I have read the original article and found it deeply lacking. Not in the sense that it misrepresents the facts, but more like it fails to acknowledge the underlying assumptions and motivations that give those fact a meaning.

//----- In theory

First of all, what is being described seems a lot like the "Art of Memory". It is a technique whose modern incarnation was developed mostly during the Renaissance, based on older techniques of the ancient roman schools of rhetoric.[1] If that is the case, we need to put the Art of Memory into a context and remember that it pre-dates Gutenberg and his printing press (let alone any sort digital media).

So, the way I see it, its a little bit like running. We have all this professional and olympic athletes, who we admire and subsidize so they can devote full time to their art, who represent the maximum levels of human physical achievement. Now, to expect those athletes to run longer and faster than a car would be obviously ridiculous, and to expect that the whole society ditch their cars and begin running everywhere is beyond impractical. However, most people would agree that it's a very sad state of human existence to be unable to move oneself without motorized assistance for a few hundred, or even a few dozen, meters.

With memory, it is the same thing. These memory athletes may do amazing things but it'd be foolish to expect them to store and recall as much information as a computer. Still, having a good memory is a very human thing that everybody can do, and we are reaching to a point where cloud computing and hand-held devices are not empowering us to remember and handle even more information, but to be complacent and not to bother with it.

//----- In practice

Now, when we are talking about the particulars of how this things are remembered... There are some points... first, some people here has commented that it is harder to remember all this crazy imagery that then payload data in the first place. As others have pointed out, the crazy imagery works because it is loaded with strong emotions that trigger responses in our brains that simple digits cannot. This is part of the answer, the other part is that imagery is meant to be reused over and over again.

As it is described in [2], you have to pay the cost upfront. You build what is essentially a sort of ideographic alphabet with which to encode new information in the future. I assume you could go the other way around and load our native alphabet and guarisms with a bunch of strong emotions... but it i not how the method evolved historically.

Other important flaw that I find in the original article is that it fails to stress the fact that these new symbols are (or should be) a personal fabrication. It is not like everybody has to cramp their heads with imagery of Ozzie Osbourne chewing off bat heads. If there's a number of competitors doing that, it must be a (very recent) defect in the teaching of the technique. Its like the students are literally blindly copying their teacher's symbol table; instead of developing a personal, and more effective, one of their own.

By example, the author of [2] is a sorts of fan of Tolkien, and his mental imagery is filled up in characters from LOTR. I have very recently started to use this technique, but its very clear that I shouldn't pick the same work of fiction to base my own symbol table. Instead, I am using Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality".

So it is not that we clutter our heads with useless stuff. We ought to "recycle" the stuff that has already found its way in. To continue with the example, may mind has attached emotions to "Theodore Nott, Chaotic Lt." (as depicted by Dinosaurusgede [3], nonetheless) in a way that "Theoden of Rohan" will never reach. So, I use that when trying to pinpoint the phoneme "Th" instead.

//--- Links

[1] Art of Memory I. Introduction and historic development. http://hermetic.com/caduceus/articles/1/1/ars-memorativa.htm...

[2] Art of Memory II. Description of one technique. http://hermetic.com/caduceus/articles/1/2/ars-memorativa.htm...

[3] http://dinosaurusgede.deviantart.com/art/Potter-s-Chaos-Legi...