Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0403: How to remember a vacation in detail

Episode Date: September 23, 2015

Jon asks about remembering occasional expensive vacations. Is there a good technique for remembering vacations reliably in detail? 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 403. 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. John wrote in an email, How do you remember more vividly and in even more detail expensive vacations? For example, precious memories of a semester abroad, where there are lots of memories living in a place. It almost seems absurd to create a palace to remember

these sorts of things because of the amount of time that it would take. So John, what I would really recommend for you is, I mean, you can remember your vacations by thinking through them one location at a time. As you say, you have memories that are living in places. The advantage of having a vacation is you're storing all of those memories in a place that's separate from where you normally are. I have lots of memories in my own life for having traveled around quite a bit, spending lots of time in different cities. And if I want to remember something from a particular time, I can just think of the city that I was in at the time and the memories are all living there separate from where I am at the moment. And so there are great advantages to travel as far as

memory goes. So think through all of these locations one at a time and try to remember the sights, sounds, and details. Go through location each day, remembering all of those memories. If you do something like this every day for a few days after your vacation, and then once a week for a little while after that, in the end, this whole vacation will be solidly in your memory. And this is a vacation that nobody can take away from you. This is something that's, you know, it's an experience. It's, I don't know, I just get really passionate when I talk about travel and about experience and about memory. If you read Moonwalking with Einstein by Josh Foer, he describes the fact that memory is really all that we have. If we don't have our memory, we know nothing about our

own lives. But if you can keep your memory rich, especially of those, you know, those things like the expensive vacation or the semester abroad that you really want to remember and keep with you, you're enriching your life by keeping all of these things alive and with you. Now, for those who don't go to different places on vacations, try to associate fun activities and activities that you find meaningful, like learning and things that you don't find tedious, with locations that are important to you, even if it's in your hometown. Choose places, or even if it's in your own house, choose a place, sort of sanctify a place for the things that you really want to remember, and then always associate things with that location. We're not just talking memory palaces for memorization. We're talking life palaces for keeping memories alive. Anyone who spent the first few years of their life in one place and then moved from there, like I did't remember things. I have memories that are tied to that place and that can't be taken away from me

because that place is dedicated to that in my memory. Sure, this is a great testament to the value of memory palaces and of location-based memory, but it's also just a testament to the value of moving around, and you don't have to go far away to move around either. Find new places in your hometown. Make new memories by associating them with new locations. Thanks for the great question, John. And for anyone listening, if you have any questions about memory,

leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you again soon. © transcript Emily Beynon