Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0446: Memory palaces: Should I “explore” a palace before filling it?

Episode Date: November 23, 2015

Ko has created a memory palace and wants to fill it with information. She has been practicing exploring the palace in her imagination. How much time should she spend doing this exercise before storing information in her memory palace? What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, […]

Master of Memory 446 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. Co wrote in an email, I'm an uber beginner but I'm setting up a memory palace in an old haunt of mine, the Boston Public Library. For now, I'm just walking through and letting all the

details come to me. I remember quite a lot of the library vividly, but how long should I walk through the palace before I start filling it? So, Ko, now that you've done it once or twice, I really would strongly recommend that you take action right away, but start doing it from a top down perspective, meaning going from general areas to more detailed areas. So something that you can try is to create temporary palaces in the Boston Public Library just to see how well you know the library before turning it into a permanent palace. Because I'm guessing from what you're saying that you're not just wanting to store grocery lists and short-term storage like short, I guess, strings of numbers to show people that you can memorize numbers,

but you're wanting to store a lot of real serious information in this palace because you're taking it pretty seriously. But what you can do is just start storing things in it as a temporary palace, and then once you're pretty confident that you're able to store things in it quite well and with lots of detail, then turn it into a permanent palace with whatever you think is worth storing there. So I'll give you three steps that you can follow to making sure that you're ready to turn it into a very detailed permanent palace. The first step is very general.

So just divide the whole library into about five to ten areas, five to ten general areas. Now make sure that you know these areas really well and you know what they are. So you might even list out exactly what those five to ten areas are that you're dividing it into. Then once you have that, go ahead and store a grocery list of the same number of items in that palace that you've just divided up. So if you've divided into, say, seven areas, you want to have seven different grocery items and just store them in those seven areas and make sure that you were successful. Just measure your success and see how well you were able to make those really closely related to the locations that you placed them in throughout the library.

Step two is to divide those areas, those first, let's say, seven areas or five to ten areas, into five to ten more distinct sublocations each. So you're going to store a new grocery list in just the first of your original five to ten locations, but dividing it among five to ten locations within that and see how well that goes. And then measure your success and do that with each of the locations. So if you had seven locations throughout the library originally, divide each of those seven locations into maybe 10 more locations and store a 10 item grocery list, or even if you want to test other mnemonic ideas, number pegs or things like that throughout those different locations, those sub locations within your general locations.

Once you're done with that, you'll have about 70 different locations in the library that based on your success, you know that you can store things in quite vividly. Once you've used all of those locations at least once, the final step is to try to use the entire palace as a temporary memory palace. So you're going to use all whatever it is up to 100 locations, 25 to 100 locations throughout the library, and you're going to use them all at once, not just individually in different little steps, but you're going to see if you can store literally, say, 70 different items all at once in that whole library. Now, it may be hard to come up with a 70-item shopping list, but if you have number mnemonics, you might just shuffle up a random number at random.org

and store all of your number pegs or 70 different number pegs, however many it is, throughout that palace with all of your sublocations. And then test your success. If there are certain locations that you are having trouble with or having more trouble with than others, you're going to have to refine those locations or maybe re-divide your rooms up just to make sure that you are able to think of each location as a distinct place.

But the thing is, and this is kind of an interesting note about the way that memory palaces work, oddly enough creating palaces out of a location is actually one of the best ways to get to know the location itself, not just the other way around. I mean you're not just learning information by storing it in the location, you're learning the location better by using it as a memory palace. So it's sort of a double win. So you don't have to keep just going through the palace like you've been doing, but start using it as a palace. And then you'll find that you're learning the whole area much better and probably quite a bit more quickly if you're doing it that way.

So thanks for the question, Ko. And as a call to action for all Master of Memory listeners, if you're serious about the show and want to keep us going, the best way that you can support us right now is by going to masterofmemory.com slash vote and supporting our Mandarin Kickstarter project. We're trying to raise $12,000 by December 18, and we're a good amount of the way there,

but there are only a couple of weeks left, and so we really want to get as much support as we can and keep the momentum going. If we're successful in launching this project, then I'm going to do a one month language challenge in February, having hired native speakers and other mnemonists to create basically the course content for me. And then I'll be working on refining the mnemonics and learning the language to the extent that I can, practicing with native speakers. And actually, the $12,000 will also fund several students, several of our top contributors, to go through the course with me. And so you can read the

details again at masterofmemory.com slash vote. If you're not sure if you can contribute even $1 to the project, please check it out anyway just to see what I'm up to right now, what the plans are, and how things are going. Masterofmemory.com slash vote. Meanwhile, 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.