Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0411: Learning contexts for historical events

Episode Date: October 5, 2015

Chermaine asks about the best way to memorize the contexts for historical facts. I describe two different approaches depending on the intended outcome. 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 4.11 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. Shermaine submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Shermaine says, what's the best way to memorize historical context and details? So, Shermaine, I'm going to give you two options to choose from, and which one you choose is based on the ambition of the project and exactly what sort of context you're looking for. One of the options is to take whatever

item you're looking for, whatever single subject it is that you're wanting the historical context and details for, and place that on its own in a sort of environment in your imagination. And then you can place the details and the context around it. This approach starts with the thing that you're studying and then proceeds to create the context around whatever that thing is. So for example, if what you're learning is about George Washington crossing the Delaware, you're going to place George Washington, maybe think of, you could possibly think of a park that you know of where there's a statue of George Washington. And then from there, if you know the park fairly well, you can place ideas about that

thing and the context of the event around it. So you might imagine, for example, that the date 1776 is somewhere very close to the statue along with Christmas. So you have 1225 because it was the night of Christmas or, you know, December 25 through December 26. So what you're going to do is you could create your number mnemonics and put them somewhere close to the statue. And then for any other details that you want to include about the event, you can put them also around the statue on the park benches around it, in the trees, in, I don't know, the streams and lake, whatever happens to be in that park. You can just imagine those events simply happening in that park around the statue. Pretty straightforward, and I guess a little too easy if you happen to have actually a

statue of that historical event. If not, you could instead sort of invent something, maybe take your own house and place your event, your historical event, in one of the rooms in your house. Maybe it's Lee surrendering to Grant in the Civil War. You'll place that in a place in your house, so you could make that happening in the fireplace, let's say. Make that event as visual as you possibly can, and imagine that Grant is trying to write out the terms on a piece of paper, but the piece of paper is burning up because they're sitting in a fireplace. This, of course, assumes that you have a fireplace, and it's just the first thing that came to my mind. Now, if you do have a fireplace, what room is that fireplace in? You want to place other details of the historical context around that fireplace. Just

place them around it, you know, the closer details, closer to it, the most important details, and represent them visually and tied to the location, just like we did inside the fireplace. So you're just making up all this stuff in your imagination, and the point is that you're basing it all around the one event. You start with the event, put it in a prominent place, and place the other details around it in your imagination, and you're basically creating a concentric memory palace of details from most important to least important. That's one approach. The other approach that I would take that's perhaps more ambitious and more

comprehensive is actually to have an enormous memory palace of a single timeline going from as far back in history as you want to go up to the present day and continuing. So you have one large memory palace that's a linear palace going from one end to another end. It could go through several buildings, it could go through several cities, go through several states. It can be an extremely long memory palace, but you can just slowly fill it with all the details of all history that you want to put in it. Again, that's a very large project, and to learn more about that, I would just search the Master of Memory site for the word history or dates. In fact, it would work probably almost just as well to search for the word Gretchen, because Gretchen, one of the listeners and one of the most active participants

in Master of Memory's activities from a user standpoint is working on this very project, creating her own very ambitious but impressive memory palace of historical dates. But possibly just for now, Charmaine, pick the first approach and just experiment with it a little bit just to practice creating small palaces and practice putting historical facts into your imagination and then leave the ambitious project for later. For everyone listening, what do you want to learn or memorize? Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.