EMCrit Podcast 172a – The Mind Palace? - a podcast by Scott D. Weingart, MD FCCM

The mind palace, also known as the memory palace or the memory theatre, is something I want badly! Ever since I read the incredible book, the Art of Memory by Frances Yates, I have dreamed of building a mind palace. But in medicine, we should be able to externalize the palace--in fact, we must! The method of loci will not suffice.







Technology should surely have advanced to the point where this is simple--the programming requirements are trivial.



My current mind palace is at CrashingPatient.com. It is quite good, but not perfect.

Factors

Storage

We need a place to store all of the literature, books, and internet posts/media we feel will be valuable. The storage must be durable (if an internet site goes down, the work remains). If we lose our paid access, we retain the full text of the literature.

Readability







The medium should allow comfortable reading of the literature, viewing of the media, etc.

Accessibility

Should be immediately accessible offline or online. Should be firewall resistant.

Ease of Commenting/Summarizing

Need to put the take-home message somewhere. Additional thoughts, new findings. Really two separate things:



* We need the ability to comment on, by which I mean literally on the paper (i.e. scribblings, marginalia, highlighting)

* But also the ability to summarize a Topic and add those papers as citations in a way that would link to the scribbled on paper



Ease of the Edit

Front end editing

Open Source

Or at the very least, immediately exportable to open source

Search

All information should be easily retrievable with logic, operator,  and fuzzy logic based searches

Option to Publish

Should you want to share your memory palace

The Mind Palace Cycle



* Discovery

* Storage for to-be-read/to-be-viewed

* Process=Read/Comment/Summarize

* Storage

* Retrieval/Search

* Publish or Protect as Desired



Possibilities



* Wordpress

* Evernote

* Zotero

* Papers

* Mendeley



image from memorise.org

Want to read more about memory?

The Art of Memory, mentioned above, is amazing--but oh so dense. For a lighter, contemporary read:





Update

Some additional requirements/desires:



* Self-Updating TOC as frontpage (see crashingpatient.com)

* Search must be browsable by either google or a plug-in and updates in real time

Further episodes of EMCrit Podcast

Further podcasts by Scott D. Weingart, MD FCCM

Website of Scott D. Weingart, MD FCCM