Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0392: How many substations per memory palace room?

Episode Date: September 8, 2015

Brian asks about organizing memory palaces with discount beds within a room. For example, should a bedroom have just as many substations as a hall? I describe two separate approaches for two separate intended results. 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 […]

Master of Memory 392. 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, Hi Timothy, do you recommend making a standard set number of memory substations within each station of your memory palaces? For example, five substations per room, no more, no less. Or do you encouraging tailoring the number of substations to the room?

For example, eight for a bedroom, three for a hallway, etc. My concern is that if the number of substations varies from room to room, I have an increased chance of forgetting or missing one or two, whereas if I know there are five substations in every room, I'll know when I've recalled them all. Brian, I don't have a single Boolean answer for this, but I can say that for what you seem to be doing, the answer is probably yes. So it seems like you're going through your palaces looking at things that you've stored there. This is very common. I'm not saying that this is the wrong thing to do. This is one great memory palace technique is you're storing lots of things in

your palace and you're going through and you want to make sure that you know every single thing that you've stored. I guess there's a sequence, maybe there's not, but the thing is there are very many different types of memory palaces. So for example, for scripture memory and similar chapter divided projects, I would not have a set number. Instead, I would put the number of substations that need to be in each one based not on the room itself, but based on how many items there are in that particular category. So the first chapter of a book of Scripture has 20 verses, and then the second chapter has 4 verses, and then the third chapter has 80 verses,

which never happens, by the way. You know, you would have different number of substations for different rooms, and that's based on something very specific. Now, the thing is, in those cases, you do want to make it very clear how you proceed through the room, and you want to use, for example, what we're doing with the new courses that we're creating, a course for memorizing Philippians, a course for memorizing the Book of Ruth, a course for memorizing the Book of Romans, and a course for memorizing John, hopefully, as well. What I would recommend doing is actually having a different object at each of the substations, and that object is our object mnemonic for a particular number. So

since the verses are numbered from, let's say, in that first room, 1 to 20, we have 20 different objects that are placed throughout that room, and they are doing things that represent what the verse means. But those objects are there, and they show the sequence, and so it's pretty easy to follow them. If you ever get hung up, wait, does this one go straight to that one? Oh no, it can't, because tuna would skip to tire, but tuna has to have dime between it and tire. So, oh yeah, the dime, it's on the other bedpost. So you see, that helps to keep the sequence in order and make sure that you don't miss anything. That's one idea, at least for scripture memory,

which is what we're doing in cases like this, where you have a sequence of things that are actually tied to specific numbers. But this does bring up a good point about being able to be very sure about when you're going from one thing to the next. So in the case that I talked about, you don't just want to do it that way because then you'd have to be thinking for every single verse, what's the next number? And you definitely don't want to do that. Of course, obviously, if you're reciting something, eventually it becomes smooth enough that you

don't have to do that. But you also want to make sure that the actions themselves lead from one thing to the next, especially using my own case as an example, that the 20 in the first room leads very logically to the second room because you could follow the entire sequence, but then only go up to 19 and then skip to the next one. You could accidentally forget that 20th or think that there might be a 21st. So you want to make sure that the actions are leading to each other, especially between rooms. So you always know that one closes and the next one opens. So that's just an example of how you might do this to make sure that even if you don't have a standard number

or a set number of stations per room, you can still follow the sequence and make sure that you don't have a standard number or a set number of stations per room, you can still follow the sequence and make sure that you don't miss anything. Another example of this would be nonlinear memory palaces like we use in the Spanish course at Spanishin1month.com, where we just have spread things throughout the palace and the bigger images represent the most important words in those scenes, and then the less important words get smaller and smaller. So that's another idea where it doesn't really matter how many things you've put in that room, because the biggest ones are the ones you're easily going to find, and the smaller ones are still accessible, but they're not as important.

Thanks for the great question, Brian, and I'd really appreciate an iTunes review from you. For everyone listening, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Thanks for the great question, Brian, and I'd really appreciate an iTunes review from you. 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.