Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0378: Prepare for the MCATs using accelerated learning

Episode Date: August 19, 2015

Brian is about to study for the MCATs. I give my suggestions for creating the best system possible to remember this massive amount of information. 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 378. 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. Brian submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Brian says, I'm about to study for the MCATs. I would like to create the best system possible to remember this massive amount of information. So Brian, I know that the test has undergone some recent changes, and there's a trial section at the end.

So it's going to be perhaps a little bit questionable exactly what information you're going to have to cover for the test. But assuming that you'll need to memorize information for physical sciences, for chemistry, for verbal reasoning, and for biology, and perhaps for psychology, you know, depending on those big areas, I would try to break down the entire test into those big areas and have a memory palace for the physical sciences, a palace for chemistry, a palace for biology, a palace for psychology, and so on, because they're considered separate fields, and the test is kind of organized to look at them in separate ways. So it'll just be helpful to be able to go to a particular palace the same way that the test does. You also want to make sure that you have, obviously, some reliable resources for finding the information that you need. And for the purposes of this episode, I've simply referred to Wikipedia and to freemcatprep.com, which seems to have some stuff that you could at least start with. But what you want to do is you want to take those resources, and once you've decided on your palaces, you want to start storing information, but starting with the right information. So you can see a multitude of other episodes where I've talked about how

to create a schedule and memorize the information and store it in the palace and everything, but I want you to make sure that you start with the most important and most frequently referenced information. Don't pick a textbook and go from the beginning to the end. Instead, look in your study guides index, or if you're using a web resource, just search the page for terms that you don't know and find the ones that are referenced the most throughout the whole thing. Those are the terms and the concepts that you want to get as solid as possible because then you can understand almost everything else because if you get, let's say, the top 20% of the terms down pat, then everything else will kind of fall into place,

because it'll largely be based on those. Take one topic at a time, maybe start with the physical sciences, and then move on to chemistry, but let's say you start with the physical sciences. Take your resources on the physical sciences, find the terms that are referenced the most or that are used the most. Make sure you understand everything related to those terms specifically and ignore all the other information.

And then learn those solidly and store them in your palace. And do that for each of the topics in turn. Don't move on to the small details until you've covered the big details in every single area. And then fill in the rest. Read through your materials, find whatever other facts you may need to know, and fill up your palace with that information as well. But even then, keep revisiting the information that you think is the most important, that you learned first,

and make sure never to lose that, because that's going to pay off the most on the test. Everything else is just sort of a bonus. I know that's a pretty general answer, Brian, but I'd be happy to continue collaborating with you on this project if you just shoot me an email at timothyatmasterofmemory.com. I'll help you through the project, and let's see what we can do. For everyone listening, 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.