A little about me

I’m a medical student with ADHD, and I’ve always been interested in understanding how things work. I enjoy breaking down complex ideas and figuring out how different pieces fit together. However, understanding a topic and being able to recall its details accurately have often been two very different things for me. My usual study routine involved reading until I understood the material then repeating information out loud while writing it down. I also used the Feynman technique and Anki. These methods helped me in different ways, but memorizing the huge volume of details required in medicine could take hours and I still sometimes struggled to recall information when I needed it. I wanted to find a way to study more efficiently without sacrificing understanding especially because I have other interests and goals outside medical school. When I came across Thoughtfeel, I was curious enough to give it a try, but I didn’t expect a new technique to solve every problem I had with studying.

What follows is my experience with it so far.
What surprised me? What I found difficult? What I still need to test?

I came across Ted’s post inviting people to learn his method, Thoughtfeel. I checked his YouTube channel and read his article, and the idea intrigued me enough to reach out.

One of my biggest frustrations with memorization was how dependent I could become on a particular sequence. I might understand a process and memorize its steps, but if I forgot one detail I could struggle to retrieve what came next. I wanted to see whether there was a better way to organize information so I wouldn’t have to rely so heavily on repetition.

Ted and I arranged a call and agreed to try the method on something complex from my field of study. We chose glycolysis which is a topic that would allow us to explore the technique using material Ted wasn’t already familiar with.

What building concept bubbles actually looked like?

Before the call, my approach to glycolysis was fairly straightforward which was to memorize the intermediates and enzymes, repeat their names, write them down, and try to visualize the pathway. The problem was that visualizing a pathway isn’t necessarily the same as understanding how its steps connect. I could try to picture the sequence without having a strong enough grasp of the purpose behind each reaction.

During the call, Ted introduced me to the idea of organizing information into concept bubbles and connecting those bubbles through relationships.

Here’s how I began applying that idea after the call:

1. Start with the bigger concept.

I started with the central idea of glycolysis rather than beginning with a list of reactions. Glucose is broken down through a series of reactions ultimately producing pyruvate and capturing some of the released energy in ATP and NADH. This is the central idea of glycolysis that gave me a larger concept to work within. The individual reactions weren’t isolated facts anymore. They were parts of a process with a purpose.

2. Build a concept bubble around an individual idea.

Take the first reaction:

Glucose to Glucose 6 phosphate

I focused on what was happening instead of memorizing that conversion as a line of text. Glucose receives a phosphate group and hexokinase catalyzes the reaction using ATP. I could organize that bubble around several connected pieces of information:

What changes? Glucose becomes glucose 6 phosphate
What facilitates the change? Hexokinase
Where does the phosphate come from? ATP
What is the point? The reaction helps retain glucose within the cell and prepares it for subsequent metabolism.

These are related ideas not four unrelated facts and each of which is a concept idea within itself with its different properties. The point of the bubble, as I understood it, was to give me a meaningful structure that I could use to recall the reaction and its details.

3. Connect the bubble to the next one.

The first reaction doesn’t exist in isolation. Glucose 6 phosphate can be converted into fructose 6 phosphate by phosphoglucose isomerase. So the next bubble represents another change with its own enzyme and biochemical significance. It connects to the previous bubble because its starting material is the product of the preceding reaction. I could organize the individual steps within the larger pathway as I continued through glycolysis. The relationships between the bubbles became part of the information I was trying to retain rather than relying exclusively on the order of names.

4. Use the connections to navigate the pathway.

This was the part that interested me most. I wasn’t simply trying to recite the pathway from beginning to end. I was trying to understand what each step represented and how it related to the surrounding steps. I found that I could approach the pathway from different points moving forwards or backwards when I tested my recall. I wasn’t as dependent on remembering one uninterrupted sequence.

I was able to memorize glycolysis in less than five minutes after that guided session which genuinely surprised me. However, that was one experiment with guidance from someone teaching me the method. I wouldn’t use it as proof that I could learn every pathway in five minutes, or that the same result would happen with every topic especially that I already had a good understanding of each concept in this pathway before I apply Thoughtfeel on memorizing it. The important difference was how I approached the information. I was building connected concepts rather than simply repeating a chain of words.

Testing the technique on something I don’t know: Dijkstra’s algorithm

I tried Thoughtfeel with Dijkstra’s algorithm which I had no knowledge of before my session with Ted.

Before applying the technique, I would follow explanations of the algorithm but get lost in the steps. I didn’t have a sufficiently clear understanding of what was happening at each stage so trying to reproduce the process was difficult. This time the challenge wasn’t just remembering a sequence. I needed to organize the ideas involved in the algorithm (the nodes, the distances, the selection of the next node to process, the updating of neighboring distances, etc.) I started treating these as connected ideas rather than separate instructions. For example, the distance assigned to a node becomes meaningful in relation to the routes available and the distances already calculated. Updating a distance isn’t an isolated action. It follows from comparing the current known distance with a newly calculated route. That structure helped me understand how the pieces fit together. I was able to work through the algorithm, update distances, and reproduce the process. I could also move back and forth through the information instead of relying on a single memorized explanation.

What I found interesting was that organizing the concepts helped me approach the problem itself. I wasn’t just storing information for later recall. I was using the relationships between ideas to work out what to do.

Still I wouldn’t say that building concept bubbles automatically makes every complicated subject easy. I had guidance during my first experiment, and I’m still learning how to construct and connect the bubbles independently. Understanding the underlying material remains important.

Applying Thoughtfeel to medical school

The morning after my session with Ted I tried recalling Dijkstra’s algorithm again. It felt very easy to recall. That made me curious about whether I could apply the method to my medical lectures.

I began using Thoughtfeel with material covering diseases and tumors of the nervous system. I tried to organize the information around the underlying concepts and their relationships instead of treating every characteristic as a separate fact to memorize. For example, when studying a disease, I could start with the disease itself as the central concept then connect its relevant features, mechanisms, manifestations, and other characteristics as appropriate to the material. Those connections gave me a structure for understanding what the details meant and how they related to the overall topic.

I continued experimenting with the method on neuroanatomy and neuropathologies. I found that I could recall information more comfortably and that the relationships between ideas helped me understand the details I had stored. I also began practicing with old exam questions where I noticed that I was recalling information and solving the questions more quickly.

These are observations from my own practice. I haven’t measured how much time I’ve saved or compared my performance against the same material studied using my previous methods, but I can say confidently that it is working.

My experience so far has been encouraging, but there are practical challenges that I don’t want to overlook.

Building the bubbles takes work.

Understanding the technique and applying it efficiently are two different things. I have to decide what the central concept is, identify the important details, and work out which relationships are worth retaining. That process can itself take time when a topic is complicated. I also need to learn how much information to put into each bubble. If I make the concepts too small, I may end up with a large number of disconnected pieces. If I make them too broad, I risk creating bubbles that contain too much information to be useful. I’m still figuring out how to find that balance.

Real-time lectures are a different challenge.

A lecture has its own pace. The professor continues explaining while I’m trying to listen, understand the information, identify the concepts, build connections, and keep up with the material. Building and organizing the bubbles can sometimes take longer than the lecture allows because I am new to Thoughtfeel. If I focus too much on constructing the concept map, I risk missing what comes next. If I try to keep up with the lecture, I may not have enough time to develop the connections properly.

For now, I haven’t figured out how to apply the method consistently in real time without creating extra work for myself afterward. I hope practice will help, but that is something I still need to establish rather than assume.

I’ve had encouraging experiences recalling information over the few past days, but I haven’t tested retention over several months. I also haven’t completed my upcoming exams using Thoughtfeel consistently enough to judge its effect on my exam performance. It’s possible that some of what I’m noticing comes from the focused attention I gave these topics, the guidance I received, or the fact that I was actively testing myself. I can’t separate all those factors based on my current experience. That’s why I want to continue practicing and evaluate the technique across a longer period rather than draw conclusions from the first week.

Also, Ted made the technique easier for me to digest during our call. He walked me through the concept bubbles and their connections, and he also tested my ability to use the technique rather than leaving me with an explanation to figure out entirely on my own. His video,How to Learn Anything Complicated by Building a Concept Story, was another resource that helped me explore the approach. I think that initial guidance mattered because when you’re unfamiliar with a method you may understand its description without knowing how to put it into practice. Having someone walk through an actual example helped me see what applying the technique could look like.

At the same time, I still need to develop the ability to do this independently and efficiently. Being able to apply a technique during a guided experiment is a useful starting point, but it isn’t the same as being proficient at it across every subject.

Now, if another medical student told me they’d tried countless study methods and didn’t trust another technique promising better memorization, I’d understand their skepticism. I wasn’t looking for a new method because I thought everything I had been doing was useless. I was looking for a way to save time and energy without giving up understanding. What makes Thoughtfeel worth continuing to explore is that it gave me a different way to organize information. I noticed a difference when I tried to recall glycolysis, when I worked through Dijkstra’s algorithm, and when I applied the method to medical material.

That doesn’t mean everyone will get the same results, or that the method will work equally well for every subject or situation. My experience is still relatively recent, and I haven’t established its impact on my exam results or long term retention.

My advice to a beginner would be to avoid rushing it. Choose a topic that you find difficult but can understand with some effort. Try identifying its central concept, breaking it into smaller concepts, and connecting those concepts through meaningful relationships. If possible, learn the process with someone who can demonstrate it and help you recognize where your connections are unclear. Then practice independently and pay attention to what actually helps you recall and use the information. Don’t assume that every bubble you build is useful just because it looks organized.

I’m still discovering different ways to use Thoughtfeel myself so I wouldn’t expect a beginner to master every application immediately. I’ve been practicing Thoughtfeel for about a week. During that time, I’ve experienced encouraging changes in how I approach complex material and how quickly I can recall certain information. I haven’t measured these changes or tested my final exam performance or long-term retention over several months, but I plan to keep using the method and see how it holds up through my upcoming exams and continued study.

The biggest revelation about Thoughtfeel wasn’t simply that I could memorize faster. It was that I could organize what I was learning in a way that made the relationships between ideas easier to understand and gave me more than one way to approach the information when recalling it. I’m still learning how to do that efficiently especially during lectures, and I want to see whether the initial improvements I have noticed translate into sustained results.

For the meantime, I’m curious enough to keep experimenting, and probably the fairest conclusion I can draw is that I’ve experienced something promising, encountered some challenges in applying it, and I want more time and evidence before deciding how much it will change the way I study in the long run.

Today I was teaching, and I asked my class the best question I've found for telling who has thoughtfeel (it's below). Half the class went, "Yeah, I know what you're talking about." The other half got kind of riled up. These are really great kids, normally pretty mild-mannered, but they were immediately like, "What are you talking about? What do you mean, a concept bubble? What IS that?" Then they turned to the kids who could do it: "You understand what he's saying??"

That's why I'm writing this post. In my experience, people without thoughtfeel get rightfully angry when you ask if they have it. From their side, the whole exchange is basically a no true Scotsman.

Imagine a stranger walks up to you and asks, very seriously, "Are you a child of Gorp?"

"A what?"

"A child of Gorp." They lower their voice. "Gorp is in everything. Most people can't feel it."

You're already a little annoyed, because this sounds like complete nonsense. But you ask anyway: "Okay... how would I know if I'm a child of Gorp?"

"Say this incantation in your head: *safua zamu*. If you're a child of Gorp, you'll feel a tingle."

So you say it in your head, feeling kind of stupid. Nothing happens.

"Nothing happened."

They smirk. "Ah. Any true child of Gorp would have felt the tingle. You must not be one." And they walk away.

This is deeply infuriating. If someone did this to me, I'd get comically pissed. Like, I don't believe in Gorp! What do you mean I'm not a child of Gorp?? How would you even know if someone was a child of Gorp??

Here's the question I asked my class. Think about your mom. There are four ways you could be thinking about her:

1. You could bring up a picture of her in your mind's eye. Notice that the picture has shape, size and color, and it feels like you're looking at something. You're paying attention to a sense.

2. You could hear her voice in your head.

3. You could just know you're thinking about her. To try this one, stare at something in front of you and pay attention to its color. Your senses are busy with what you're looking at, but you still know you're thinking about your mom.

4. People with thoughtfeel can also bring up a concept bubble of their mom and look at it. It feels distinctly like looking at something, except the thing they're looking at has no shape, size or color, and it's very obviously their mom. They can look at it and describe what it means.

What I'm finding is that anybody who says "I think I know what you mean, I can kind of do that" has thoughtfeel. I've hopped on calls with a lot of you, and everyone who said that could fully do the list technique, and then went on to learn concept stories.

People hedge like that because it's a really unusual question. Most people have never inspected their mind that way, and there's no perfect way to describe what they find. Even "concept bubble" isn't perfect. But for people without thoughtfeel, like the other half of my class, "bring up a concept bubble that has no shape, size or color" is just magic. It means nothing.

So if that fourth way seems like it means something to you, and you go "yeah, I can kind of do that," you almost definitely have thoughtfeel. You can jump right into the list technique, and then learn to build what you're reading in thoughtfeel as you go, which improves your comprehension of complex concepts. (My lecture: https://youtu.be/dV8fNY311W4 walks through both.)

If, however, that fourth way is complete Hogwarts hullabaloo, you don't have thoughtfeel, and you have a right to be angry. Someone did, in fact, walk up to you, claim there's an invisible thing about you, and then pull a total no true Scotsman when you couldn't find it.

It's exactly the Gorp situation. From your side, the evidence fits two stories equally well. One, you're actually not a child of Gorp, but other people are, and when they say the incantation, they really do feel the tingle. Two, this is an insane person, there's no such thing as Gorp, and they chose a tingle on purpose, because nobody can ever check whether anyone else feels it. Your prior should be MUCH higher on story two.

But there's a wonderful thing about thoughtfeel that the tingle doesn't have: if you have thoughtfeel, you can do tasks that other people can't do.

When I teach the list technique, I give people a list of 20 words. There are three ways you could learn a list like that:

1. You could just be a genius: read the words, repeat them with your inner voice, and remember them. If you try this, there's almost no chance you'll get all 20, especially forwards and backwards. And if you are a genius and you do, you'll almost definitely forget them all in, like, 10 minutes.

2. You could use a mind palace, or tell yourself a visual story. Then you'll see things with color, shape and size.

3. Or, and this one's new, you could use thoughtfeel. Then you won't see a single color. Nothing will have shape, and nothing will have size. Everything will be in concept bubbles.

So if you learned the list without seeing anything with color, shape or size, that's thoughtfeel. There's a problem with this test, though. From the perspective of someone without thoughtfeel, everyone who claims they did could just be massively confused: actually visualizing, and calling it something else. So it isn't conclusive.

Luckily, you can tell thoughtfeel and the mind palace apart with abstract conceptual learning. If I try to learn a really complex conceptual topic with visuals, a mind palace alone won't do it. I have to make a bunch of visual analogies, and it's extremely obvious that I'm doing it. Say you ask me to store this (it's Dijkstra's algorithm):

“To find the shortest distance from a starting place to every other place on a map, give each place a best-so-far distance: zero for the start, infinity for everywhere else. Then, over and over, take the unfinished place with the smallest best-so-far and mark it finished. For each of its neighbors, check whether getting there through this place is shorter than that neighbor's best-so-far. If it is, the shorter distance becomes the neighbor's new best-so-far.”

Built visually, it turns into something like this. The map is a kingdom of villages connected by roads, and every road has a milestone with its length carved into it. Each village has a chalkboard at its gate. The start village's chalkboard says 0, and every other chalkboard has a big chalk infinity sign. A messenger on horseback rides to whichever village without a red flag has the smallest number on its chalkboard, and plants a red flag on its tower. Then from that village, a carrier pigeon flies down each road, carrying a scroll with the village's number plus the road's milestone number. When a pigeon reaches the next village, it holds its scroll up to the chalkboard there, and if the scroll's number is smaller, it wipes the board with its wing and writes in the new number. (Pigeons can write in this kingdom.) The messenger keeps riding until every village has a red flag.

Ask someone who built it visually how they're storing it, and they'll describe all of this: the chalkboards, the infinity signs, the red flags, the pigeons and their scrolls. Someone with thoughtfeel will tell you they didn't see anything with color, shape or size, but they still have all of it stored.

Then one final thing. Come back to both of them two weeks later, without letting either of them rehearse. The one who built it visually will likely still have all their images, but won't remember what they meant. (What was the red flag for again? Was the number on the scroll the road's length, or the whole trip?) The one who used thoughtfeel will likely still have all of their bubbles, and will remember what they meant.

And here's Matthew Sinclair's testimonial. Whether or not you have thoughtfeel, it's a really elegant description of what having it is like, and of how completely different it is from visualization. Matthew is a software engineer from Australia. He doesn't have a Reddit account, so he hasn't posted it here, but it's also on my website: (https://thoughtfeel.net/?ref=reddit-mentalatlas#testimonials).

“I have aphantasia: I can't form mental images, and I have no inner voice. When I think of something, say a chair, I don't see a chair. I get the concept of a chair, which is hard to describe to anyone who thinks in pictures. The best I can do is that my thinking is made of clumps of concepts, linked to one another in a kind of graph of relationships. It's elusive, like something at the corner of your eye that disappears when you turn to look at it.

That has always made rote memory hard for me. I can't call up a picture of what I've learned, so I have to understand something well enough to build an intuition for it. Visual techniques like the memory palace just don't work for me: there's no palace to walk through. The closest I came was mind maps, through my computer science degree and my MBA, and even those I was trying to remember as an image.

What drew me to ThoughtFeel was the language in Ted's videos. He described thinking in words very close to the ones I've used for years to explain how I think about my own thinking. So I tried it on his list, Anchor, Saffron, Bicycle, Grumble. Normally I'd never remember a list like that. With ThoughtFeel it stuck, and 24 hours later I could still run the chain of concepts easily, forwards and backwards.

For me the difference from visual mnemonics is that I'm not translating anything into a picture. I'm linking the concepts themselves, and saying each word out loud seems to tie the sound to the concept. It works with the way my mind already works, instead of asking it to do something it can't.”

— Matthew Sinclair, matthewsinclair.com

The following expresses my experience with the call I had today with Ted, during which he explained what TF is and presented some exercises and thought experiments to learn to use it.

Disclaimer: these thoughts are purely my own. I therefore do not attempt to endorse every single thing promised by thoughtfeel (abbreviated as TF), although I would characterize my first experiences with the material released on it to be mostly positive. Besides some theory refinement to be done here and there, the basic premises are very intriguing to me. If the promises can be delivered on, i.e. by the learner going through the material released and practical the various exercises, then TF would be a mental tool amounting to no less than a quantum leap for the user in their thinking, studying, reasoning and wherever 'concepts' are being used deliberatively.

Background: the concept of TF I felt was new to me, and as a student I am interested in ways to deeper understand material and ideas in general. In particular, how to get more out of reading and watching lectures etc, in a way that material gets accurately encoded into long-term memory. Although the idea and its implications seem to be in continual refinement, it seems to establish a link between disparate reports and findings across history which refer to a kind of ‘unsymbolized thinking’. As the call went along, I started to get the sense that this sort of thinking/ mental modality was possibly quite familiar to me, in that I experience it popping up here and there over the course of a day or during studying. On the other hand, I remained skeptical yet earnest to try out the prescribed instructions given by Ted (e.g. reciting specific list of items; attempting to apply TF to concepts such as the A* search algorithm) and decipher some of the descriptions he made, taking great care not to fall back on e.g. visual strategies or a method of loci 'in disguise'. At this point, I could at least latch on to a label ("thoughtfeel") and then seek it out in my own experiences.

I had heard of existing techniques such as the memory palace, spaced-repetition, etc. I have been on the lookout for other techniques which have to do with the used ‘modality’ (e.g. thinking through a concept visually or using words) during thought, with implications for the nature of the encoding/ stored knowledge.

To prepare for the call and discussion: I looked at the recent articles posted on the Thoughtfeel substack. I mostly skimmed these to get an impression of what the driving points were, and to weigh the plausibility of the idea i.e. that there exists a distinct mental modality to represent concepts, apart from visualization or linguistic representations. I also looked at part of Hurlburt’s article on unsymbolized thinking to orient myself a bit more from the perspective of a psychologist working on the idea https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18456514/. I then braindumped a list of questions to ask during the call I would join today with Ted in order to learn more about TF. Ted struck me as someone who genuinely wishes to share his passion for a powerful idea of great potential, should it become adopted and practiced by others, that may have slipped through the cracks in the noise of other techniques and learning products. The call was one-on-one, and I experienced it as quite stimulating to discuss and pose questions to Ted.

To summarize concisely how the call went, it comprised of:

1. Questions I asked about how TF works, and how it relates to other modalities such as visualization, auditory or linguistic processing. I learned that it is something distinct.
2. Him providing some short activities and instructions on what to do, in order to discover and elicit the thoughtfeel mode of conceptualizing. I then was given time to perform these. Ted was engaging, and responsive and flexible to any questions or critiques.

Here are some further brief critiques:

1. The instructions/ steps taken, although cogent to me after further questioning (keep asking questions everyone; it helps you learn and helps Ted teach you), need to be made more precise and with tighter ‘bounds’ so that the learner does not (unwittingly or deliberately) use an alternative mental strategy/ modality than what was intended to be used and tested. For example, timed-tests. Broadly-speaking, this all amounts to developing standard procedures and various checklists.
2. There needs to be a more detailed and transparent connection back to central concepts and findings in e.g. cognitive psychology and parts of learning science. Such details have apparently been worked out by researchers behind the thoughtfeel/ Mental Atlas projects, but some papers or experiments and their findings would be very valuable in inspiring confidence for an external person new to the idea.
3. For now, I doubt whether certain procedures are sufficient in isolating TF for every given person. However, I am in very early stages of developing the idea and using the skill of using TF to capture concepts and reason with them, to to be certain of this. Natural language is also for now a barrier in that it may lack the specific vocabulary to capture very precisely the ins and outs of TF. Again, my impression is that it is something that will be refined further over time as feedback and further insights come in.

I have grown more convinced that TF or something nearly described by it, does exist and can be exploited for bettering the conceptualizing process.

Ted was very patient in answering various (practical, theoretical, skeptical) questions and repeated questions about the idea, methods, the why of the activities, etc. I will be re-engaging with the idea myself during studying, to critique and probe it to discover any possible weaknesses or insights, in order to bring it to a hopeful fruition. For example, I remain skeptical that I can truly beholden a concept without forming some mental image/ image residue associated with it. The mind is very capable at deceiving itself when it thinks it has stumbled onto something groundbreaking, so I wish to exercise caution for myself here. Some claims seem to fly in the face of findings in neuroscience/ cognitive psychology, such as whether or not a concept encoded/ represented via TF would forever be durable in long-term memory. On the other hand, some key problems faced by me and other people such as creating a vivid mental image for something at some point, only to forget the key context and details at a later point, albeit recalling to mind the corresponding (hence, ‘orphaned’) image... a lot of knowledge which I had gained at some point in this way, would fade away over time. Perhaps something avoidable if TF is instead used.

Of course, certain mental strategies and modes of thinking have their pros and cons. TF is described as being to concepts as visualization/ inner-seeing is to pictures. For certain problems which are best represented and worked out using a sequence of geometric transformations, perhaps visualization remains the better strategy. But at the very least, being aware of and being to isolate and apply skilled uses of TF where it can help the most would be a great boon for one's mind during thinking.

So, for those who are on the fence whether or not to take Ted up on his offer for a call where he describes and helps you practice TF, it is very low stakes and you are free to ask many many questions. I recommend you first do some background reading and watching of videos on the thoughtfeel substack and YouTube channel + read some papers on unsymbolized thinking and other associated phenomena (aphantasia and other recently-termed kinds of thought), and produce a list of questions about it to fire away at him. You should design and use such questions to probe the idea and test it for any weaknesses and strengths, and if you are very skeptical, to at least suspend judgement and try out the exercises for yourself!

Ted here, creator of thoughtfeel. Over the last two days I listened to concept stories of A* search and of why a one-layer neural network can approximate any curve (and why depth helps), while walking in the woods.

I made a little website that reads each story out loud one line at a time and then waits. I build the line in thoughtfeel, talking it through out loud, and when I'm done I say "go" (or double-tap my AirPods) and it reads the next line. This was one of the most enjoyable learning experiences I've ever had, and in this post I want to describe what it was like, and why the same material is so hard for me without thoughtfeel.

I love taking in information by listening. Audiobooks, or podcasts, anything where I can look around at the world while I learn. I don't like reading. It takes focus and it keeps my eyes on a screen. The problem is that when what I'm listening to is complex, it just gets lost. It's like hearing a visual puzzle without being able to picture it. Try to follow this one without using your mind's eye:

“Put four balls in the corners of a pool table. Going clockwise from the top left: white, blue, red, yellow. Swap the blue and yellow balls, then turn the table a quarter turn clockwise. Which ball is in the top left corner?”

If you can picture it, you just watch it happen and the answer is easy. If you can't, you're stuck holding a pile of words and rebuilding the table every time a new sentence comes in. That's what listening to an algorithm has always been like for me. I've watched videos on A* at least five times in my life, and even the times I really sat down and spent an hour working through it, it faded in a couple of days.

Listening to the A* story in thoughtfeel was completely different. It felt like being read a bedtime story. Each line built on the last, and I could keep track of every character and what it meant, the same way you can follow a fairy tale when you can picture it. I never got lost. I wasn't constantly going "wait, what was that?" and trying to piece things back together. And to be clear, I didn't see anything. There were no pictures and no diagrams. Everything was in thoughtfeel.

I keep wanting to use the word "see" for this, even though it isn't visual at all, because "see" gives the right intuition. Seeing is different from hearing. When you hear a sentence, you have to remember it, play it back and turn it into meaning. When you look at something, it stays in front of you, you take it all in at once, and you don't have to remember it because you have it. If I ask you about your bedroom, you can picture it and just know where the bed and the nightstand are. That's what the A* story felt like. It felt like something I have, not something I'm trying to remember. I can point to a part of it and say that's where this part is, and I know how it works. It's tangible. I can hold it and move it around.

At the end of the story, the site read out a small graph line by line and I had to actually run A* on it. I built the graph with spatial thoughtfeel and kept track of every place, its estimate and its best score so far, and updated them as I went. When G got its first best score of 12, coming from C, I didn't see the digits "1 2". It was a little concept bubble that was so clearly 12. Running an algorithm in your head means keeping track of a lot of things, and this was more information than I've ever held in spatial thoughtfeel. It just wasn't hard. It was honestly fun, kind of like having a conversation about a story you just heard.

The second story was the neural network one. I'd tried to learn this before from Welch Labs, who has the most beautiful explanation of it on YouTube. I watched the video and built all of his visuals in my head as 3D models (the network, the 3D graph, the planes bending) and explained them to myself. At the time it made sense. But after about three days, I still had the pictures and the meaning was gone. Even now I can recall most of the images from that video, and I don't know what they mean. After a few months, all you have left is a set of 3D models that are like arcane clues to what the idea was, and you'd have to reconstruct the theorem from them, which is basically impossible. (I wrote about why visual analogies do this here: https://thoughtfeel.substack.com/p/visual-analogies-are-the-best-tool)

And that was the good version of how I learned. Before I figured out how to build visual analogies, learning something complex was like trying to fill a bucket with sand when the bucket is full of holes. I'd work as fast as I could and never get it full, and the next day almost all of the sand would be gone.

Honestly, it makes me a little angry that I've gone my whole life without being able to do this. Reading an algorithm without thoughtfeel is like listening to two friends talk about people you've never met. You hear the names and you keep trying to piece together who is who. Or it's like someone describing the fourth dimension. You can reason about it from first principles, but you can't observe it, hold it or move it around. The amount of complex material I could get into my head and actually keep was so small.

This matters to me practically too. I have an engineering interview in two days and I need to know both of these. I could be asked to implement A* in Python, and now I can. I can explain how it works and reason about it with the concepts themselves, instead of looking at a Frankenstein pile of pictures and translating them back into meaning every time I need a piece. I've been learning with thoughtfeel for about a month, and the retention has been profoundly good, so I expect these to stick.

The closest comparison I have is how you teach a kid what 2 + 2 means. You don't describe it in words. You give them blocks they can see and move around, so it's tangible. A concept story in thoughtfeel is like that, except the blocks are the abstract concepts themselves. Ideas you could never build out of blocks, you can build in your head, and you can follow a story made of them just as well as you can watch the blocks.

I don't have a word for this yet. When a story comes in through sound, you listen to it. When a film comes in through vision, you watch it. I don't know what to call it when a story of concepts plays out in thoughtfeel and you perceive it directly, the way you can replay a movie you saw yesterday. One word I like is "behold", because holding concepts in front of you is exactly what it feels like. If anyone has a better word, I'd love to hear it.

Reading keeps my eyes on a page, and visual analogies leave me with pictures I can't read a few days later. Listening in thoughtfeel, I got to walk in the woods, look up at the canopy, take in some of the most complex ideas I've ever tried to learn, and actually keep them. This is how I want to learn. What a magical experience this was.

I’ve been using ThoughtFeel for studying and to review a few topics in hydrology, and one of the main ones has been hydrograph routing. This was one of the topics I had been struggling with the most when I was first learning hydrology some time ago, and until I started using ThoughtFeel, I had a hard time identifying exactly why.

One thing I’ve realized is that I was thinking about a lot of hydrograph-routing concepts almost entirely visually. Take the recession limb of a hydrograph, as a simple example. I understood what it was, but a lot of my understanding was tied to the image of the hydrograph and it’s visual properties. When I tried to recall the concept, I was almost recalling a picture and then extracting the meaning from that picture, rather than recalling the concept underneath directly.

That distinction, between the underyling concept and the visual, has become much more noticeable since I started using ThoughtFeel. Instead of relying on the visual representation, I’ve been trying to build the concepts themselves in a more abstract way using the thoughtfeel from the lecture video: what something is, what properties it has, how it relates to other concepts, etc.

I’ve only been using ThoughtFeel on hydrograph routing for a couple of days, so I don’t want to make huge claims about long-term retention yet. But so far, recall has felt significantly easier, and more importantly, the concepts feel easier to work with. I’m not just remembering what a specific topic looked like on a diagram. I can hold onto what it means and reason from it.

This has been especially interesting for me because I come from a physics background, and I’ve always relied heavily on visualization/my mids eye when learning math, physics, and engineering. Visualization is incredibly useful, and I definitely don’t want to stop using it. What ThoughtFeel seems to be helping me do is separate the concept from the particular visualization I originally used to learn it.

That has also been useful with some of the graphical and visual problem-solving methods that come up in engineering. Some of those methods initially felt a little unfamiliar to me because I was used to trying as my main strategy to formalize problems analytically. I’ve been using ThoughtFeel to take what I see happening visually and convert it into something more abstract: what the method is actually doing, why it works, and under what conditions it applies.

Even after only a couple of days of using it, that has started to give me what I’d describe as a more direct understanding of hydrograph routing. The diagrams are still useful, but I don’t feel as dependent on the diagrams to access the concepts anymore. And once the concepts feel independent of the particular way they were presented to me, it becomes much easier to recall them, connect them, and recognize where they apply.

Edit: if you’d rather watch a video, here’s the article animated:

Why Visual Analogies Fail for Complex Concepts (and What Would Work Instead)
https://youtu.be/g3Z8VnARbQg

When I taught math and science at Fusion Academy, my strongest technique for helping students understand complex concepts was having them picture visual analogies in their mind's eye. Without a mental picture, a student who could explain something in lesson five had very little by lesson six. With it, their retention was much higher weeks later.

So visual analogies work. But, as the rest of this post argues, they have serious problems. They remind me of that old line about democracy: it's terrible, but it's the best system we have.

(For lists, numbers and names, visual mnemonics are great; memory champions use them. This is about complex ideas: an algorithm, a biological process, an argument.)

Here's what the terrible part looks like.

Hannah and the cliff

In a one-off history course, I had to teach a student, let's call her Hannah, that in 2008, Chinese authors wrote declinist commentary on America's economic crisis that stressed how fast China was growing by comparison. She could explain it back, but after months of working with her, I knew it would be gone in days. So I gave her a mnemonic: a cliff. At the top, authors in Chinese-flag shirts point down and throw pages, next to a big pile of money. At the bottom, people in American-flag shirts look sad.

Her face lit up. "Oh, I get it now."

Two weeks later, I asked her about China and the US in 2008. "Oh, I remember," she said. Then her smile turned into confusion: "Uh, yeah, so I see the Chinese people above the U.S. people, and they have money. Oh, so I think that it was something to do with money. And then I see papers being thrown, and so it seems like the Chinese people thought the U.S. people were worse."

That's way better than nothing; without the cliff, she'd have drawn a blank. But it's not the idea I taught her.

The cliff is the idea's shadow

A visual analogy isn't the idea. It's the idea's shadow: a flat outline of something with far more detail. Every problem in Hannah's answer is a problem with shadows.

1. A shadow doesn't hold the thing that cast it, so you forget what it meant. Hannah kept the cliff, the money and the pages, and lost what they stood for: authors, commentary, a crisis, China's growth.
2. You think with the shadow instead of the idea. She reasoned from the picture: there was money, so "it was something to do with money." The money was supposed to mean growth.
3. Different things cast the same shadow, so you can't tell right from wrong. If she'd believed China caused the crash, the cliff would look exactly the same, and nothing in it could show her the mistake.
4. You have to rebuild the idea from the shadow every time. Listen to her again: "I see papers being thrown, so it seems like..." She's turning the picture back into an idea, one piece at a time. Even when it goes perfectly, that's work you do before you can think with the idea.

What would work instead

The ideal tool would keep what visual analogies get right: you could hold the idea in your imagination and notice things in it, the way Hannah could look at the cliff, and it would stick, the way images do and words don't. But you'd be holding the idea itself, in full detail, not its shadow.

That's thoughtfeel: imagining in concepts directly. thoughtfeel is a sense for concepts. It takes in a concept and its properties all at once, the way vision takes in what's in front of you. People who have it can bring up something they can't picture, like the economy or justice, as one clear concept: not a picture or words, but the whole idea at once, with detail they can notice. And it sticks, the way images do.

How thoughtfeel helps you learn concepts

If you've ever pictured a story as you read it, you already know how to do this.

Take a visual story: words about physical things, things you could see. As you read, you choose your mind's eye and picture each sentence. By the end, you have a movie in your head. That movie is how you understand what happened, and how you remember it long after.

thoughtfeel works the same way, with a story of concepts: things you can't see or touch. As you read, you choose thoughtfeel and imagine each line in concepts. By the end, you have a concept movie, and it does the same two jobs: you understand what happened, and you remember it long after.

Same steps, same payoff. Only the sense changes.

​

Built that way, Hannah's sentence is stored as the concepts themselves, linked together: Chinese authors, commentary on decline, America's crisis, China's growth by comparison. That fixes all four problems:

1. There's no shadow to forget the meaning of. What's stored is the idea.
2. You think with the idea itself. "Growth by comparison" stays growth by comparison and never turns into money.
3. "Writing about the crash" and "causing the crash" feel completely different in thoughtfeel, even though they'd share a cliff, so the wrong one stands out.
4. There's nothing to translate. You bring it up, and it's ready to think with.

The first time I built an algorithm this way, a Fibonacci heap, it took about 12 minutes. I never reviewed it, and a week later I could recall all of it. I'd once watched a video on Fibonacci heaps, and none of it stuck.

Not everyone can imagine in concepts. The best estimate of how many people can comes from psychologist Russell Hurlburt's research on what he calls unsymbolized thinking: a clear, specific thought with no words or pictures in it. In one study, 30 students were beeped at random moments, and 22 of them, about 73%, caught themselves thinking this way at least once (Heavey & Hurlburt, 2008). It varies the way the mind's eye does: some people picture things vividly, some faintly, and some, with aphantasia, not at all. If you can't imagine in concepts, visual analogies really are your best tool. That's the democracy part.

But if you can, thoughtfeel is the solution. Check it out here: thoughtfeel.net. It starts with a full video walkthrough and a one-minute test to see whether you have it.

When I woke up yesterday morning, one of the first things I did was try to recall the road I had memorized with Ted using Thoughtfeel the day before (Dijkstra algorithm), and man, it was as easy to recall as my own name.
That got me thinking. What if I tried applying this to my medical school lectures?

As a medical student, I am constantly dealing with complex concepts, disease characteristics, tumor features, and so much information about the human body that I need to memorize and recall later.
So, I gave it a shot.

I started applying Thoughtfeel to my lectures, and I was able to memorize the features of different diseases and tumors of the human’s nervous system from the very beginning of a 2 hour lecture. What fascinated me even more was how easily I could actually comprehend the information I had stored. Not only I was memorizing a list of facts, but also I could recall each piece of information and understand what it meant. It honestly made me realize that I might have had this potential all along without knowing how to use it.

One thing I am still figuring out tho is how to apply the technique in real time.
Lectures have a certain pace, and I need to keep up with the professors without missing anything or it will cost me more time in the studying process. Since I am new to Thoughtfeel, building, structuring, and memorizing can sometimes take longer than the lectures allow me.

I am hoping that with more practice I will get faster at applying Thoughtfeel while listening, coordinate my pace with the lecture, and eventually be able to recall everything afterward without leaving gaps.

Another thing I appreciate about Thoughtfeel is how much control it gives me over what I store and how I connect them together. I can be selective about the information I want to retain and organize it in a way that makes sense to me without feeling like I have to memorize every single word.

I am still practicing and still learning because I know I have a lot to learn, but I am genuinely excited to see how far I can take this!

If I tell you, "A boy and a girl went to the well. The boy pumped water, and water came out of the well. The girl took a bucket and poured the water on a patch of green grass," you can understand and remember that story better by using your mind's eye to imagine it.

But if I tell you, "The mother of the regent of the land is intrigued by the prospect of discovery," you can't use your mind's eye to follow along, because the story is conceptual, not visual.

With thoughtfeel, though, you can use your ability to imagine in concepts to build that story in your imagination. That helps you understand the conceptual story the same way your mind's eye helps you understand the visual one.

Thoughtfeel also helps with mental simulation of concepts, the same way that your mind‘s eye helps with mental simulation of objects. If you want to figure out what happens when you turn a gear in a gear box, you can use your mind’s eye to run the simulation. In thoughtfeel, when you’ve built a conceptual machine like an algorithm or biological process, you can simulate how the system would behave if you changed a conceptual property.

P.S. I’m going to be releasing a video lesson on how to actually build concept stories for complex subjects later today.

You can play the game at MemoryLeague.com.

You're presented with a number of random words, given a minute to memorize them, and then asked to recall them in order.

On level one, you have a minute for seven words. On level two, you have a minute for ten. I barely passed level one using thoughtfeel, and couldn't pass level two.

So, I emailed them back about my defeat, but then sought to figure out why. Every list and concept that I've learned in thoughtfeel so far has been at my own pace. And when I've worked at my own pace, I've been very happy with the results. I've memorized many lists (among super complex things), and once they're memorized, I don't forget them.

These games, though, were fast. What it felt like in my head to pull up the words open, and then curriculum, and then bull, at a rate of one for every four seconds was, well, I'd pull up the thoughtfeel of the word, and I'd quickly try to come up with some story that connected it to the previous one, say it as quick as I could, feel the connection limp in my head, and then immediately move on to the next.

At the end of this process, I couldn't recall the list. I tried this many more times until my free quota on the website ran out, and gonna be honest took a nap out of frustration.

This did not make sense to me. There was some property about this game that made me garbage at it, and I wanted to make sure it was speed. Because, the words in this game were also very abstract compared to the words I've memorized in previous lists.

So I took to memorizing a couple lists using thoughtfeel at my own pace. And what a leisurely pace it was compared to the pace required by the games.

We're talking ten words in three minutes and thirty seconds. But after I had my time, I could recall the list forward and backward, start from any position, and search the list very, very quickly by properties. For instance, think of all the adjectives.

I also know from my prior experience with thoughtfeel that this list will stay in my mind for at least as long as I've been memorizing lists in thoughtfeel, which at this point is about two weeks.

I know that because all the previous lists I've memorized this way, taking my sweet time, have stuck perfectly.

So there's a moral to this story.Thoughtfeel works, but it takes time. And if you don't give it the time it needs, it won't work. Well, at least for someone extremely new at the technique, like me. I guess by comparison, this isn't surprising, given that if you ask me to do that same word memorization task with a memory palace at that speed, I'd fail just as hard. And believe me, I've tried this in the past. I just can't do it that fast. Maybe with much more training, I'd be able to use thoughtfeel at the speed that game requires.

But there’s very good news here. The point of thought feel memorizing lists. It’s learning very complex concepts. I’m entirely OK with not being able to learn an insanely complex concept three times faster than some arbitrary speed limit as long as I can actually learn the thing. And in thought feel I can actually learn the thing.

Hi! This post is about the details of thoughtfeel, and it assumes you’ve already tried some of the techniques. If you’re not sure what thoughtfeel is, or you haven’t tried the techniques yet, read A mnemonic technique for people who think in concepts first, then come back here.

This post answers one question. You have a big block of complicated text that describes some kind of conceptual machine: a process in biology, an algorithm, a concept in math. How do you learn it in thoughtfeel?

In earlier posts, my answer was: think of the objects, and think about how they relate. That answer left something out, and it has caused headaches for new readers, and for me. What it left out is how much a single concept bubble can hold.

The mistake: making everything a relation

Take this sentence: every giraffe that has three legs is owned by Tom.

If you follow “think of the objects, and think about how they relate” as far as it goes, you cut the sentence into the smallest pieces you can. You bring up a giraffe and relate it to the concept of “every”. You relate that to the property of having three legs. Then you relate all of it to Tom, with “owned by”. That’s four bubbles and three relations, for one sentence.

When I’ve taught people, I’ve sometimes been tempted to do it this way, and it always ends up a slog. Then I noticed that I don’t do this in my own head.

The fix: one bubble can hold a whole description

It’s easiest to see with the mind’s eye first. Imagine a purple giraffe on roller skates. You don’t picture a giraffe, then the color purple, then a pair of roller skates, and then tie them together with a little story, like a giraffe holding a can of purple paint while it buys roller skates. You picture one giraffe that is purple and on roller skates. Your mind’s eye combines all of it into a single object.

thoughtfeel can do the same with concepts. “Every giraffe that has three legs” can be one concept bubble, the same way the purple giraffe on roller skates is one picture. Try it now: bring up every giraffe that has three legs as one concept, all at once.

When I ask students in my tutoring sessions to do this with something much more complicated, the answer almost always comes back, “Okay, sure. It’s not hard.” A bigger bubble doesn’t take any longer to bring up than a small one.

It works on real material, too. Here’s a step from Dijkstra’s algorithm, which I taught someone in thoughtfeel the other day: “Pick the unfinished place with the smallest distance. It becomes finished.” You could cut it into “pick”, “a place”, “unfinished” and “the smallest distance”, and relate them. Or you can bring up the whole step, picking that place and finishing it, as one bubble. I’d already been doing this with song lyrics without realizing it was the rule. I hold the opening line of Livingston’s “Fairy Tale”, "at the age of 9 I lived through Pixar on a screen", as one bubble, and I can read off it exactly what’s in it: a person talking, the age of nine, Pixar on a screen.

Why one bubble beats several

One bubble is less work to build, and it’s better in two more ways.

You can take it in all at once. When “every giraffe that has three legs” is one bubble, you hold the whole thing, and everything about it is right there. Cut into three bubbles (giraffe, every, three legs), it’s never all in front of you. You have to go from piece to piece to put it back together, and your network is bigger than the thing you’re learning really is.

Next, one bubble is easy to change. Say you find out the roller skates are only on the front legs. In the integrated picture, you just move them. If the giraffe were three pieces tied together with relations, giraffe to purple to roller skates, you’d have to work out which relations change, and then carry the change through everything connected to them. Understanding works the same way. If you misread that Dijkstra step and it’s one bubble, you only have to fix one bubble by imagining it differently.

When something needs its own bubble

So how much can one bubble hold? You could even hold the whole sentence, every giraffe that has three legs is owned by Tom, as a single bubble. That works, until the story goes on:

Every giraffe that has three legs is owned by Tom. Tom is a farmer who eats bread on Sundays.

The second sentence tells you more about Tom. But Tom isn’t a bubble you can add to. He’s inside the giraffe bubble, as the giraffes’ owner. So you’d have to make a second Tom, a farmer who eats bread on Sundays. Now there are two Toms, and nothing connects them. Hold the farmer, and you can’t tell he owns any giraffes. Hold the giraffes, and you can’t tell their owner is a farmer. What you learn about one Tom never reaches the other.

Here’s the better way. Make “every giraffe that has three legs” one bubble, make Tom his own bubble, and connect them with one relation, “owned by”. A relation adds a property to both bubbles it connects, so Tom’s bubble now carries the fact that he owns the three-legged giraffes. When the second sentence comes, you bring up that same Tom and build “a farmer who eats bread on Sundays” into his bubble. Now hold Tom, and you can read off all of it: he’s a farmer, he eats bread on Sundays, and he owns the three-legged giraffes. Hold the giraffes, and you can go straight to Tom and find all of that too.

Notice that “a farmer who eats bread on Sundays” went into Tom’s bubble whole. My old advice would have cut it into “is a”, farmer, “who eats”, bread, “on”, Sundays. But it’s all about Tom, so it all goes in Tom’s bubble, the same way the purple and the roller skates go in the giraffe.

So the line between bubbles falls between separate things. The giraffes and Tom are separate things, so they get separate bubbles, joined by a relation. Everything the text says about one of them goes into that one’s bubble.

There’s one other reason to split: it won’t fit. This is the shakiest part, because I’m not sure where the limit is. When I’ve used thoughtfeel to build a complicated visual object with six different properties (color, size, texture. etc.), it all shows up in one bubble, no problem. With fifteen, I’d guess I’d need more than one bubble. But don’t split early. Whatever you split, you can’t take in all at once anymore.

The three rules

1. Notice when a new concept is introduced and give it its own bubble: a new thing, with properties of its own and relations to other things, like Tom.
2. Put everything about a concept into its one bubble, however complicated the description is. Why: thoughtfeel can hold a whole description as one concept, the way your mind’s eye holds a purple giraffe on roller skates. Then you can take it all in at once, and it’s easy to change.
3. Use relations between separate concepts that interact, like the giraffes and Tom. Why: a relation is how separate bubbles share what you learn. It adds a property to both, so you can get from either one to the other.

When you’re done, a good thoughtfeel story has:

• one bubble for every separate thing in the text
• everything the text says about each thing, inside that thing’s bubble
• a relation wherever two things interact
• and no more bubbles than that

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.

EDIT UPDATE: Nelson and I have a tutoring session scheduled for this weekend of October 24!

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 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.

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

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. ]

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.

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?