Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0414: Memorize the Harmonized Tariff Schedule

Episode Date: October 8, 2015

Gloria wants to memorize details about the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States. I describe a method for creating and organizing a memory palace so that she can store all the information that she wants within it. 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 414. 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. Gloria submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question about memorizing the harmonized tariff schedule of the U.S. She says that she needs to be familiar with the chapter notes and additional notes, which are found at the beginning of each chapter, and that the next

important things to know are the headings and subheadings of the chapters. So Gloria, based on my research on this, it seems to me that at least if I was to tackle this project, I would actually kind of reverse your order and start with the chapter headings just for organization purposes. After that, I could start placing the notes into those and it's just that it would be easier to proceed this way. If you get everything organized by chapter first, then you can start placing that information that you say is the most important to learn. Now to do this, let's actually back up a little bit more and start with the sections for even better organization. The harmonized tariff schedule has

22 sections, and the technique that I'm going to describe is going to depend on you having a PAO system for remembering numbers. So just keep that in mind. There are lots of other episodes about how to build your PAO system for easily remembering numbers, and this is going to depend on that, just as a disclaimer. The first thing that you want to do is elect 22 super palaces, or large palaces that are going to have smaller palaces within them. So for example, section 11 has 13 chapters in it, so you'll want to choose a large building that is very familiar to you and that has 13 major rooms in it. In fact, speaking of that example, I would suggest, Glory, that you go ahead and start with this one, and the rest of the palaces will be simpler because they all have fewer chapters within them. Each of the other sections has fewer chapters. This one has the most. So why don't you go ahead and choose the 13 most distinct rooms in your high school. So by

distinct rooms, I mean the rooms that you remember the best. So choose 13 rooms in your high school. That sounds like an arbitrary choice, but I just chose that because why delay in making decisions? I'm just going to tell you to do that. So 13 distinct rooms in your high school. Now with one of those rooms, you want to associate silk along with the number 50, which for me is lace because that's based on the major system. So think of silk and lace and somehow attach that to one of those distinct rooms in your high school so that when you think of that room, you think of lace and silk. And then with another room, you want wool and the number 51, which for me is a wallet. So why are we using silk and wool?

Because those are what are in those chapters. Chapter 50 is about silk, and chapter 51 is about wool. So you're tying the chapter number to the item that it's about. Chapter 52, for example, as the next example, is about cotton, and you want to tie that to another one of those rooms. Let's say it's the principal's office. You want to fill the principal's office with cotton, or maybe push cotton into the principal's ears.

And also the number is 52, which for me is the number is Halloween for the L and the N. And so the physical representation of that is something like a jack-o'-lantern. And so you could make the principal have the head of a jack-o'-lantern with cotton in his ears. And now anytime you think of the principal's office in this memory palace, you'll think of the jack-o'-lantern representing chapter 52, and you'll also think of the cotton, so you can remember those things tied together. Now the next task is to associate the entire school, all of section 11 for you, with the number 11. So what we've done in my examples is I've used objects from my PAO system. So I would

suggest using your PAO character for the school itself. And that character is going through the whole school. And so for me, that would be a vain woman who calls herself deity. And deity represents the number 11. So this vain woman who calls herself deity could be sitting on the roof of the school or something like that, maybe painting her nails. But at any rate, I've associated this whole high school with the number 11. And then each of the rooms has these chapters, 50, 51, and 52, representing those different things. You have the silk, you have the wool, and you have the cotton. Now, you might, in some ways, just as an interesting point, consider this palace to be a linear palace. But the nice thing is that if you think of any section number, you can quickly

think of the super palace based on the character. Because, you know, most people think of a book as going from the beginning to the end, but we're creating a large index where you can just kind of go from broad to narrow. And so you think of section 11, and you immediately think of this school, and you can zoom in and think of any particular subject. Now, once you've done this for all of section 11, I would suggest that you store the chapter notes and so on within those rooms that you've now indexed. So first index all of those rooms in section 11,

and just get all of that done so that you can think of the chapter and what it's about and then start creating more mnemonics in those rooms to represent the notes. Now I suggest doing all of that for section 11. Completely fill out everything you think that you should know that's essential for all of section 11 and then proceed to other sections with other palaces if you find that this method works well for you. That's my suggestion, Gloria, and I hope that that helps you to get started right away, and I look forward to following your progress on this. For everyone else 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.