Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0418: Re-using memory palace stations for short-term exams

Episode Date: October 14, 2015

Chris asks about re-using memory palace stations when the information is just for a university exam. I talk about the difference between temporary palaces and memory palaces intended for long-term retention of information. 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 418. 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. Chris asked a question in an email saying, when it comes to grad school tests and all the information provided, when you run out of pegs in your palace, do you just stack more

information over it or create a new peg? So the technique that Chris is talking about here is when you're studying for exams and you're using short-term palaces. Let's say you keep reusing your own house over and over to store information temporarily so that you can remember it on a test. This is something that's very common. It's one of the most quickly applicable mnemonic tactics for memory palaces and for using different stations or pegs in your house to peg information, associate all the information you need on the test with various things in your house, and then you can remember it all and write it out on the test. Next time you have a test you can just erase that information, meaning you can just overwrite it with new information for

the new test. Now about reusing pegs to keep information alive or to keep two different facts alive in the same place on the same peg. Let's say you have a certain doorknob, you know, the doorknob on the inside of your bedroom, and you want to store two facts there because you don't think you have enough pegs in your house to store all the facts in different places, you should change some aspect of the peg or station. So for example, you could have your doorknob be the way that it actually is to store one fact. Let's say you have to remember the year 1849, and so you store the year 1849 and the whatever fact happened there on your doorknob the way that it really is and then you also imagine that your doorknob there in the same place is red hot and

starting to melt it's starting to drip and you can store a different fact there and you can remember both of those facts by associating them with the two different objects that you've placed in the same place but honestly this is not really best practice. It's not considered best practice because it's best to be able to look at one place in your imagination and have a single thing there. You're not going to have any conflict that way. You're only storing one thing in one place. And honestly, it's not too hard to find another palace with lots more pegs and stations. So if you run out of pegs and stations in your house, which honestly it will take a long time to do because there are a lot of things in just your

house. I mean, if you have 10 rooms in your house, pretty much any one of those rooms could be divided into 100 different stations. And so I don't really think that you're going to run out of those pegs that fast, those stations, so quickly. But also, it's not too hard to find another palace with lots more pegs and stations, maybe a friend's house or something like that. Of course, for long-term storage, you'll want to follow the techniques that I normally talk about, which is to create real palaces in which you permanently store information in an organized fashion. That's not what you're doing here.

You're just studying for exams and are willing to forget the information because you're going to reuse that palace and use it for something else later. But if you want to store information permanently, you should also create some permanent palaces so that you, I would say, just keep the two different types of palaces separate. Have some permanent palaces of one type and then maybe maintain the house that you currently live in as a temporary palace. Thanks for the question, Chris. And for everyone listening, what do 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. Thank you.