Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0400: How to memorize legal cases

Episode Date: September 18, 2015

Rea wants to memorize legal cases, including facts, issues and resolution. A legal case is a type of dispute between two different parties opposing arguments at the end to be resolved by a court with the full process of the legal system. Each legal case has an accuser and a defendant, and it can involved […]

Master of Memory 400. 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. Ria asked a question in an email about memorizing legal cases. Ria is studying law and wants to know if there's a mnemonic technique that she can use to memorize the facts, issues, and resolution of legal cases quickly and systematically. Rio, this is a learning project that I haven't spent time on myself, but I do have some suggestions. And the most basic one

is to create some sort of system to have an image for each case. You want to have a very simple image system so that when you look at this image, this imaginary thing happening in your imagination, you'll know exactly what the case was, what happened, what the resolution was, and so on. And in order for that to be the case, you really need a system. A system means that you know how to interpret that image pretty quickly, and you don't have to think, well, how did I create that mnemonic? Why did I create the mnemonic that way? But you actually have a reason that it's there and you know how to interpret it. So I do have some ideas both for the imagery and for the organization of this palace, but it'll depend on your personal priorities. So take all of this with an open mind and with the idea of using it in different ways. So for the imagery itself, I would suggest

turning the names of the cases into images using the stressed syllable of the cases. And if you're a regular Master of Memory listener, that'll already be a familiar concept to you. Turning the abstract idea of the names of these cases into something physical, some sort of physical object that you can imagine that has texture and shape, and that's much more easy to remember than some abstract name. So you can find out about this in many other episodes in Master of Memory. So now that you've turned the name of the case into a physical object that's easy to remember, what you want to do then is combine that with an image for the year based on the number peg.

So you should have number pegs for all the numbers from 0 to 99, and then it'll be easy to tie the year of the case to this other physical object that you have, have them interacting in some way so that when you think of the case you'll quickly remember the object that it's interacting with and you'll remember the year as well. Then, given that you have two physical objects, it'll be easy to tie them to a location in a memory palace. So that already in a sense is fairly systematic because you know that you'll have a physical object that represents the name of the case and you know that you have a physical object that represents the year. You can easily find the year by interpreting that image. But what about the aspects of resolution and the issues that are present in the case? That's a little bit more

difficult for me to say personally because I haven't had much experience looking into legal cases, but you might do it through the organization of the palace. So remember that putting things in different places differentiates them most distinctly. Knowing where something is quickly tells you a lot of information about it if you've organized your palace correctly. And so one idea for you is maybe to have a different palace for different resolutions of the cases, if those can be categorized. Then within those palaces, you might use different rooms for different issues that were present in those cases. So anytime someone brings up a case, you can think of the object, you'll quickly remember the year that it was, and then based on the room in the palace, you can remember the resolution of the case, and you can remember which issues were presented in the palace. So you can see that you can store a lot of information just by remembering weird things in weird places. It's storing information in a way that your brain likes to remember them

instead of just being dry, boring legal stuff. So those are just my thoughts, Ria, and the implementation is everything. You know, just me spilling out ideas on something I don't really know too much about except for the mnemonics themselves is not really worth anything unless you put it into action. So I'd love to get a follow-up message from you on this and see how you've put it into place. 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. © transcript Emily Beynon