Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0347: Non-linear memory palaces

Episode Date: July 7, 2015

Brendan asks challenges my use of non-linear memory palaces. Memory palaces normally have specific start and end points, with a clear journey involving each station in sequence. What are the benefits and drawbacks of using a non-sequential memory palace? What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, […]

Master of Memory 347. 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. Brendan submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Brendan says, can you talk more about how non-linear memory palaces work? I've built a linear path memory palace that I can use to memorize a deck of cards using a celebrity card map, mapping a card to a celebrity. But I don't see how non-linear palaces would work to store information. With linear palaces, there's such a clear trigger and order that you know what feature or location in

your palace you're using to trigger a mnemonic. I don't understand how this would work in a freeform non-linear memory palace. Would you just visualize a room and just start looking around in your mind's eye to see what features are in a room, and then hope that one of them triggers your stored mnemonic? This seems error-prone prone and it seems like you would easily miss things. Please elaborate on how this works. Thanks for the really good question, Brendan. So the thing is, these aren't exactly free form palaces. They're non-linear, meaning that they're not a single journey from beginning to end. So if you want to pull something out of the middle, you don't have to go through the whole journey to do it reliably. The reason that we use non-linear palaces is because we can organize information in more of a tree branch kind of way

rather than a linear beginning to end kind of way. So it all starts by organizing your information in a very definable and intentional way. You're organizing it in a way that actually means something. So you have designated areas for designated things. We do this with the Spanish course at masterofmemory.com slash Spanish so that you can simply go to a particular room or a particular scene in the country and see what things are stored there. Now the thing about this is practical purposes, you don't really miss anything because you actually can go through it linearly. I'll use the country scene in the Spanish course as an example. We have several scenes in the country that represent different persons. There are about five scenes that represent personal pronouns.

So we have the subject scene, we have the three object scenes, and then we have the prepositional pronoun scene. But the thing about these scenes is that in each one, there are five different types of characters. Well, there are actually more than that, but you can, for the purposes of this episode, I'll talk about the five types of characters. You have the second person, tu. You have the first person, yo. You have a third person masculine, el You have the first person, yo. You have a third person masculine, él. A third person feminine, ella. And then the first person plural, nosotros.

Now, those are all clearly in different places in the scene, although the yo is included in the nosotros, which I'm using as an example. There are others like ustedes and ellos, but those will apply the same way. So in any of these scenes, you can clearly see where any of these words is located. Ella is on the left, él is on the right, tú is right in front of Joel, Joel himself is in the middle, yo, and then Joel with the pandas represents nosotros. In the second scene, this is all the same, except that the words are different, so it's a different scene. You have la on the left, lo on the right, te in front of Joel, me for Joel himself, and nos for nosotros as an object.

Those are five different things in five specific locations in this second country scene. So we have two different country scenes and each one has these five objects and so you can just go to the appropriate scene first and then pick the appropriate object. If we were using a linear palace then we would have to go through every single one of those characters before getting to the one that we want but since we're using more of an organized top-down rather than organized from beginning to end sort of palace, we just first choose the right scene, we need an object, and then choose the right person, we need the first person plural, nos. But if we want to review

everything, the beauty is that we simply can move from scene to scene and look at absolutely everything in that scene without missing anything because we can see how everything's laid out. That's how these non-linear memory palaces work. You're very proactive in the way that you organize them so that you're sorting things sort of the way that you would sort a mind map or the table of contents in a book or anything like that. You're organizing it in a top-down way, broad to specific way, but still at the same time, all of the rooms have particular stations that you could go through linearly if you wanted to do so, but you don't have to do so. I hope that makes sense, Brendan,

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