Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0382: Why use memory palaces instead of the link method?

Episode Date: August 25, 2015

Kyle asks about using memory palaces rather than the link method. Why use a palace when items can simply be vividly linked to one another? 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 382. 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. Kyle submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Kyle says, I'm trying to understand the value of a memory palace. Can't things just be vividly linked to one another? So Kyle, sure they can.

So let's say you have a grocery list. You have two ways you could memorize that list. You could place them throughout a memory palace, as I've described before in memorizing a grocery list, or you could just link one thing to the next. Let's say lettuce and light bulbs. You could have the lettuce crash into the light bulbs, have the light bulbs shatter over the next thing, which is a can of beans, and so on. But the thing is,

that's useful in very few situations. So what you're describing is linking one thing to the next, and that's very dependent on the sequence. Whereas perhaps what you're learning is something that you want to be able to categorize and be able to move around out of sequence. For example, let's say you're going to the grocery store and all the canned foods that you are remembering are in one room in a memory palace and then all of a certain other kind of foods are in another room in your memory palace when you've memorized your grocery list. Let's say you don't know where the canned foods are going to be at the grocery store.

Why should you depend on the sequence that you've created? You might end up crossing the grocery store five times to find everything you need because you get the lettuce on one end, then you run over to the other end of the store to get the light bulbs, then you go and backtrack to get the canned foods, and then you go to the opposite end again

to get the dairy and the eggs. That would be very inconvenient. I would say it's better to have a palace because you don't have to do things in sequence. Instead, you can just do things one room at a time and get everything of a particular category. So the bottom line is that the link method is used specifically for when you know you're going to link one thing to the next, and you're only going to use those things in that exact sequence. But even in those cases, as I've explained in more detail in other episodes, spatial memory is just about the strongest memory that we have, because we all have to be

able to get around, and so we know spaces really well. Even a single room with just one piece of furniture can store an enormous amount of information by putting things around that room, on top of and underneath that piece of furniture, and so on. So when is it helpful to know information in a non-linear way? We have the grocery list, but you could argue, well, you could just do the list in order. But there are other situations where linear doesn't really make sense at all. Anytime you want to organize information in a top-down way, in a general-to-specific way, rather than in sequence, you're talking about organization that is not linear.

And a great example of this is language learning. Learning in a sequence is actually, it's just simply silly. You don't need to learn the words in the dictionary from A to Z, because then you'll start out learning all the words that start with A, and you'll end up with everything that starts with Z, and that just doesn't really make sense. You could also instead try to learn the words in an order that has to do with the parts of speech, so you'd learn all the pronouns first, the conjunctions second, the prepositions after that, but again, you'd only know them in that specific sequence,

one linked to the next one. And that wouldn't really make sense because you couldn't speak with those words. You'd just be able to rattle them off. And so that's just not very handy. Instead, if you learn these words in categories where you can just access any of a bunch of them in a memory palace, as we've described at Spanishin1month.com in our free Spanish course. You can just organize an entire language into a memory palace

that you can go around and find different words of different categories and easily structure them into sentences. So I hope that answers your question, Kyle. The link method may be useful in the short term for remembering how to link one thing to the next, but if you want to learn things long term and if you want to apply this to a much more enormous variety of types of information, you should really go with memory palaces and with spatial-based

memorization. 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.