Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0404: How to memorize date ranges

Episode Date: September 24, 2015

Gretchen is memorizing historical dates and wants to know how to remember ranges, such as the years of music’s Classical period 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 404 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. Gretchen wrote in an email, I'm continuing to work on my historical timeline, and I was wondering how you might approach memorizing dates that range from one year to another. For example, I'm putting musical eras in my timeline. This project doesn't require academic nuance, so I'm just taking broad brush ranges from Wikipedia.

The classical period in this context runs from 1730 to 1820. My memory palace uses local streets. Centuries are embedded in the blocks, so the mnemonics only concern decades. At this point, I'm using characters from my PAO system for both numbers. Miss Marple, the old lady British detective, is 30, and Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, is 20. My mnemonic has a flute that arches between them on the appropriate city blocks. In my mind, it's the magic flute like the opera, because I think of Mozart as the apotheosis of classical music style. I'm trying different approaches, so for the Baroque period, I used

individual pieces that roughly outline the time frame. Monteverdi's L'Orfeo from 1607 and Bach's Mass in B minor from 1749 with a rock bridge between them. Wikipedia has the Baroque period from about 1600 to 1760, but remembering these two pieces made it easy to remember the overall time frame. Is it unwise to use two characters in this context? Is there a better approach to memorizing generic date ranges than this? So Gretchen, I would say that this sounds like a pretty solid approach overall. The fact that you're using the blocks for your sentries means that you have to come up with some other way of organizing your palace in order to make it so that you can see which time frame you're in at any given point. So what I mean by that is what

I would normally do in situations like this is I would actually use different palaces or different sub-palaces for the different time periods. For example, the Baroque period would be along one street, the Classical period would be along a beach, and so on. However, in this enormous project that you're doing, there are likely to be a lot of overlaps that don't permit this approach. In your project, you have the Baroque period ending after the classical period starts, which incidentally is something I really agree with. And I think that it's really cool that you've gotten this to work out, that you have the two time periods overlapping. And another nice thing about this is that you can incorporate other eras into this as well on a smaller scale or on a larger scale, and they aren't going to interfere with each other. So if you only used the approach that I mentioned where you have different periods and different palaces, that only works for one aspect and it doesn't work for overlap.

But what you're doing allows for unlimited overlap. So that's, I think, a great idea, and I think it's really cool what you're doing. So keep me updated on what you're doing, Gretchen. This is a really amazing project that you're doing. It's big, but it's just fantastic that you're doing it all in this hands-on way. You're making it all work, and I'd love to stay updated on it because I'm interested not only in creating my own mnemonics for a lot of these same historical things, but also sharing some materials for memorizing historical dates with my audience when we can come up with a free

course or something like that. For everyone listening, if you have questions about learning historical dates or anything else that 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.