Hello! Im Ted Shachtman, I have degrees in cognitive science, education, and computer science, and I just left my job (working for jeremy clarkson) to work on sharing and teaching a novel mnemonic technique. If you find this interesting, I’d be unbelievably happy to chat and I’m free all day.

Okay, so

4 months ago my friend asked me “Do you have any component to your thinking that isn’t imagery of one of the 5 senses, and if so what’s the utility of it?” In my search to answer his question, I found a very interesting answer that offers a whole wealth of very useful mnemonic techniques (that I can’t find on the internet) for people who say yes to my friend’s question (and more specific versions of it). In this post I’ll describe enough of it so that you can guarantee your interest enough to dive into the resources to learn the full thing— and then hopefully we can chat about it!

You can read about the technique at the website i made, thoughtfeel.net, and have published several youtube videos teaching the mnemonic techniques (all on my website).

So, to do that poster-board work, Here’s the description of it from the website:

From the website, not typing this on my phone

“Some people have it and some don’t. It’s like the mind’s eye: some people can picture things vividly, and some, with aphantasia, see nothing at all. If you have thoughtfeel, you can imagine in concepts, not just words or images.

What is thoughtfeel?
thoughtfeel is a sense for concepts. It lets you take in a concept and its properties all at once, the way vision lets you take in what’s in front of you.
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 look at it, and vision gives you all of that at once, with no list.

Concepts have properties too, including properties you could never see. Take the economy. You could write out what’s true of it: millions of people, making and trading things, sometimes booming and sometimes in a slump. People with thoughtfeel can still make that list in words. But when they use thoughtfeel, the sense takes in properties like these all at once.

That makes comparing fast. Show someone photos of two dogs, and they can tell right away whether it’s the same dog. If it isn’t, they can look again and point to why: one has a brown tail, the other a white one. With thoughtfeel, the same works for concepts you imagine. If two concepts aren’t the same, that’s clear right away, and paying attention to each one shows which properties differ.

Like vision and hearing, it differs from person to person. For some people, taking in and imagining concepts is the default way they experience the world. For others, it’s much quieter. Just as people can imagine in pictures or in sounds, people with thoughtfeel can imagine in concepts.

Is it really all at once?

Taking in the concept is. Putting its properties into words comes after. When a friend walks into a room, you know it’s them right away, before you could describe a single feature. If someone asks what color their eyes are, you look again and say. thoughtfeel works the same way. Someone with thoughtfeel who thinks of a promise knows right away what it is. Then they can pay attention to it and put its properties into words: it’s made to someone, it’s about the future, and it can be broken.
With practice, people notice finer properties, the way a birdwatcher learns to spot details in a bird that look the same to everyone else.

Mnemonic Techniques (not from website, me typing on phone)

My lesson’s explore a bunch of them, but thoughtfeel is generally really useful. I’d compare it to if 20% of people had a minds eye but society never talked about it. Some people would discover the keyword technique to learn vocabulary, and they’d just be better at learning words than everyone. A rare bloke would discover the memory palace and be quite good at memorizing grocery lists.

That’s where we are with thoughtfeel.

For instance, my friend Henry, who’s brain auto imagines in thoughtfeel, can read a board game rule book back to front and comprehend it. Me and all my friends just thought he was a genius until i interviewed him about thoughtfeel and found it that’s what he was doing. Then, in my head (where thoughtfeel doesn’t auto build, i have to do it on purpose), i tried “visualizing” the rules in thoughtfeel as i read and… boom! I could do it.

Another family friend could remember a whole song from one read of the lyrics, and she had no idea how she did it. I interviewed her, and she was turning each sentence into a thoughtfeel “image”. I tried it, and now i can too!

But, there are a bunch of techniques where all the people i’ve interviewed go “huh… yeah i never thought of doing that.” These, are like the memory palace POA system to remember 1k numbers— crazy unintuitive unless you know what to do and people are talking to each other.

The language learning and prospective memory techniques (you can check out the videos to learn them) are one’s like these… quite unintuitive unless you’re thinking of thoughtfeel as an extra sensory modality where you engineer weird mnemonic techniques.

Anyway, I’m looking for more people to chat about this with. It was interesting enough for me to leave my job and work on this full time, but tbh that was because i bet that people like u guys would find this interesting. If you don’t, then that would be very a good signal that i should get my job back, so please tell them.

I am trying to use Major system but I do not think it is working, ik dominic but are there anyother way to do it?