Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0390: Planning Meshack’s college semester

Episode Date: September 4, 2015

… 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 390. 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. Meshack submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Meshack says, Hi Tim, I'm a freshly minted sophomore starting out my junior year in college. Since my discovery of ancient memorizing techniques, Meshack says, this into a wondrous opportunity that can help me attain way more in life than just a piece of paper. So my question to you is, what is the most efficient plan that I can implement for my academic courses so that I can be able to internalize and memorize a large quantity

of information effectively and be unbelievably productive on homework assignments, quizzes, tests, and final exams? Meshack then goes on to list the types of classes that he's taking and says, P.S. Your podcasts and websites are an immense help and I couldn't be any more grateful for your work. Well, Meshack, I think that your attitude toward taking this thing that you despise, academia, and turning it into an opportunity is the right way to approach this. So I think that just going beyond accelerated learning, anything in life that we're given, we're given two ways to respond to it. Either we can make it worse by being upset about it, or we can turn it into an opportunity. And so yes, it's an opportunity that

can help you attain more than just a simple piece of paper. You're exercising the skill of learning, and hey, you may be able to pick up some stuff from these classes that will be helpful in life. This knowledge may be helpful to you later. Now, looking at the classes that you're taking, economics of money, credit, banking, and monetary theory, environmental economics, introductory biology, calculus, what I'd like to do is I'd like to give you a five-week plan where we can just basically talk about how to start out the rest of your semester. I realize that it's probably already started by now, but just starting this next week, what you can do is you can take this five-week plan, see how it goes, and then keep going based on how that goes. So, for example, when I was in college,

I had one semester of music history where it was my last of three semesters, and before it started, I actually front-loaded the work by doing what I could before the semester started. I read through all the materials that I thought that we would need in the class, and I memorized a bunch of terms that I hadn't known before the class started, and also learned who a bunch of people are, things like

that. And my class was pretty easy based on that. And although the professor did depart from the book significantly, I was able to build on the knowledge that I already had, and I'm glad that I learned that stuff beforehand, because there's stuff in there that I still know and is good for someone like me who keeps music and music history as a long-term interest. So that's exactly what I'm going to recommend that you do. Try to learn everything you can for your courses as soon as possible, and then you can relax during the rest of your semester, just basically focusing on, well, for one thing, everything that you specifically need for your tests themselves instead of actually trying to learn the information, just preparing for the tests.

Those are not necessarily the same thing. And then also just living a meaningful life. So, you know, you don't want to lose your life over the course of the semester by having to play catch up all the time. But instead, you want to be able to relax and to do things that are interesting to you outside of just academia. So let's just look at these five weeks that I've laid out so basically the idea is you do these five weeks and then the rest of your semester will be fairly easy although you'll have to tweak things as

you go along as I did and so let's see so starting next week I would spend the week taking the syllabus of each class, determining how the class is laid out, how the whole course is laid out from an idea categorization standpoint. So we're not talking about just the schedule of the class, although that may be relevant, but what you can expect to see on your quizzes and tests and how those general ideas of information are organized. And what I would do during the week is decide on a separate memory palace for each one. Just pick one. And you want to organize each of these memory palaces accordingly. You're not actually going to place facts into these palaces. That's for later. For this first week, what you want to do is just decide on some memory palaces. Maybe it's your school library for your economics class, and maybe it's your home for your biology class.

I don't know. But just decide on these palaces, and then think about how these buildings are laid out that you're going to use as palaces, and what information you might assign to each of these rooms based on how you've determined the class is organized by information. In week two, you're going to use the indexes from your textbooks to determine what terms are most frequently used in each subject

and try to learn the top ten most used terms that you didn't previously know. Or in some cases, they may not be terms, they may be formulas or something like that, but whatever is referred to the most frequently. So you want to pick the top 10 from each of these subjects. Now try to see exactly how those terms are used, particularly in what you're doing that particular week. So you'll probably see these terms coming up quite a bit throughout your classes during that week.

And so you want to learn them and then figure out exactly how they're being used and how they kind of fit into a larger body of knowledge, which ultimately means that they're going to fit into your memory palaces somehow. In week three, I would recommend filling out an entire palace, one of your four palaces, with as much information as you think you'll need during the whole semester. So this is kind of intense, but what you're gonna do is you're gonna go through your textbook, go through your syllabus, go through everything that you've done in the class so far

and try to figure out what all knowledge, what all just basically facts and information you're going to need for the whole semester and then test it out during the week to see if it's working well. So see if you've actually filled it out sufficiently to continue doing well in what you're doing that particular week

and just keep tweaking it throughout the week. But it is a lot of information. It will be a lot of information in that palace. Week five, I would then finally crack down based on how well that the first one went and finish filling all four palaces with everything you think you'll need for the semester in all of your classes.

If you can fill them with what you can reasonably be fairly sure is pretty much all the information that you'll need for all of your classes for the whole semester, then you can spend, after these five weeks, you can spend the rest of the semester just chilling and having a life. You might attend class, obviously. You'll want to attend class to help maintain and strengthen your knowledge and to observe any changes that may need

to be made to your palaces. But other than that, you know, do something that's meaningful and fulfilling to you personally outside of just being in school all the time. So Meshack, I'd love to hear how this plan goes for you. You may tweak it. I'd just love to stay updated on how it goes and whether you're able to do all of that, learn all that stuff in five weeks, and then how the rest of the semester goes for you as well. For anyone 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.