Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0331: How to encode historic dates in your memory palace

Episode Date: June 15, 2015

Gretchen asks about storing historic dates in a memory palace. If you have a mnemonic for the date, how do you actually attach that date to the historic event in your memory palace? 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 331. 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. Today's question is from Gretchen. Hi, Timothy. I'm ready to put some items in my linear memory palace for historic dates and wondered if you could give some advice on how to actually apply the images from the PAO system to dates. So if using a made-up mnemonic that would be year, month, day, like if you had Brad Pitt kicking a milk carton, how would you apply that to various things, say like the moonwalk in 1969 or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or something abstract like 2005, the YouTube launches? I wondered if you would specifically how you can apply those images to the dates.

Thanks so much and thanks for recent episodes with the questions from Florian and Nicholas and others that are very helpful. Thanks for a great question, Gretchen, and thanks so much to you for the great questions that you've left on the show in the past. For anyone else who's listening, it's the listeners that make this show work. So if you want to go ahead and leave your question at masterofmemory.com slash question. I love hearing multiple questions from people who are taking action like Gretchen clearly is. So Gretchen, you have your memory palace, or at least the locations you're going to use as your memory palace, and you have your historical dates where you've turned the numbers into memorable images. So the question is, how do you put these memorable numbers, these numbers that you've turned into memorable images,

into your palace so that you can associate that imagery with the event because the event itself is memorable. You just need to tie it to those dates and place them in that memory palace. So this is what I would do. To populate your palace with imagery that allows you to associate the events themselves with their dates, all you really have to do is stick the date item, like as you said, Brad Pitt kicking a milk carton, into the same room with the event that you have,

which would be the moon landing. So let's assume for the sake of this example that this particular event, according to your timeline, happens to fall in the parlor of some house. All right, so a parlor of a house that you can remember very easily, and if you think of that parlor, you'll think of whatever memory you've placed there. What you're going to place there is the surface of the moon on one of the seats in the parlor for that particular date. Let's say, so when you think of that room, and you think of what you've come to on your timeline, you have the seat of a particular chair in that room and you imagine that that seat

is the surface of the moon. Then what happens there is Brad Pitt is there on the surface of that, of the moon on that chair, and he's dressed up as an astronaut, and he's kicking the milk carton. So there's your person, action, and object. Then, just to make this more memorable and associate it with the moon landing, the milk carton bounces a little bit to indicate the low gravity. So what you're doing is you're tying the two things, the historic event of the moon landing and your mnemonic imagery that represents the date, you're tying those two things, the historic event of the moon landing and your mnemonic imagery that represents the date, you're tying those two things closely together, or at least putting them near each other in some way in the same room so that you remember the date from the event and vice versa. Now,

whenever you think of the moon landing, you're going to remember that date from Brad Pitt kicking the milk carton, and you'll also be able to look around this room in your memory palace to see what other events are happening in history nearby in the same year. Thanks again for the great question, Gretchen, and I'd love to hear any more questions that you or any listeners have. Just go to masterofmemory.com slash question and leave your learning request there. Otherwise, if you're just a passive listener like most of the listeners are, that's fine, but I would ask that you go to iTunes and leave us an honest review.

These reviews have a multiplying effect of how many people iTunes allows to see this show, so if you want the message of accelerated learning and mnemonics to go further, please be honest, leave us a review, and we'll keep this show going and keep it free for everybody. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Tell us what you think of the show, and I'll talk to you again soon.