[thr0w__4w4y]

I've done the exact same trick in my mind to remember a sequence -- the "linked list" linking A to B, B to C, etc. It just seemed natural to me, I didn't read it anywhere. If you have the "head pointer", you're probably golden.

When I told a colleague about this years ago, he said that my approach seemed so much more complicated and/or difficult than his approach (IIRC it's called the Memory Palace?) of building a castle/cathedral / museum in your mind, and as you walk through it, you see a banana on the left, and then a monkey a little further down the hall, then a trombone on the right, etc. For me, that technique simply doesn't work, as much as I try.

[phpnode]

The book covers both techniques (though not in great detail), Memory Palaces are another term for Method of Loci[0] - in my experience it is actually much better and faster, but requires habitually revisiting rooms in order to remind yourself of their contents (this is as quick as mentally walking through a door into a room and glancing around it from left to right). This is easy and fast but it's also easy to forget to do it and then the contents do start to fade. I use the layout of the first house I owned as my "palace", so it's a real place but no longer somewhere I actually go to in real life which helps avoid confusion.

The linked list idea works well and arguably lasts longer, but it's also much more time consuming to "set up" (for me at least), and suffers from O(N) time complexity just like a real linked list (i wonder if it would be possible to construct a mental skip-list!) and if I forget a single association then the whole remainder of the list is forgotten.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

[piyh]

I can build my grocery list in my memory high school and neighborhood. The skip list could be built as an acronym built out of first letters taken from named areas.