Constructing a mind palace... in Minecraft

I absolutely love Minecraft. Though my level of obsession has dimmed a bit compared to when I was first mindblown, it's still an amazingly satisfying sandbox to play in. There always seems to be something new to build, which always manages to recapture my interest.

One of the things I noticed while playing Minecraft is that I pretty much know exactly what, where and how I built the things in my world. If I somehow lost my world and all of its backups, I am positive that I could recreate an extremely large portion, if not all of it, just from memory. The connection to a mind palace should now become evident.

In the past I've tried to build mind palaces of things, and have been more or less successful, up until the point where I try to populate the rooms in my mind with actually useful information. That's where my memory stops functioning well, I suspect because an entirely imaginary mind palace is just too unreal for me to hold in my mind. But if you tied a mind palace to something tangible (well, more or less) like a Minecraft world, a place with actual houses and paths and rooms, then perhaps it would be a lot easier to store knowledge in. If you go so far as to place things that you want to remember in signs and books, I bet you could remember a lot.

Another good example of a mind palace is my photo folder on my hard drive. I've organized it chronologically and hierarchically, first by year and then by month+day. While I can't remember exactly what happened on which day, using this folder structure as a mental guideline, I could tell you with reasonably high confidence what I was doing at any given month. But only for those months that I have photos of. My hobby of photography has waned a lot over the past years..

tl;dr: create a physical or virtual structure to hold your mind palace, then populate it with real-world information.

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