Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0386: How to prepare for the Navy exam using accelerated learning techniques

Episode Date: August 31, 2015

Eamon asks about how to apply accelerated learning techniques to the Navy exam. I give my suggestions for constructing an efficient memory palace for this project. 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 386 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. Iman submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Iman says, I'm taking a Navy exam in September, and I have about 2,000 questions. Now, I know that I need to condense them down because they'll not all be on the test, but I'm thinking I could probably get away with learning 300 or so of the questions. The test will be in a multiple choice format, but the study book that I have is in Q&A format, i.e. Q, what form is used for so-and-so, answer blank. Any help at this point

would be phenomenal because I'm known for my terrible memory and would love to use this method with all kinds of stuff, but would like to start with this exam to test the waters. Thanks for your help. So yeah, Iman, there are advantages and disadvantages to starting with something that's so high pressure, but apparently this will be good for you because it'll just get you results really fast. So I like this question because Iman has clearly started to take action. He's already applied exclusivity because he's reduced his 2,000 questions down to 300. And it seems to me that I seem to start a whole lot of episodes with the exclusivity principle. But he's, you know, been proactive and actually started with that.

So I can say something maybe a little deeper and more meaningful. I can think a little bit more before I start the episode. This is worlds different from the many, many questions that I get where people just simply say, how do I pass my college biology exams? Where people clearly haven't put any effort into figuring out the issue themselves. So Iman, kudos for a good question. Now at this point, I would suggest that you start thinking about how you're going to have to access your information in your mind.

So in order to store it properly, you want to know how you're going to get it back out. Just like when you put clothes in your closet, you want to think about the way that you're thinking when you go and get those clothes, not just the way you're thinking when you put them in. So how are the question prompts organized? You mentioned what form is used for so-and-so in the example that you gave me, so maybe you know that you'll want to devote an entire memory palace to forms. That way you can quickly go to those forms whenever you see a question that asks you about what form to use in a particular situation. Within that palace about forms, you want to take the name of each form, or the stressed syllable of the name of each form, and turn that into a very visual object.

Make that object do something related to what the form is about. It should be doing some sort of action that's related to what the form relates to, and then you can have it interact with some sort of object in the location in your memory palace where you're storing it. So this is what I would suggest, Iman. Go ahead and fill up that palace with all the forms before moving on to other categories of questions. And then follow up with me by email, timothy at masterofmemory.com, and let me know how that went for you, because I'd love to continue helping you with this project. 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.