How I Accidentally Created the Mental Atlas: An Honest, Personal Story
Hi, Ted here.
I want to share the story behind how the Mental Atlas method came about—not as a polished idea or some intentional technique from the start, but as something that grew slowly, uncertainly, and sometimes accidentally. This story is deeply personal, and honestly, I didn’t set out to build something for other people at all.
Since I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of improving not just what I learn, but how I learn it. Specifically, I had this big guiding question: if I wanted the best possible chance of making a meaningful scientific discovery by the time I’m fifty, how should I train myself? How could I become the sort of thinker who could handle complex, unknown problems across any domain?
That’s how all of this began—in November of 2024, I was working through a lot of computer science problems for my masters, and as I was trying to grasp the data structures and algorithms, I found myself visualizing them. Almost unintentionally, I began narrating these visualizations out loud, describing what I was seeing as if I was giving a voiceover. When I wanted to compare two problems, my first approach was to mentally switch back and forth between these two visual contexts. But every time I switched contexts, it felt jarring and exhausting.
Almost by accident, I tried placing both problems side by side in the same mental space, and I started narrating them simultaneously. This seemed to remove the strain from switching back and forth, and it wasn’t any harder to hold both in my mind at a time. Curious, I started adding more—three problems, then four. Eventually, I got up to nine problems at once, each of them large, detailed, and complex. It was around this point that something fundamentally shifted. My ability to compare and reason across multiple contexts became radically easier, more natural, almost effortless.
Despite this success, I genuinely believed this was just something peculiar about my own brain. I’ve always had a very vivid visual imagination, so I assumed that this ability to handle multiple large visuals was a personal quirk, unlikely to be useful to others. There was no thought at this stage about creating a “method” or “technique.” It was simply a private exploration, driven by curiosity and skepticism.
As I continued experimenting, I realized I needed a better way to organize all these concepts. That’s when I started using a memory palace approach, placing each visual concept into a specific location around my hometown. I’d put one concept in my high school, another in my local grocery store, another in a park I knew well. Narrating these visuals as I placed them around familiar spaces gave them structure and clarity, but even then, I was still uncertain about the implications or significance of what I was doing.
A really meaningful turning point came during a phone call with my friend Ben. Ben often heard about my cognitive science experiments, most of which ended up being minor improvements or ultimately ineffective. I remember describing to him my insight—that switching contexts incurred significant cognitive costs, and that perhaps holding everything together in one larger mental space could avoid these costs. Until this point, everything I’d been doing was purely based on faith. I was so accustomed to trying new ideas and seeing them fail, but I knew that eventually something would have to work. But after I explained this idea to Ben, he paused for a long moment and said, “Ted, this one doesn’t sound like just another small improvement. This could actually be significant.” Hearing Ben, who was typically skeptical, express genuine interest and belief was surprisingly inspiring. It made me feel like I might truly be onto something meaningful.
By January, I had around fifteen visuals, each one a whole lecture or chapter in a book, placed around my hometown memory palace. It was then that I noticed something incredibly strange and important. While analyzing one visual for deep analogical structure, my visual attention would spontaneously “snap” to another concept elsewhere in my mental town, even one’s mentally “far away”. This happened without any conscious searching, and when it did, the new visual would perfectly match a pattern I’d just noticed. This struck me as incredibly weird—a piece of data that didn’t fit my existing mental model. Sometimes, I would think of a concept and wait to snap to something. When nothing would come up, I’d manually check all of my icons, and I’d realize there truly wasn’t any matching concept. But when there was a pattern, the snap reliably led me directly there, finding exactly the icon with the correct pattern out of the dozens of concepts I had stored at that point.
Encouraged by these experiences, I continued building more icons and adding them to my memory palace. The snapping effect kept working consistently, and as the months went by, I found myself improving significantly at forming analogies and making connections. I began learning faster, retaining more information, and solving problems more effectively.
Another major turning point came in mid-April with my friend Liam. Liam had heard me talk about the Atlas repeatedly over the previous months, but he hadn’t really taken it seriously. One day we were on a walk, discussing a complex hypothetical. As the discussion got too complex, I said to him, as I had many times before, “One sec, I’m gonna put this in my Atlas.” I did so, and I immediately experienced clarity. Then, like many times before, I asked Liam if he wanted to try it. This time, to my surprise, he said yes. Frankly, I fully expected it to fail for him. But instead, it worked remarkably well—he experienced a clarity and depth of understanding he’d never had before. This genuinely shocked me; it completely contradicted my assumption that this was a unique personal skill. That moment profoundly changed my perspective and gave me hope that maybe this method could actually help other people.
After that, I started asking more people to try the method. For most people, it worked well, though for some it didn’t. I eventually realized that certain cognitive abilities were prerequisites, which is why I introduced the three screening questions now found on my website.
In early May, I shared the description of the Atlas and hastily written learning materials for it. to learn it on Reddit, specifically r/Mnemonics. Honestly, I expected little reaction, thinking people would dismiss it. Instead, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Many people tried it and found success, which was incredibly motivating. Encouraged by this response, I began creating specific icons to represent concepts, refined my encoding techniques, and learned how to use the Atlas effectively in real-time scenarios, such as while watching lectures.
Just to clarify my intentions clearly—I don’t plan on charging individuals to learn this method. My goal is simply to share it freely and see it help as many people as possible. If someday large organizations want professional training, perhaps I’d consider that separately. But for everyday learners, the Atlas is intended to remain accessible and free.
Something important I’ve learned is that the impact of the Atlas scales dramatically. Having four or five concepts is fundamentally different from having hundreds or thousands. The system doesn’t get harder—it becomes easier, more intuitive, and more powerful with scale. But it does take faith at the beginning, when the benefits that long term practitioners get seem out of reach.
If this technique helps even a handful of people improve the way they learn and reason, that’s already deeply rewarding. And even if the method doesn’t spread widely, I’m deeply grateful for what it has done for my own learning and thinking. It has fundamentally transformed my ability to reason and retain ideas in ways I previously couldn’t.
I hope sharing this story helps explain not just what the Mental Atlas is, but why it matters so much to me and why I care deeply about making it available to anyone it might help.
Thanks for reading.
