Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0423: How to memorize topics of the Bible

Episode Date: October 21, 2015

Shaun asks about memorizing topics of chapters of the Bible. I’ve mentioned in previous episodes that it’s good to memorize overall topics before memorizing the individual verses, but how do you implement the topics and themes into your memory palace? What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd […]

Master of Memory 423. 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. Sean wrote in an email, I'm interested in starting out on that first step of making palaces for each book of the Bible, rooms for each chapter, and memorizing the themes of the chapters. What I'm confused on is how to incorporate the themes into the palaces. It seems that you classified those as different from the pegs. How do

you implement the themes, the topics, into the memory palace? Or do you put them in the memory palace at all? On a different subject, thanks for the video on how to improve listening in another language. That's helped me out already. So yeah, Sean, on that other subject, and as a quick comment for all the listeners, in the near future, you're going to be seeing a lot more free resources like that video about listening skills that you mentioned, the guide that we've created for starting up with mnemonics that I mentioned in the previous episode, and things like that. I'm excited about lots of projects that are underway at Master of Memory. We're growing, and I'm really wanting to improve your whole user experience

and really arm you all with more than just the inspiration and information of the podcast, but with real hands-on stuff to get you concrete results with whatever it is that you're learning. Now to answer your question about learning topics of chapters of the Bible, there are two approaches. And the first is, if you're interested in memorizing a whole book of the Bible, I would say that just simply memorize the key verses of each of those chapters. So choose your topics, but then choose the verse that represents that topic best from that section, and just memorize all of those verses. That way you've effectively placed the topic into the palace, and you've already started

memorizing the passage. And then all the other verses, when you eventually learn them, will go in between. So as you know, to do this, you'll be basically choosing rooms for your chapters, subdivisions of the room for the verses. So if a room has, if a chapter has 21 verses, then you'll choose 21 places throughout the room. And then the objects represent the numbers for the verses, your object pegs. So just memorize one verse per topic that represents the topic fairly well. And the thing is, when you think of the room, you're going to remember those three verses. So in effect, when you think of a chapter like John chapter three, you'll remember the three topics of John chapter three because of the three, basically the three verses that you've memorized throughout that

chapter or throughout that room. The second approach you could take if you're not interested in memorizing the whole book, at least for a while, is that you might actually turn the numbers themselves, the number of the chapter, for example, into a physical object with certain topics along that object. So you're sort of turning your object into a memory palace itself. And this is actually what I did myself first a while ago, years ago, when I memorized the topics of all the chapters of the New Testament. And in particular of the four Gospels, I really had to create some object mnemonics in order to make this work.

For example, my object for the number nine was a bicycle, and in Luke chapter nine, there are about nine or ten things that happen throughout the chapter. But I simply placed the events along the bicycle, starting with the handlebars, and then proceeding along the neck of the bike to the seat, and then the back wheel. I just placed the different events along the bicycle, starting with the handlebars and then proceeding along the neck of the bike to the seat and then the back wheel. I just placed the different events along that object. So those are two approaches you could take.

The second one would be quicker and easier, but the second one will give you a head start on actually memorizing the whole book if that's your intended result. I hope that helps, Sean, and thanks for the question. 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.