Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0455: Memorize molecular structures for amino acids

Episode Date: December 4, 2015

An anonymous listener is memorizing molecular structures for the 20 amino acids. I describe a basic memory palace organization and some mnemonics for this project. 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 455. 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. An anonymous listener submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. This listener is trying to memorize molecular structures starting with the 20 amino acids. He sent me an image of what he's working on learning with diagrams of each of the 20 amino acids grouped into five different categories. So there are aromatic R-groups, which means that they're ring structures made up completely by carbon atoms.

Aliphatic, which means that they aren't ring structures. Positively charged R-group groups, negatively charged R groups, and polar uncharged R groups. Now as regular listeners may have predicted, what I'm going to recommend is a five-room memory palace with sub-locations for the amino acids. So you'll have the five rooms for the different groups, but each of those rooms will have two, three, or six different sublocations based on how many amino acids are in each category. You have the categories

that are the rooms, and then you have the subdivisions for the different acids. But how do you store the imagery for the amino acids themselves? How do you memorize each of those individual acids? Well, the thing is, the fact is that we're actually just working with a limited vocabulary, because I see that there are only 15 types of molecules in these diagrams. We have C, H, S, N, SH, NH, OH, CH, CH2, CH3, H2N, H3N, H2C, COO, and CH2OH. Now, the most used of those 15 types of molecules, although many of them are repeated many times, there are five in particular that are repeated a ton, and those are CH, CH2, CH3, H3N, and COO. Now, what you want to do is you want to identify each of these things, this limited vocabulary

that we're working with, with a very unique and memorable object. So for example, C might be a cat. So instead of thinking carbon, which is really abstract or maybe it's just not visual enough, think of a cat. And then H might be a horse. And so CH2 might be a potato chip, which is something completely different. But hey, it's a different molecule. It's a different vocabulary word in the language we're making up for your mnemonics. CH3 might be, let's say, a chandelier.

H3N might be a helium balloon. And COO could be a cookie. All right. Now, it's easy to put those things in a memory palace. It's easy to remember those things if you have left one. Let's say you walk into your room and you see something on the bed. You're going to remember what each of those things is if it's sitting on your bed. So what we're going to do is we're going to arrange these things as you see them in the diagrams.

Taking the very first one I have in your diagrams, we have glycine. And let's say that this is in the dining room for the aliphatic groups and let's put it on the dining room lamp. Alright so the way that the diagram looks is we have a cookie at the top for the COO and then hanging down from that is a cat for the C and it's hanging down by one paw let's say. Now clinging to the left side of the cat is a helium balloon, and on the other side, a horse is biting the cat's fur. And then at the bottom, hanging down from the cat's tail and brushing against the foot of the lamp is another horse, maybe a smaller horse. So obviously we have COO at the top, C hanging down from that, H3N on one side for the helium

balloon, H on the other side for the horse, and then another H at the bottom, C hanging down from that, H3N on one side for the helium balloon, H on the other side for the horse, and then another H at the bottom for the other horse. That's pretty easy to remember, and it's a distinct image. You have a cat hanging down from a cookie, and the fact that you'll remember that it's hanging down from the lamp is, it will help you remember which group it's in. So, it's in the dining room for the aliphatic group. Now, there is a little bit of a problem with this, and that is that every single one of these amino acids has COO

and a C. So you'd have basically too many hats hanging down from cookies. Those aren't very memorable images. I mean, those aren't very different images because that's a lot of cats hanging down from cookies all over your house. So you might instead make some of the cats tigers, some of them lions, some of them leopards, and so on, just to make them different. It doesn't matter. They're still cats, and they still represent C. Thanks for the question, anonymous listener. This was a fun episode to do.

And for everyone listening, make sure to check out masterofmemory.com slash mandarin to see what we have going on with the Mandarin Project over there and to see if there's a way you can support the show through that. Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon