Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0425: Memorize the Navigators Topical Memory System (60 Scripture verses)

Episode Date: October 23, 2015

Rob asks about memorizing the Navigators Topical Memory System. I provide resources for learning mnemonics for the references of all 60 verses. 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 425. 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. Rob submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Rob says, Tim, I would like to memorize the Navigator's Topical Memory System. This is 60 verses with topics. I want to know the topics, the verses, and the references.

I have been attempting via rote learning, hard work. Any advice much appreciated? So Rob, first of all, I would suggest starting by learning overall the outline of this thing and the references. So the way that it's organized is you have five general topics, six subtopics within those, and then each of those subtopics has two verses. Now it seems to me the purpose of this, which is actually really exciting and something that I'm very interested in, is so that you can think of a particular topic related to something in the Bible or to the Christian life, and you can pull up the verse just by remembering the topic. You think of the topic, and you can remember the verses.

Now, I think that that's ridiculously handy because you can always, even if you don't have the verses themselves memorized, you can always find something on a particular topic in order to strengthen an argument or anything like that. And for this reason, I've actually spent a significant amount of time creating resources for you to help learn this,, I've actually spent a significant amount of time creating resources for you to help learn this, and I'm going to be learning it myself as well, just from the perspective of learning all of the verses and references along with their topics. So if you go to masterofmemory.com slash navigators, you'll see that I've created four sets of flashcards where you can learn a bunch of different things related to how we're going to do this.

And this is sort of personal to me in a sense because the mnemonics that I'm using are based on my own PAO system, or actually the PAO system that I'm developing to share with Master of Memory members. And so what I'm going to do is you can go there and you'll see four different sets of flashcards. One of them is the list of general topics, and that's just five flashcards. On one side is the general topic, such as, for example, living the new life. And on the other side is the, you know, the six topics, Christ the center, obedience to Christ, the word, prayer, fellowship, and witnessing. And so what you're going to do with those is I would suggest creating a memory palace of five main rooms and then six sub-rooms or sub-locations within those. It's very easy to

memorize these things by representing them that way, you know, somehow in a memory palace. So this part is fairly easy. Just five rooms and six sublocations within those rooms. You can memorize these general topics fairly quickly. But beyond that, it gets kind of difficult because you're dealing with a bunch of numbers in order to be able to learn all of the verses. To deal with this, the biggest flashcard set in here has 37 terms, and those terms are my object mnemonics for the 37 two-digit numbers that you're going to need to learn these references. For example, the number 26 is in there because of one of the verses that has the number 26, and the object for that is a hinge. For this particular set of verses, you don't have to learn all the numbers from 0 to 99, but there are 37 different numbers that you do need in order to be able to turn these references into memorable objects. And I'll point out really quickly here that the mnemonics that we're creating are not going to be,

I mean, they don't really represent the verse. You just want to be able to associate them with the verse somehow, just like the fact that the verses of the Bible were not originally in the Bible in the first place. That's only happened a few hundred years ago. They're just there to help you reference things. So don't think of these, you know, these references, as I often say, these mnemonics, as somehow taking away meaning from the verses themselves, which is an objection some people have to creating mnemonics for biblical topics. The thing is, these are just there to help you associate the verses and reference them, not to represent the verses themselves. On that subject, a third flashcard set actually turns each of the books of the Bible

into a memorable character. And the reason for that is, you know, 1 Corinthians, 2 Timothy, things like that, those sound very abstract. And even if you tried to remember the person that wrote them, both Paul in those cases, or the person that they were written to, Timothy or the church at Corinth, those are not very visual or very colorful. They're simply not very memorable. So if you can associate each of the books of the Bible with a memorable character, with some sort of colorful character, like a cartoon character, then you'll have an easier time remembering those books and remembering all of those references. So for example, the book of Luke for me is Ron, who's a dog, but a pretty lazy dog,

and he doesn't know any tricks. And why is that? It doesn't have anything to do with the book of Luke. I just decided to associate the book of Luke with Ron because Luke is the 42nd book in the way that the Bible is organized into 66 books, and Ron is the major system for 42. So generally speaking, what you're going to do is you're going to create this memory palace with these five rooms with six subdivisions each. And then in each of those subdivisions, you're going to place these memorable characters and objects in order to represent the books and verses. This all may have sounded very complicated, but the result in the end

is that you'll be able to think of any of those topics and remember exactly what the verses are. Plus you can remember all of the related verses because they're stored in similar locations in your memory palace. And going even beyond this project, the beauty of this is that you're now set up to start memorizing even more verses of the Bible, and they'll get easier and easier because you have all of these objects and these characters that are going to help you memorize any scripture passage with its reference quite easily. So Rob, you don't have to do it exactly the way that I do it. You don't necessarily have to use these mnemonics. I'm just giving you at least an example of how I'm going to be doing it myself in memorizing all of these verses, or at least all

of these references with their topics from the Navigator's topical memory system. So thanks, Rob, for the question and also for introducing me to this system. And for everyone listening, what do you want to learn or memorize? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning requests at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you again soon.