The Chaos Memory Palace of Giordano Bruno & Why You Need This Special Memory Technique

in December 1585 the legendary memory Master Giordano Bruno told a librarian named Guillaume cotton that he could teach anyone the entire art of memory in under an hour I find this story puzzling not because Giordano Bruno couldn't do it I have a feeling I can teach you the entire art of memory in under an hour or two and have been doing so in slices of time as little as 59 seconds and I'll give you an example later no I find it puzzling because Bruno said that it was possible to memorize everything yet Bruno claimed the

universe was infinite and he didn't stop at writing just one memory book in this infinite Universe he wrote a ton of them injected memory training into his theater plays and in 30 statues he even bases one of his memory palaces on the demogorgon hundreds of years before stranger things is even a thing now how do you square that Circle if the universe is infinite that means the information in it is always growing in fact it's chaos and that's why you need a chaos Memory Palace method because in an infinite Universe a true art of memory

will need to grow with that Universe under such circumstances it will never be possible to teach the art of memory just once and that means it will never be taught under an hour even if it can be habit Ergo chaos says Bruno non-statuum non-figurum non-imagination chaos has no statue no figure because we cannot envisage it or form the image of Chaos in our imagination however we can think about it reason about it and talk about it and talk about it we certainly have I showed you one of the earliest discussions of Bruno's mnemonic solution to

the on-growing creation of new information in the new art of memory and we did that through Aristotle's nuclear alphabet we explored Hue of Saint Victor's use of medieval cash boxes and imaginary memory palaces based on Noah's Ark and we took a chaotic detour into the non-memory palace Memory Palace work of the 20th century Godfather of memory Harry Lorraine who insisted he never used Mary palaces even though I insist that he did and I believe I demonstrated it Beyond any doubt and yet both things potentially can be true without contradiction today you're getting a thorough analysis

of how Giordano Bruno solved the problem of not only new information constantly arising in an infinite universe but the repetition of information too and how you might develop a chaos Memory Palace of your own if you're ready willing and able to do so now Bruno wasn't the only memory master who thought you needed an ever-expanding system as we've seen Aristotle and Hue of Saint Victor taught it Robert flood visualizes it in his work with his essic infinitum visualization of the universe and today I'm taking it all one step further if you like memory and remembering

more with a touch of philosophy information science and the boundless possibilities of human consciousness hit that Thumbs Up Get subscribed and tell our robot overlords that you care about human knowledge and want to help make sure it sticks around as we dive into part four of the new art of memory this is Dr Anthony metavier from magneticmary method.com and I shall be your host as we talk about this idea of memorizing anything let alone everything but not only memorize what we want to know but understand it in an expanding universe and let's think about what

this would mean it means that you would be able to memorize and understand information that you did not predict would be coming into your mind in advance you would need to be prepared and that means you would need systems these systems would be computational in nature they would rest in the foundations of your memory forever ready to LEAP into your Consciousness for use you would be like a learning samurai forever ready to execute one last perfect move even with your head cut off and so Bruno thinks and writes a lot about how this works throughout

his career he writes about it from the perspective of a memory master and from what I can tell after Decades of research hanging around with memory competitors and my own personal practice the dude knew his stuff but he also knew it wasn't his he didn't like Aristotle's philosophy but he paid his respects to Aristotle's memory training and Aristotle knew that the memory techniques weren't his either our species discovered them based on Raw logic and experimentation people discovered them in disparate places and times where they surely had no contact with one another places as removed from

each other as ancient Australia China and Greece I believe the ambresidarum was Bruno's first memory book and it's a lot of fun hard to read but fun actually all of Bruno's books are hard and what makes his books so hard well partly it's because Bruno was kind of like Shakespeare he innovates wildly with language in fact it's possible that Shakespeare Knew Bruno and the stubborn character of Hamlet may have been based on Bruno's personality this is a thesis discussed at some length in the work of Hillary gatty and I highly recommend reading Gatti's research personally

I think Bruno found teaching others quite difficult what I read and interpret from Bruno is that he was someone switched on to the nature of language as a deeply flawed medium for describing his experience of reality and his scientific inclusions about it we perhaps had better say proto-scientific conclusions but if we Define science as making hypothetical statements and then running experiments that produce evidence that help us confirm or deny our hypotheses then the dude was definitely doing science and all kinds of it from astronomy and math to memory and mindfulness but why is language flawed

because there aren't enough words the famous psychoanalyst Jacqueline Khan famously said that there are too many words for any of his patients to ever describe the truth but for Bruno it's the opposite the universe is infinite to Bruno after all and words are in the universe but they were invented at a point in history and they will never catch up with describing Infinity behind them in time let alone right now in all possible directions even the idea of directionality itself doesn't have enough words to help us describe and experience the true meaning of left right

up down and let alone the meaning of light you know Bruno gets deep into hot water with the truth because he doesn't buy the opening of The Book of John which talks about light that wonderful Latin word Lux is so extraordinarily evident there and the Book of John says in the beginning was the word in an infinite Universe there is no beginning how could there be words and symbols and numbers appear in reality at a moment in time and these are merely Shadows of the real things we use words and numbers and symbols and Concepts

and analogies and metaphors to point to that's why the title of his book diamre sidere is translated on the Shadows of the ideas what a great title what a confusing title but that's what it means the ideas are the real things the things in themselves without the separation of our language which showed up too late to be as full as reality itself language between our minds and what we're trying to describe and the words and the mnemonics we use these are the Shadows the Shadows or our magnetic images as I like to call them in

the magnetic memory method Master Class have a special energy even if they're not sufficient to the cause of describing reality they're too late well why else are they insufficient to the cause because even if they are somehow out of sync with time in reality and always insufficient to explaining our experiences even if language feels like it's not as rich and detailed and nuanced as raw experience itself without words to talk about all this stuff we'd be apes and Bruno uses that exact word Apes preter naturally intuiting exactly where Charles Darwin will take us a few

hundred years later although not exactly we replace Apes with chimpanzees so our language is flawed and shadowy but it's ultimately a medium that is called upon to repeat again and again and again the attempt to describe reality your reality patched in to the words that I use to describe mine which brings the sameness amongst us and language is a medium that gives us the word light helping us talk about and even build new spiritual and meditative practices that refine certain experiences so that some of us might become enlightened and memory is one of the most

direct paths to that experience of Enlightenment via Lux but for that to happen memory must be the key you have to remember all kinds of things everything from how to conduct daily meditative practices to the ins and outs of philosophical ideas that help you perceive reality perhaps not for what it is but for what it might be like if we could use our words to help us better experience the truth as if words were sufficient to the cause and now we can go back to the library in December of 1585 this librarian was guillem cotton

who tended the books at the monastery of Saint Victor De Perry Colton also noted in his diary that Bruno complained about many people including his fellow philosophers and Scholars Bruno told koten about a battle he'd fought at the collage de Cambray where according to Bruno he had slaughtered Aristotle and aristotelianism literally using Aristotle's art of memory to show beyond all question that Aristotle's logic itself was flawed now I wasn't there and I'm not sure whether Bruno was correct or not or even well reasoned and I don't want to go down a rabbit hole about Aristotelian

logic but Aristotle does at least briefly recognize in his metaphysics that his logic is inherently self-referential and tips to what we now call dialataism and this idea of dialataism is that two contradictory Notions can be equally true without any actual contradiction and this is found throughout Bruno's philosophy and basically Aristotle goes in a different direction and Bruno's not happy about this he wants philosophy to go in a more pantheistic some people call it direction or just really go past even that because pantheism is a word that appears and it's not sufficient to the cause because

of infinity or so it seems to me all of this really stretches your brain and if you want to get a taste for it watch a David Lynch movie I mean many of them contain Shadows of this philosophy that two things can be true without contradiction and if not the philosophy itself at least the Cinematic aesthetic equivalent of the concept anyhow Bruno's audience that day was apparently so hostile that Bruno had to flee the lecture hall at the collage de Cambray out of fear that he would be physically injured that sounds like some of the

things that happened today when people get banned on campuses can you imagine that happening back then in the 16th century and that stuff is still going on today Enlightenment anyway the next day Bruno returned but this time he refused to speak he had a disciple named John hennequin speak for him but apparently an hour's worth of training in the art of memory had not been enough hennequin also failed to convince the audience that Aristotle was incorrect and Bruno refused to repeat his arguments from the previous day he didn't like repetition very much apparently especially not

when it came to repeating himself instead Bruno declared his defeat and about the great memory Master Bruno the librarian at the monastery of Saint Victor De Paris never wrote another word question is did Bruno fail that day did the art of memory fail that day did Bruno's student fail that day yes and no and no words will ever be sufficient to the cause that helps us Explain why both of these answers can be equally true without contradiction I beat Ergo chaos so with all that in mind let's get to the entire art of memory and

we're definitely going to do it in under an hour I'll show you the one minute version in a bit but the longer one goes a little bit like this let's see how fast we go you create memory palaces a simple starter project is 26 memory palaces one for each letter of the alphabet then you want what has sometimes been called a bestiary a list of animals at least one for each letter of the alphabet but these figures could also be people objects and actions and they should ideally you will have multiple lists all alphabetically encoded

and if you're wondering how that's going to reach infinity let's say we choose for every first station in a Memory Palace the letter a and the bridging figure is going to be an a person so we have Adam West who played Batman right here in Adam West's pocket there must always be a person who has the letter that starts in the next sequence so it's Batman in Adam West's pocket inside of Batman's pocket is Cookie Monster because Cookie Monster starts with C inside of Cookie Monster is Dracula because Dragon starts with d inside of Dracula's

pocket is Einstein because Einstein starts with e inside of his pocket is Foucault and on and on and on and on and on now what happens when you get to the letter Z well you just play it over and over again and that goes on for Infinity from one station in there so your density can be so dense that it uh it reaches the ends of the universe and then when you get to the end of the universe you can you know just add another because you can always add another in if Infinity is real

and if all of this feels like chaos in the beginning why then good how else are you going to establish cruising altitude except for to jump in to the waves that are crashing around you and learn to swim next you'll want at least one number system but ideally four these systems are a number rhyme system a numbered alphabet the major system and a zero zero to ninety nine Pao which is essentially another bestiary but this time for numbers instead of letters next you'll want a system of recall that is optimized for what Aristotle called entering

the middle of the alphabet in the modern science of memory we now call it active recall and space repetition but you'll still want to know what Aristotle is talking about in order to get it right the mnemonic way the magnetic way these are powerful tools that are best learned through a combination of study and practice and the nuts and bolts and nuances can all be learned by visiting magneticmarymethod.com which I mentioned with thanks to all of you who already have this program or who otherwise support this project by getting my books other special offerings I

put together for you or showing that like button and the comment section a bit of chaos as frequently as you can muster no the reason Bruno cannot teach the art of memory in under an hour and why even I can teach it in whatever that was three or four minutes it can never be taught completely and it's because there is no free will absence of Free Will is the presence of chaos because you see some people are understanding things they're winning memory competitions passing exams living a life that you want but you don't have yada

yada yada you're smart enough to understand the one-hour version of The Art of memory you're smart enough to understand the one that I just gave and you're smart enough to understand the one minute version I'm gonna give you in a little bit here yet maybe you're still not taking action well Bruno's statues in 30 statues are an antidote to chaos and we'll get exactly to what Bruno teaches in 30 statues but let's talk about free will because it is the key to remembering anything you want even if it is unlikely and unnecessary to memorize everything

Free Will is the everything in which all things happen and we don't have it now free will is one of those tedious and ultimately tiring philosophical noodles that helps explain why Bruno abandoned many of his fights rather than staying to try and turn people around to keep it clear and crisp or at least as clear and crisp as I'm capable of let me give the job to somebody else Galen strawson has a four-step demonstration of why Free Will doesn't exist and why that I am doing what I am doing the way that I am doing

it one you do what you do in any given situation because of the way you are two to be ultimately responsible for what you do you have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are at least in certain crucial mental respects three you cannot be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all four you cannot be ultimately responsible for what you do Bruno knew this understanding was the key it's one of the reasons why he gave the inquisitors the bird when they sentenced him to death at the stake for not

recanting on his claim that the Universe was infinite perhaps your fear in passing judgment on me is greater than mine in receiving it he reportedly told his murderers judgment fear all growing in an infinite Universe along with hope and Light habit Argo chaos the only way anyone learns the art of memory in one minute 10 minutes 15 minutes or 5 000 hours is luck you come across the teaching from whomever and however it is being discussed and you do it only if that person and the occasions which is a light on in your head and

Away you go the technology is already in you you already have the alphabet you already have a head filled with numbers and maybe you don't know the names of all the symbols on a keyboard or scientific calculator but you can put on your adult pants and Google it not if you want but if the timing is right and you bounce into the right tree in the right forest and you are either mysteriously or practically compelled to take up this martial art of the mind it's that simple and not one amongst us is an exception to

the rule though many amongst us find such exceptions those exceptions we use them to name the gods because it feels good to have a reason why things are this way and not that way blame it on Zeus or why not blame the demogorgon that need for answers within you within me it is driven by the need for some explanation for why we are here and why any of this is happening but with knowledge we can resist this need we just need to remember the knowledge and to do that we need a responsive set of memory

systems habit Ergo chaos Bruno Bruno says there is no figure for Infinity no statue for it but there are statues of Gods Poseidon for example the Conqueror of Uncertain oceans I strategically placed on the cover of the Victorious mind is a metaphor for the many things that the book talks about and it's a way to have an image for taking responsibility and then that image changes the wiring of the brain the more the brain contemplates on it and different actions are taken not through free will but through the submission to willlessness to using mental metaphors

to put wind in the sails and blow ourselves in a different direction now I also had Bruno in mind when I chose that statue image his infinite hedge against chaos and how Poseidon plays a role in how humans have created the figures of gods in a world of chaos to help bring meaning and impetus in better directions and I thought maybe one day the right circumstance and impetus would arrive that would lead me to script a little memory training all about Bruno's infinite Memory Palace technique and how you can build a chaos Memory Palace that

helps you hedge against the chaos and here we are I say I did it but it's the body that performs the eye says Nietzsche repeating the teaching again and again and again the body performs the eye we are trained to do it Bruno knew he was trained to do it and it pained him that others could not get it it works so simply and yet the ego causes us to deny it later Freud will try to account for this Freud was worried that people would recognize that every single idea he had was sourced in Nietzsche

Nietzsche had no such worries because as Nietzsche tells us if you think there is a Nietzsche you haven't understood the first thing that I have said but Nietzsche can be useful as a statue not as a God but as a Memory Palace inside of a Memory Palace so you fill your memory palaces with statues in Bruno's case these are anthropomorphic representations of Concepts that he links to various gods and figures in mythology he says to have 30 stations on each statue and in this way you can scale any Memory Palace rapidly because each station in

the Memory Palace becomes 30 stations by using a statue and that's how you hedge against the infinite oncoming of information that is either new or seems new to you or is repetitive of something that you've encountered before but you now are responsible for remembering it in a new context the question is does this memory technique work can we teach it in under an hour well here it is in under a minute except instead of the Eternal gods and demigods and demogorgons I'm using figures from pop culture to at least try to teach the art of

memory in under a minute let's see how I do here's a reading life hack that I wish I would have known about sooner you know instead of using a bookmark or holding a book like this in your hands when you got to take a break why not just use a simple memory system sometimes it's called a Pao or a zero zero to 99pao what you do is you create yourself an association for every no number and then when you get to page 29 you can just use your image to remind yourself of where you were

in the book in this case my image is Jack Napier who is the name of the Joker in the Tim Burton Batman movie which is a very very striking image and for 30 I have Mickey Mouse and so forth you might be wondering what happens when you get to page 127 where you throw in another memory system which is called a number image system so you would have a candle with say Jack Napier or Mickey Mouse so 130 would be a candle and Mickey Mouse and then that reminds you of page 130 and the coolest

thing is is that you can wind up an image of Mickey Mouse with a candle to help you remember the fact on the page get subscribed for more I published that one minute training as a short and it's not really up to me to say whether it's good or not the body performs the eye it's an experiment and I do my best not to give up like Bruno and turn away even though the robots prefer pushing gushy nothingness instead of mnemonic goodness on us in droves because I ultimately don't know why things are the way

they are and it doesn't matter they unfold as they unfold Mickey Mouse Jack Napier these are just a few of my mnemonic Gods mythological cinematic figures that I spent so much time with as a kid I bet Bruno would have chosen some of these fine fictional characters himself were he with us now or maybe not Bruno says in 30 statues that he used the demogorgon on purpose to help him memorize a particular Concept in philosophy that relates to demogorgon-ness if you're interested in that jazz read 30 statues it's a blast even if Bruno buries the

memory techniques in all kinds of metaphysical explanations about the nature of the universe infinity and Oneness in a world that feels separate due to the Shadows of the ideas I won't get further into the philosophy he expounds there but I will tell you this if I've succeeded in hijacking your absence of Free Will and if you're interested at the end of the video on Aristotle's nuclear alphabet which is part one of this series I gave you the exercises that will give you not 30 statues because that might just be too much in the beginning but

26 not a bad start to building an infinitely growing set of mnemonic devices that help you keep up with the expanding Universe of information or at least a great way to get your memory Journey started expanded revived or whatever other shadowy word you want to use for getting yourself sorted and prioritizing the quality of your mind and Better Living Through better memory that's ultimately what this is all about and you can put statues inside of the pockets of statues scaling and scaling and scaling your memory Palace networks again and again and again is that the

best way to do it not necessarily but it's good for you to know about that because you can then experiment with it if you run into the right tree that inspires you to do so now there's another book The Seal of seals and in this book Bruno expresses the role of habit the benefits of showing up consistently it's different than what I cover in the Victoria's mind but in that book too the idea is to find some way of getting yourself started through simply scheduling your reading your course taking or your practice time which you

need to base your practice time on what you've read or you've gone through in a course and you just get a calendar and you show up and you do it and if you can't do that well what else do you have as an option you get yourself a coach perhaps if that's what it takes I've certainly gotten coaches when I've needed them there's no shame in it so if you can get yourself to do it watch Aristotle's nuclear alphabet again or for the first time and see how Aristotle was talking about the same thing Bruno

was talking about only looked at from an ancient Greek angle and understand Aristotle had to look at it from that angle because he had no choice just like I have no choice as a polite Canadian to thank you very much for joining me on this ride the alphabet and numbers they recur again and again back into the place that they came from in Canada is both One Big C Memory Palace and a container of many other are many memory palaces and mnemonic devices like John Candy from Canada who of course with Magnetic Serendipity based on

Aristotle's nuclear alphabet made a splash a very memorable Splash with his appearances on SC TV now I'm making some jokes on C and variations and showing you how it works if it's not C it might be B and you know our dearly departed Tony bazan had a variation of Bruno statues for numbers which are ultimately also represented by a nuclear alphabet in busan's way in his sem 3 or self-enhancing Master memory Matrix and you can check out the book the memory book four more on that it is really really fun to go through and develop

for yourself ultimately I chose a different way but more is more in memory training and you definitely want to check this one out if you haven't already one way or another we hedge against the chaos of incoming information by being prepared with multiple memory systems The Memory Palace encoding systems from numbers words and symbols at the very least and a system for space so that you have a place to put all of your representations that you build with reference to the alphabet the numbers and the symbols this is how it works magnetic friends and whether

you learn it from this place that place or the other the new art of memory shall continue when chaos and maybe the demogorgon lets it I have plans to cover the hand Memory Palace and more on Robert flood in the future though I'll be surprised as the next of you all by what this meat tube called Dr mitavier actually does and how he actually does it you're putting the wind in the sails you're the trees in the forest I run into and you are the lights that wake me up so I always love hearing from

you in the comments as I find myself drafting Vitamin X the hardest project I've ever worked on it's the sequel to flyboy in the memory detective series which I'm also expanding with some books for kids or at least that's what I'm hoping is going to happen and we'll see it's an experiment I've got a lot of heavy lifting yet to go but listen when it comes to heavy lifting when it comes to memory techniques and the Magnetic memory method in particular if you ever doubt the value of working with Aristotle's nuclear alphabet and multiple memory

palaces where you think it's all just a bunch of busy work let me give the penultimate where word to the world's only living Shakespeare David milch he's The Mastermind behind D for Deadwood and the explosive Memory Palace and all the magnetic imagery living within Deadwood that you can use anytime he says if you're sticking with your work you discover truths about it that aren't present when you begin and that's the real fun symbols signifiers they generate their meaning out of the submission of energy from the believer they're fluid rather than stable they mean different things

at different times a few pages later milch gets at exactly what Bruno was getting at when you finally realize that the alphabet does you just as much as you do the alphabet when you get it going and you keep it going we are organs of a larger organism which knows us although we do not know it I regard myself as a vessel of whatever that larger organism is it's instrument rather than as a source of the scenes so a lot of what I try to do is get out of the way and the final word

goes to Bruno who tells us something in De minimo that will seem to contradict David milch but not really if you think it through minutes Oris the grammarians enslaved themselves to the words we subdue the words instead they follow the use which we indicate to them pay attention to the word we we neminus belong to the larger organism and then you will see that both milch and Bruno are saying what must be true completely without contradiction and all the more so when you start developing your memory palaces and your chaos Memory Palace out of chaos

itself to hedge against chaos keep yourself magnetic we did it oh