Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0322: Memorize the Declaration of Independence

Episode Date: June 2, 2015

Anton asks about memorizing the US Declaration of Independence. I describe the organization and mnemonic planning for this project. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory, episode 322. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Anton submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question asking about how to memorize the United States Declaration of Independence. So, Anton, there are three parts to this in my mind. First of all, you want to get a good recording of the Declaration of Independence

and have it written out so that you can read it and you can listen to it, you can speak along and all of that. That's just the basics. This is how you flesh out the parts that we're going to lay down as far as memorizing points go. You really have to know how to say it in order to have it genuinely memorized. Now, the second part is you want to create a memory palace with imagery that represents each part of the declaration so that you always know every single point in the declaration, and you can always hit those when you're delivering it. And the details about that I'll go into in a little bit. The third part is having a quiz, and I like to use Quizlet.com. There are plenty of other quizzing platforms that you can use, but you just want to

have some sort of way of quizzing yourself with keywords from each of those points so you can make sure you know all of the points from your mnemonics. Putting all of those together and you have it memorized pretty well. And you can do this very quickly. Now, some details into the memory palace. So I would say there are two aspects to the Declaration of Independence. Just looking at it, the nature of the Declaration of Independence is it has a couple of paragraphs at the beginning. And then it has a couple of paragraphs at the beginning, and then it has a list of items,

and then it has some more just kind of long form, you know, paragraphs at the end. So for the long form paragraphs, I would make sure in creating your mnemonics to follow the arguments really closely so that as you're looking through your memory palace, the imagery that you've created for each of the points in it, you're thinking through what the declaration is thinking. So every time there's a new phrase, you may have one image for that to represent that in your linear memory palace, but you want it to reflect the way that the declaration moves along. So whenever there's a turn in phrase or something, you move on to a new image.

It's good to represent that kind of thing with a document like this, where they're making arguments. You really want to represent the things that they're saying so that you can say it in the right way. You can deliver it the way that it's meant to be delivered by capturing the meaning of what it's trying to say. Like you can turn a corner when there's a however and things like that.

You don't necessarily have to do that systematically to help you remember the word however. You'll probably just remember the word however from your recording and just quiz on the keywords. It's just that kind of thing helps to deliver better if you're going through your palace while you're reciting. Now, as far as organization goes, I would suggest having a large memory palace with two large rooms before the list, each one to represent a paragraph before the list, and then you'll have three large rooms afterwards. So each of those represents one room. And then between those, somehow you want to have 18 items. So these 18 items all start with he, but the 13th of those has to be much bigger than the rest

because it has nine items inside it. The nine items that start with the word for. So if you just look at the Declaration of Independence, you can see what I'm talking about here. That's how it's organized. But you want to organize that geographically in your palace. Maybe you can find a palace with two large rooms and then 18 small rooms, except that the 13th one is quite large and has 10 sublocations within it. For example, you could have, I'm just thinking of my own house that I grew up in. I could put most of the, I could put the first two paragraphs in the two rooms at the end of a hall. Then the hall itself, I could place those he and for items along the hall.

And then the other three would be three rooms at the other end of that hall. And that's the whole declaration. Now, as far as quizzing on keywords goes, I'm really leaning more and more toward going as minimal as you can with your keywords. So don't try to put a whole bunch of keywords in your quiz. Instead, try to keep it down to about, you know, maybe one keyword for every eight to 15 words in the text, if possible. You're really learning all the in-between words through auditory memory by listening to this thing, and you're quizzing on the ideas with the keywords.

And I feel like you should be able to boil down the ideas to just a few keywords for each sentence. So to recap, you're going to acquire or create a recording of the Declaration of Independence. You're going to create a large memory palace with imagery that represents each part of the Declaration, according to the details that I talked about in this show. And then you're going to quiz using keywords, not too many keywords, but just enough to make sure that at any point in the whole declaration, you know what the main points are that you're covering so that you never get lost. Now, listeners have asked about how they can support Master of Memory and keep this show free for the world, particularly if you don't have a lot of time or any money to spend.

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