Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0428: A visual mental diary

Episode Date: October 28, 2015

Michael wants to maintain a mental diary and wants to know how he should organize the memory palace. I give some suggestions for making it easy to remember conversations, past events, and important decisions made on particular dates. 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 428. 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. Michael wrote in an email, My question is regarding a personal diary which I would like to internalize into a 3D diary of sorts. The blog over at lembranization.blogspot.com is very helpful. His recommendation is to visualize a calendar and treat that as a journey

of sorts. That has not worked well for me. The only solution I've fallen back on is to use my neighborhood as a large palace subdivided by months, similar to one of your prior podcasts. Are there a few alternatives I may be able to consider that would bring better bang for the buck? I have an extensive diary in day one, but I don't tend to remember the events even though I wrote them down. So my goal is really to hold on to these entries and the key events and lessons of life by visualizing them on a journey of some kind and constantly revisiting them. I want to be able to say, for example, on Monday of such a date,

I read a key passage in the Bible, had a fun date watching a particular movie with my wife, made a key decision, etc. With that in mind, I have memory pegs for the days of the week to work into my diary snapshots. Any thoughts would be appreciated as this is slow going. So yeah, I agree, it probably would be very slow going if you're just trying to visualize a calendar and turn that into a memory palace. The way that memory palaces work is that they're memorable locations. And our brains think in terms of locations and spaces and frankly memorable things. That's what we remember. And a calendar is really none of that. For that reason, using your neighborhood instead, I think makes a lot of sense. Although I would suggest that instead of

sorting by dates first, and then by categories within that, you actually sort by categories first. So you have separate memory palaces for different categories. Maybe one big palace for events, one big palace for conversations, one big palace for decisions, and so on. This is just how I've organized my own personal records in the past when I used to spend more time doing that. And then you can tie the dates to those events by, first of all, having them proceed linearly through each of those palaces. For example, in your conversations palace, you could have your first room being one entire year or perhaps a month, and you can have the conversations going along a journey throughout that palace, but then also using dates on those conversations. So within, let's say, January of

2015, you use your particular bedroom for all the conversations from January 2015 that you want to remember. And one of those conversations was on January 6th. You can create a brief image for what that conversation was about, and then you can also tie your mnemonic pegs for, let's say, the number 6, your mnemonic peg for the number 6 to that same spot. That way, anytime you want to remember all of your conversations or review all of your conversations, you can just imagine yourself making that journey through those different rooms in your conversation palace,

and then each time you arrive at a conversation, for example the January 6 one, you can remember the general topic and which day it was on, and then you can just remember more details from what you happen to remember about the conversation, what remains in your memory. So that's my suggestion. Just organize not in terms of dates first, but in terms of subjects first. And I think you'll find things more easy to access. And then you can review on different days. You know, we'll review all of our conversations this day. We'll review a bunch of events this day. We'll review a lot of decisions that I've made on this diet by going through my decisions palace and so on. It might make an interesting hobby.

Thanks for the question, Michael. 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