Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0344: Hippocampus literature: Deeply learning the authors and the themes

Episode Date: July 2, 2015

Jalina is reading lots of books around the subject of the microcircuitry of the hippocampus. How can she organize a memory palace in order to memorize which authors use which methods while reading these books? 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 […]

Master of Memory 344. 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. Jelena submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Jelena says, I'm in graduate school. I need to read a ton of literature about a very specific topic, microcircuitry of the hippocampus.

I have to read many studies with fairly repetitive methods and very different results by different authors. I think it would be beneficial to have the author method result information in my head at all times and want to construct a memory palace for it, but I'm a little unsure where to begin. The strategy I'm thinking of using is having a room in the palace for each region of the hippocampus and the projections from it, creating a character for each method, like you would for a PAO system, and one for the author. Do you think this is a good strategy, or would you suggest

something else? So, Jelena, first of all, I would say that this is a very good application for mnemonic and accelerated learning tactics because keeping thoughts straight and being able to remember things is really important. And it's because you can really get overwhelmed in a lot of information when it's all thrown at you at once. So just having a little bit of clarity and having a few things to rely on is very key. I think particularly of when I was reading, this is completely unrelated, but when I was reading the Brothers Karamazov by, you know, Dostoevsky, I would get the names mixed up and things like that, except that I decided to memorize all of the characters' names as they came up.

So I would create a mnemonic for each character and I remembered all of their names. And that way, whenever a character came back, even if the name was changed, I always quickly had a context to place that character in and I always knew what person it was talking about and could relate them to something else. So while it may at first seem like it'd be overkill to try to do all this memory work when you're reading all this literature, it does pay off or it can pay off at any rate if you choose the right technique and make sure that the trigger is actually working. So when you're reading the hippocampus literature, what is it that's going to trigger this thing that you have to remember? Let's say you're reading and you happen to come

across a method and result. Well, you should quickly be able to relate that to the author, or at the very least, I'm assuming that that's what you want to be able to do. There are other things that you may want to relate to other things, but you want to know what the trigger is and what the result is. And just an example that more people can relate to, if we're talking about names and faces, you want to be able to remember someone's name from looking at the face, not just remember their face from looking at the name. The former is probably more important, and that's something that's very important to have in mind when you're talking about memory tactics.

You can place all of your imagery in a memory palace, but you need to think about the triggers, and you need to think about, am I actually going to remember B from A, not just A from B, and get your priorities right as far as that goes. Now, all of that said, just from the very beginning, I think that the process that you're describing can work as long as you keep these principles in mind. And since you're talking about having a different room for each region of the hippocampus, the thing that I'm noticing here is when you were asking your question, you were talking more about authors and methods and results. You weren't talking about the regions of the hippocampus. So I would just ask you whether that's that important, if that's really the best way to sort things, because the organization of

a memory palace, what's in each room, what's in each scene in the memory palace is one of the strongest things that you have. So is the region of the hippocampus actually that important? I don't know. I don't study hippocampus literature right now. So the answer may be yes, but I would just ask that question as well. So, Jelena, I know that I'm only giving you really questions instead of an answer to your question. I wish I could just say, do this and go on. But the mnemonic system itself is going to be dependent on exactly what results you want. And so I would start with that and determining what the triggers

are and then organize accordingly. But I would actually start with exclusivity. Once you kind of have an idea of how you want to organize your mnemonics, choose the things that you're seeing the most. Maybe the author that you're seeing the most or the themes or the methods that you're seeing the most. Whatever it is, and something may be coming to mind right now. You may be hearing something that perhaps there's one author that always is referenced by all the other authors. And so that's the one you want to start with. But start with that one thing, learn that really well, and experiment with your techniques using that one author. Then if you can validate the way that

you're using your mnemonics, expand from there to all the others. Now, like hundreds of other listeners, you may be wondering how you can support Master of Memory and keep it free for the world, particularly if you don't have a lot of time or any money to spend. So right now, I'm going to tell you that believe it or not, right now at this moment, the number one way that you can support the show

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