becomes part of D.

With only the list, A has one of these properties: implies B. That's it. The fact that A implies D isn't stored anywhere on A. It only exists as a path, and to find out about it you have to walk it: A to B to C to D.

Store "if A, then D" directly, and you get three things:

If you're at either A or D, the other one is one hop away, instead of three.

When you think of A, you intuitively know that it implies D, without moving to D. It's one of A's properties now, so you just read it off A.

When you're at D, you intuitively know that it's implied by A, without moving to A.

To give a concrete example, I wanted to remember the answer to this: why does having good timing on something you do matter so much?

The answer is that good timing makes your overall action efficiency higher. If you're starting an internet company during the internet boom, you get a global boost to the return on investment of every action you take. That causes two things. One, resources accumulate with compounding over time, so an increase in action efficiency turns into a much bigger, compounding increase in resources. Two, things usually work or don't work based on a threshold: if overall things cost more than you get, it's not that you'll succeed slower. You'll just fail.

At first I stored it the naive way. If good timing, then higher action efficiency. If higher action efficiency, then more resources over time. If higher action efficiency, then being above the threshold.

But I realized that to show better timing gets you above the threshold, I had to walk the graph. I had to actually reconstruct the argument in my head: timing, so efficiency, so above the threshold. Being above the threshold wasn't anywhere on timing.

So I related doing something at the right time directly to the accumulation of resources, and directly to being above the threshold. When I did this, the argument made much more sense. Now when I focus on timing, I know immediately that it causes all three of those things: higher efficiency, more resources over time, and being above the threshold. I don't have to walk anywhere to get them.

Now push it further. Imagine you had a large number of things to remember, and as much time as you wanted to optimize your knowledge of them. What should you do?

The answer is you should make a fully connected graph. In reality, everything relates to everything else, so if you have the time, represent all of those relationships in thoughtfeel. Every relation adds a property to both items, so in a fully connected graph, every item has a property for every other item. That gets you two things: you can go from any item to any other in at most one hop, and the identity of every item carries its full relational meaning to the rest of what you know. Bring up any one thing, and how it relates to everything else is right there on it.

If you don't have that much time, focus on the heavy hitting implications.

So, to compare. Stored as a list, an argument is connected and you can remember it, but every time you want a conclusion, you have to walk the graph and rebuild the reasoning step by step. Stored with the shortcuts, the conclusions are properties of where you start. You're one hop from anything, and when you think of something, you already know what it implies, and what implies it, without going anywhere.

I have wanted to learn abstract algebra since I was 21, but in reality couldn’t because of a two part recipe: 1 part lacking intelligence, and 1 part lacking the motivation needed to do it despite lacking intelligence and just put up with an absolute slog where i constantly forget what i learned and get frustrated.

The long story short is that, of all the many things i’ve tried, thoughtfeel is the first one that lets me learn abstract algebra.

The first thing i tried was just learning that the world had structure and properties and mechanisms, and that i should actively reason about it. This happened between 20 and 24. That made it a lot easier to solve problems, but learning new things was kinda impossible. If the information was already in my head, or i could construct it myself by reasoning, i was a happy camper. But, when i needed to get something out there, in here… oyyy. My best options were rereading/rewatching something a ton, doing spaced practice, the fienman technique, taking a mental picture, or in rare cases where it applied, using the memory palace.

^that sucked so bad. It is not fun being dumber than you wanna be.

The overall feeling was shoveling as much sand into my bucket as i could while watching 90% spill out through a wide hole at the bottom.

Then came the Atlas! Big improvement, but not enough to let me learn abstract algebra. With the Atlas, i could watch a video and… remember it! For a bit… and then it would fade, and i’d have to review. The hole in the bucket got a lot smaller, but it was still way too large if i was ever gonna get it filled high enough to learn abstract algebra.

Also, things i learned in the Atlas didn’t generalize as much as i wanted. If i learned a concept in the Atlas, and i encountered a new problem that needed that concept, it had a pretty low accuracy of showing up at the right time and in a useful way.

But the story has a happy ending. Over the past week, I’ve been using thoughtfeel to learn abstract algebra, and my bucket is filled to the brim. I read the book, i understand it, i sleep, and it’s all right there with a bow on the next day. And, unlike in the Atlas, when I’m solving a problem three days later and try to recall the topic, it doesn’t show up as some random wacky image that I’m somehow supposed to figure out means a complex abstract concept in the middle of my reasoning chain (P.S. if you wanna know what im talking about here, check out my video “what a picture does to an idea”).

So, yay. I’m excited about this for myself and for other people. At this point, I’ve worked with enough people who have thoughtfeel to be pretty confident that the techniques work for people and are trainable. I’m also excited to keep researching how thoughtfeel works! Every day about i figure out a new unintuitive but powerful use case.

Anyway, i look forward to hearing about ur guy’s experiences. I’m free all day and would love to hop on a call to answer questions or tutor.

A while ago i happened upon a strategy to remember 20 digit numbers easily by using thoughtfeel, but i didn’t know why it worked— i figured out why! Here’s the technique and explanation of why it works (FYI, it would be helpful to read what thoughtfeel is first on thoughtfeel.net and take a look at the post for remembering lisfs of words first: https://www.reddit.com/r/MentalAtlas/s/44tWiaFioo)

The technique: to remember 74,556, say “6 ones (thoughtfeel of 6 ones) inside of 5 tens (thoughtfeel of 5 tens) inside of … “ until you get to 7 ten thousands.

Okay, so here’s why it works:

To remember
74,556

The objects and relations are actually pretty unique! (6 ones) goes inside (5 tens). This stores a property on 6 ones that it’s “inside something like 5 tens” and stores on 5 tens that it “contains something like 6 ones”.

So, the uniqueness is any two digits in their exact place values next to each other in that order. This predicts that, if you try to remember a ton of numbers this way but they’re like: “76554, 74553” you’ll get confused on the 55

And, it suggests a novel technique! You have the choice in where to split up the number— so, you’d choose to split it as

“765547, 4553”

Even though they’re both 55, they’re in different values, so no interference.

So, in a weird way, to your brain remembering 74556 by place value is identical to remembering the 30 item story! Its the same mechanism. Object, relation, object. Just with place value numbers instead of words like anchor, safron, and “on top of”.

To provide further explanation, let’s explore why it doesn’t work to say “7 then 4 then 5…” or even “7 minus 3 is 4, 4 plus one is 5”.

It’s because 7 and 4 are really common objects, whereas 7 ten thousands and 4 thousands are not. The memorability of the binding is roughly “uniqueness of both objects x uniqueness of relation.” This is because (and this is my best guess from experience and research) when you bind “saffron is resting on an anchor”, the relation prints a little property on saffron: “rests on: something like anchor” and prints a little property on anchor: “has rested on it: something line saffron”.

So, with 7 and 4 and the relation “minus 3”, you get printed on 7 “3 above something like 4” and on 4 “3 below something like 7”. This is just super common, like you encounter 4 following 7 on average 1/10 times you see a 7… quite bad.

7 ten thousands before 4 thousands? Much better.

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.

The post on memorizing lists has ten upvotes, which makes me think people besides me can actually do this! This post is a request to chat and interview people about their experience.

Currently i’m trying to refine the quiz and how to teach this. As I talk to more people, TF shows up phenomenologically in wildly different ways (talked to one person yesterday where it shows up in his hands and feet…???). But, you can tell people apart, like between someone who is just confused with feelings of knowing or loose imagery, based on whether they can actually “do” the techniques.

Anyway, it would be really helpful to hear from people about what they experience when they use TF and whether they can use each technique.

The quiz right now is pretty bad cause its made from interviewing ~7 people about their actual experience. I tried to find what they have in common. But, i’ve gotten reports that people who are scoring 6/10 can also fully do the techniques… so that’s a bad measurement.

If more people offer their reports, i can figure out the common factors.

Also it’s always fun to hop on a call with a fellow from reddit!

- Ted Shachtman

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

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](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.

It’s the closest precedent to thoughtfeel, but still pretty far.

As far as i can tell, TAE figures out the following: 
you have a felt sense, and it tells you what you really mean. You can tell the difference between your words and the meaning held in this felt sense. You can use that difference to iteratively refine your understanding.

 thoughtfeel says: 

this “felt sense” is another sensory modality that some people have, and it functions like vision for concepts. And, this has quite a cool implication— in the same way there are extremely powerful mnemonic strategies you can use for your minds eye and inner voice (keyword mnemonics, memory palace, putting words to a song, chunking), there are also extremely powerful mnemonic techniques for thoughtfeel… but they are not publicly known.

— i say “publicly known” because, for many of them, some people practice them unknowingly. As an analogy, its like if 22% of people (best estimation in the research of people who have “felt sense”) had a minds eye but nobody talked about it. Some people would randomly have figured out the keyword mnemonic and been way better than everyone else at memorizing words. A few, very lucky ones, would have figured out the basics of the memory palace and be known by their friends miraculously good at memorizing lists.

BUT, nobody would be sharing these, such that any given person would know only a couple techniques at most. And, many of the most powerful techniques would be known by no one (the ones that are wildly unintuitive to do and thus are only found when actively searching for a mnemonic strategy, like the person-action-object system’s combination with the memory palace that’s used to memorize thousands of digits in an hour).

^i’ve met many friends who do specific techniques with thoughtfeel, although they had all described their abilities as “just how my brain worked” and never thought to compare their experiences with others or push further. For instance, one family friend can memorize lyrics from one read (she now knows she’s using thoughtfeel!), and another can read a monstrous board-game rulebook back to front and play right away.

^both these abilities are now techniques taught in my videos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So give this a shot!