Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0352: How to prepare memorization systems before classes

Episode Date: July 14, 2015

Rosemary is preparing to go into nursing school and wants to be ready for the intense memorization she’ll have to do. How can she prepare her memorization systems for the challenge ahead of time? 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 352. 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. Rosemary submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Rosemary says, I'm preparing to go into nursing school next year, and I would like to set up a memory system ahead of time.

I imagine that pharmacology and pathophysiology will be the most difficult for me. They're packed with information that overlap. It would also require working off knowledge of microbiology and anatomy and physiology, which I'm taking in the fall. It's overwhelming, and I don't know where to start. So, Rosemary, I've done previous episodes on how to take a subject and try to boil it down to a simple framework that then you can turn into a memory palace that you can fill with all the information. But since you're at a point where you're not really starting a particular subject and you're just overwhelmed by the volume of books and terms and everything that are across all of these subjects, you may not really know the best way to organize the information at this point and it might

not be as productive as it will be later on in the process. So what I would actually recommend that you do first is to take any textbooks or anything on these subjects that you have and go to the back to the indexes and look up the most used terms across all of these subjects. So maybe the back of a particular pharmacology book, for example. Look in that index and find the words that you don't know in the index that have the most references throughout the book. So maybe there are hundreds and hundreds of terms that you haven't learned yet, but there are a few particular terms that it looks like are being referenced on dozens of different pages throughout the book.

Make a list of the top 10 or 20 most used words in each book, and then take all of those lists, find the words that overlap, and memorize what those words mean first. Try really to understand those words. At that point, even if you're not exactly sure what they are or how they fit in, you have some knowledge that will apply to all the fields, and then pretty soon, having memorized all the words that you've listed, you'll know the most used terms that you previously didn't know from all of these subjects.

Then later when you dive into the subjects themselves as you start to take them, you can start to organize your palaces and things like that, as mentioned in previous episodes, but you can do it from a more informed perspective, knowing perhaps a little more clearly what everything means and where everything belongs in your framework because of these terms that you started out knowing ahead of time. I hope that helps you, Rosemary, and I'd be happy to collaborate with you on some of these subjects if you just shoot me an email at timothyatmasterofmemory.com.

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. 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 doesn't require any money of you, is very easy, and will only take a few seconds, and it requires nothing but your smartphone in your hand right now. So listen, if you've enjoyed listening to this show and you have a smartphone right now with an internet connection, there's no excuse for you not to do this.

Here's how you can give this show immense support without even having to type more than two words in your phone. So guys, this is really easy. You'll be done before this episode even ends. So here's step one. If your phone's between your fingers, in your podcast app, go to the search function to search and type the word accelerated, A-C-C-E-L-E-R-A-T-E-D, and then the word Spanish. So have you done that? So you've searched for accelerated Spanish. Now step two, here's the surprise.

Click on the new show, not the old one that has a big, ugly red word across the artwork, but the fresh new one. And then step three, just hit the subscribe button and you're done. That's it. By subscribing to the all new freshly released Spanish podcast, you're helping support Master of Memory in more enormous ways than you might imagine. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.