Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0326: Memorize herbs and herbal formulas

Episode Date: June 8, 2015

Tasha asks about memorizing herbs and herbal formulas. I talk about the importance of exclusivity: finding the most essential information to memorize first. 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 326. 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. Tasha submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question about memorizing herbs and herbal formulas. So what I'm going to answer is going to apply to a lot of recipe type situations where what happens is you have a multitude of ingredients and they're combined and used in a multitude of different ways. So in general with accelerated learning the two principles

that we talk about are exclusivity which is finding the fewest things that get the biggest results, and then mnemonics, which is encoding those things in your brain as quickly as possible. So with the herbal formulas that we're talking about, there are a lot of different herbs, and then multiply those, and you have way too many different combinations of those, too many formulas to try to memorize all at once. It's very overwhelming. But if you simplify those by finding the most important and then starting to encode them in a systematic way,

it becomes a project that's very manageable. So the first thing that I would do, Tasha, is figure out which 10 to 20 herbs are used much more than others in these formulas that you're looking at. So whatever resource you're looking at, I just went and looked at an online resource to figure out just generally what you were talking about, but take whatever resource you're using for your herbal formulas and create some standard images to use for these 10 to 20 herbs. So once you determine what are the most important, let's say 15 herbs, then take each of those 15 herbs and for each one choose an image or something very memorable that is attached to each one. And the goal here is that

whenever you think of that image, you think of that herb. And whenever you think of that herb, you think of that image. That's a more valuable tool than it sounds like because what happens is now your herbs are very portable. You can use them in many different ways. You can just store them easily because they're very memorable. You can place them in different locations in your mind. And anytime you think of an image, it comes up with an herb. And anytime you think of an herb, it comes up with an image. So now they're all distinctly memorable.

So once you have that for those 10 to 20 herbs, the second thing is to categorize your formulas in some way. And you're going to have to make a judgment call on this. So take those formulas that you're learning and figure out a way that you can categorize them. One way you might be able to categorize them is by the type of thing that the formula is intended to treat.

Like let's say that there are herbal formulas that are intended to treat things related to the mind or, you know, related to pain in the head or something like that. You would place all of those in one place, and then all of the herbal formulas that are used to treat something related to skin are placed in another place. So you're organizing them in some sort of logical way that makes sense to you, that actually means something. So that's, again, the second step after attaching each of the herbs themselves to images. And what you can do is you can take these formulas and you can start to combine these images together to represent these things that they're doing. So let's say you have a bunch of different herbal formulas that relate to skin conditions. What you can do is

you can take all of those formulas, and there will be a specific number of them, and imagine that they're all in a specific area, a geographical area. Maybe that's a room in your house or something like that. Place them around that room and combine the different herbs that combine to make those formulas in that room. So now we're getting into the third element of this process, which is to start to organize the formulas that you're trying to memorize into a large organized palace. So maybe that's the house that you live in. That's the easiest example to come up with if you've never done a memory palace before. The house that you live in is something that you know very well because you can navigate it. You can always get around and find what you need and

we're spatial creatures. We have to get around. So use that to your own advantage. That's how your mind works. Now place those formulas around that house with, let's say, everything that relates to the skin conditions in the bedroom. And everything that relates to brain conditions in the kitchen. And so on. So as long as you know where to find those formulas,

you can always go to that place and find them. Now, those combinations in those places are going to be visually represented by the very visual images that you've created for those herbs, those most common 10 to 30 herbs for those formulas. So the intended result here is that you've taken those most common 10 to 30 herbs, you've placed them in places in your mind, but in a memory palace,

so places that you can walk around as if it's your house in your imagination, and you can always find the formulas you need by walking around this place in your mind, and everything's organized geographically. So a big part of this is going to be starting with the most used formulas, the formulas you're going to need the most. But work for results, follow those three steps, and I think you're going to see results very quickly. Now, listeners have asked about how they can support

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