Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0434: Combining long-term and short-term memory palaces

Episode Date: November 5, 2015

Joey is a bartender and has been using mnemonics in memory palaces to remember information about the drinks he prepares. How can he incorporate the information from his permanent palaces into short-term palaces for day-to-day bartending work? What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by […]

Master of Memory 434. 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. Joey submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Joey says, first off, love the show. I've listened to many episodes and have been working to make memory skills a part of my everyday life. Some of my favorite episodes deal with memorizing statistics of beer and bar recipes. As I'm a bartender, one of my biggest challenges is

recalling a long list of varied items. I've built some memory palaces to house the specific information of the menu for long-term memory, but what are some ways to temporarily store long lists of items with the visualizations from other memory palaces and keep them in order? I've been using a sort of temporary palace to keep my short-term lists and it works relatively well until I get really busy. So I like this question and the subject here is combining temporary palaces with permanent palaces, which means so you have these permanent palaces, the things where you have the recipes and you have the ingredients laid out somehow in an organized fashion.

In palaces, you maintain long-term and you keep adding to, and those don't really change except for long-term changes and adding more information. But then you have the short-term palaces, which you probably just use once a night or may reuse over and over again when you're busy. And it involves using information from the permanent palaces.

I think just from what I can tell from what you're describing, it's a great technique. I think that it'll work for you. It may take some practice just to get better at it in the short term. And you may even practice when you're not on the job, just making your images more visual in your temporary palace and making it work. I would also suggest just while I think about it, using maybe two palaces. So you have two temporary

palaces and you just alternate between them so you don't have to erase one of them constantly. While you're filling in the second palace, the first one will slightly erase itself, and then you can go back to the first one and fill that up when you have another whatever it is, when you're filling that temporary palace of information. Now just thinking about the subject and talking about the combination of temporary and permanent palaces, what's going on here and answering part of what you're asking is you're going to keep these temporary palaces in order because it's a palace. You're going to go through it in order. But also, when you pick up each of those items going through the palace,

you can relate it back to its source palace just by going immediately to the place in the palace, in the permanent palace where that thing is stored, and you can see information about that object in the original palace, in the permanent palace where that thing is stored, and you can see information about that object in the original palace, in the permanent palace. So that's really efficient because you can just go through your temporary palace and see all the items where they are there. But if you encounter an item and you want to learn more about it, you can jump to your permanent palace to immediately where that specific item is in that permanent palace. And there you might have more information stored about that particular item and the things around it. So basically, Joey, I'm just giving you sort

of an affirmation of your technique. I think it's great. And I'd like to hear more about what you're doing with it and how things go for you when you've practiced it more and enhance your visualization techniques and the ability to recall this information on the fly, you know, in the short-term memory palaces. And I know that this episode for everyone listening was fairly abstract, but if you aren't sure exactly what I was talking about or what I'm referring to when I say permanent palaces and organized information, instead of listening to all the 400 previous episodes of this show, I actually recommend that you go to masterofmemory.com slash start for a full free starter guide that will give you basically all of the techniques

that we talk about in these episodes. And it'll just give you some background and a good foundation for how these mnemonic techniques work, how to build palaces, how to incorporate pegs and images, and how to organize everything that you're trying to memorize into systems so that you can learn things faster than ever. Masterofmemory.com slash start. Going more specific, for particular Master of Memory episodes, 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.