Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0402: Can I memorize the Bible in just two years?

Episode Date: September 22, 2015

David wants to take on the extreme challenge of memorizing the whole Bible, in just two years. What plan should he try to follow for memorizing the New Testament one year and the Old Testament the next year? What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed […]

Master of Memory 402. 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. David wrote in an email, I have a dream that I would like to memorize the entire New Testament in a year and the Old Testament the following year. How would I go about it?

So David, forget every accelerated learning tactic in the world. There's no question that this would be really tough. And you would make history because it hasn't been done before. But I would definitely be interested in collaborating with you on this and making it happen if you're actually serious about it. Now, what I would do is I would proceed according to this system that I'm going to lay out. It'll get you results very quickly. And the beauty of it is that even if you don't completely finish

or end up having to stop at some point, you'll still know the whole Bible. And so even if you'd stop, this is designed so that even if you stop after about 10% of the process, you still know the whole Bible very well and the way that it's laid out. So first of all, learn all the sections or topics of each chapter. Do that first before anything else. You're going to use a memorable character in a building for each book.

So we have 66 unique characters in 66 unique buildings or outdoor locations for the 66 different books. So that's your first step before anything else. Then you're going to have a different room in each of those places or a different area for each chapter. For example, if you use Central Park, New York for one of your books of the Bible, you're going to use a different major area of Central Park for each chapter. Find a way to remember the topics of the chapters tied to each room or to each outdoor area. On average, there are probably about three topics or stories for each chapter. Although, for example, some of Luke's chapters have as many as 15 different stories within a single chapter because they're absurdly long.

But you just want to try to lay that whole thing out for yourself. And if you do that, you tie the stories of these things to these different areas, and bingo, you know the layout of the whole Bible. Now that you have the topics memorized, the second step is to memorize one key verse per section. So we're talking about three key verses per chapter on average. You're going to use an object peg to remember the verse reference, and these object pegs are going to be based on the major system for remembering numbers. So for example, 14 would be a tire. It could be 1-4 for a tire. So if you're memorizing Philippians 3-14, you're going to use

a tire to represent the proceeding toward the goal, racing toward the goal, using a tire, maybe jumping through a tire. Do that for all of those verses. There are going to be a lot of them, but see how many of them you can do before you burn out. At that point, you not only know the whole layout of the entire Bible, but you know a lot about every single book and every single topic basically covered by the whole Bible. Third step is now that you have all the key verses memorized, start to memorize the verses in between going sequentially through each area in each memory palace. You're going to use more object pegs for different verses. So before the tire you have your memorable

character for Philippians doing something with a dime and right after the tire you're going to have them doing something with a doll. At this point I would select maybe one section or one chapter at a time, and also be listening to recordings of them, you know, basically constantly while you're doing this memory project. So alternate between quizzing on the keywords of these sections and listening to the entire thing and trying to recite along based on your imagery. This will be the long and tedious part. Everything else has been fairly quick, relatively speaking. And so, again, even if you burn out 20% of the way through this project,

we've used the exclusivity principle to learn the 20% that give you the 80% of results of being able to say that you know the whole Bible really well just from that first amount of work. So, best wishes for you, David, on this. And again, I'd love to collaborate with you and work on your imagery for all of these different palaces because this is definitely something that I'd like to do as well as far as memorizing the whole Bible is concerned, although I don't find it something that I expect to do in two years. For everyone listening, what do you want to learn or memorize? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question,

and I'll talk to you again soon.