Interesting that expert mnemonists (e.g. world memory champions) don't seem to be able translate that into "real-world" achievement (e.g. top execs, creatives, etc). IME insight production does seem to depend on my long-term memory performance. Not sure how to account for this.
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One explanation might be that mnemonists' techniques often emphasize memorizing large sets of relatively detached information. That doesn't match the structure of knowledge I suspect I need in my LTM to produce insights.
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My use of LTM usually feels more like "streaming long-term memory" than like a mnemonist's memory palace enumeration: each day, a few new details and observations, slowly agglomerating over time into something which might notice a coincidence / contradiction / connection.
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That makes sense. Maybe it's more about the connections than the knowledge, then? Mnemonics feels like hanging stuff on an existing connection system instead of building a new connection system.
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I think both are important. For instance, I memorized many of the key numbers about the education market (spend on various sectors per year, growth rates, demographic breakdowns). These let me mentally evaluate opportunities in that space in discussions or while noodling.
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I see. Hm, would you have needed the mnemonics as much if you already had the knowledge from discussions and noodling? That is, are they mostly useful for bootstrapping?
Or was the information "inorganic" enough that it was useful to know but necessary to explicitly memorize?