Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0393: Spontaneous memory palaces in important situations

Episode Date: September 9, 2015

Owain is a music therapist and has to be able to remember details about a therapy session afterwards, without being able to take many notes during the session. I describe a method for improvising memory palaces on the spot. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, […]

Master of Memory 393. 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. Owain submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Owain says, I've been enjoying your podcast and applying it to various areas of my life, but in one key professional area, I have problems. I work as a music therapist with children with autism and adults with mental health problems amongst other clinical areas. The sessions are

fairly spontaneous with a lot of improvised music from me and the clients, and it's real in-the-moment stuff, very absorbing and occasionally quite amazing. When the sessions are over, sometimes an hour or two later, I write clinical notes for perhaps four people in which I say what instruments are played and by whom, what had a positive effect, what moods the client went through with evidence from body language or speech, and any other detail worth mentioning. I usually only have a vague impression of what went on and that it was a good or bad session. How can I hang on to more detail during this time frame? Thanks for any guidance. So, Owain, what I would suggest is creating spontaneous memory palaces in this sort of situation,

an important situation where you can't really take notes, but you actually can take mental notes. And the best real estate for taking those notes is not a notepad, but actually your mental impression of an environment. And anyone listening can actually apply this in lots of situations where suddenly you have to memorize something and you can't really take notes, but you can find, let's say, the environment that you're in. You can just look around the room and you can store images along the walls or on the pieces of furniture.

And this is definitely not my own invention. Lots of people have used this. In fact, Tim Ferriss talks about the idea of, let's say, sometimes he used to do this party trick where someone would give him a dollar bill, and he would memorize the serial number of the dollar bill just using the environment that he's currently in. And then a while later, somebody could ask him, even if he wasn't even trying to remember it, someone could ask him, hey, remember when I gave you that dollar bill? Do you remember

what the serial number was? And all he has to do is remember where he was when they gave him that dollar bill, and he can see all the images around him from that incident. So that's something that's actually really good for practicing in real-life situations, whether they're urgent or not, but obviously it's very handy in urgent situations. And I think that one concern here is just that you may be using the same place over and over again in your sessions. So what I would recommend is do use the room that you're in as your palace, because you'll be thinking, you'll be able actually to look at it with your eyes. You'll be able to look at the

things that you're turning into a palace, but maybe rotate between five sub-palaces within the room. So one could use various sequential parts of a ceiling feature, one could travel along a particular wall, one could bounce off of various furniture items, and so on. So you could have four or five different palaces that you just have that are standard, you'll use them over and over again in that room, but each day you know whether you're using the one on the ceiling, whether you're using the one along the wall, and so on. So you don't get it confused with the previous days. You always know that today, it's whatever I most recently put along that wall over there.

Now, what do you store in that palace? It's whatever you don't normally remember very easily. So it sounds like you're normally remembering if a session was pretty good or pretty bad, but your memory is fairly vague as far as what instruments were played by whom, what exactly had a positive effect, what the sequence of moods was, and things like that. So at first you'll want to experiment just creating general images for these things in your palaces and seeing how well you can remember based on that. And then later you may come up with standard images for, let's say, different moods or things like that. But I think that even from the very beginning, just creating temporary small palaces like this will help you quite a bit if you have

enough stations and if you make your imagery vivid enough, even if it's not standard, just so that you have some way of remembering in sequence what went on during the event, during the session, and then you can transfer that into your notes later out of that temporary palace. I hope you're able to implement this in some way, Owain, and I'd love to hear from you later on how it goes. Just write me a message at timothyatmasterofmemory.com. 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. Thank you.