Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0488: Memorizing history with mnemonic pegs to represent a category of events

Episode Date: January 20, 2016

Gretchen is creating a timeline for world history, and she is trying to create consistent imagery for certain types of events, such as assassinations, invasions, and depositions. Does this have the potential to make mnemonics too complicated? 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 488. 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. Gretchen and I are working on a historical timeline where she's creating a giant memory palace to remember various important dates throughout history. Now, we've been working with animals as recurring pegs for certain types of events, such as a donkey for an assassination,

like the Lincoln assassination or the Kennedy assassination, and ants for an invasion, like Germany invading Poland. The idea here is that whenever you see ants, you can remember that something is an invasion, and whenever you see a donkey, you can remember that there's an assassination. It just makes those things easier to remember. Now, Gretchen's question has been, do we have to do this consistently? Do we always have to use ants in the case of an invasion? And where do you draw the line? Because, for example, if you know that World War II started with Germany invading Poland,

why should you have ants involved there if you know that it's an invasion? Or how do you define an invasion if something isn't necessarily an invasion? And do you have to change some of your old mnemonics if you've had other invasions represented by different imagery? Do you have to replace that imagery with ants instead to be consistent? So my answer to this question is the same between this situation and numbers as well. If you come up with a big system of a hundred different object mnemonics, but you've remembered a number using a different mnemonic somewhere else in your palace, do you have to replace that other mnemonic with this peg that you've come up with, this handy, useful peg that

you're using for lots of different numbers? Not necessarily. If a different mnemonic is actually working for you in other places in your palace, you can use that just fine. Or if you're able to remember that Germany invaded Poland rather than just attacking them in, I don't know, some other way, then that's just fine. The purpose of the ants, the purpose of the donkey for assassinations and so on, is if that's a primary word that you're wanting to remember, if you're trying to think of Mongol invasions of China or anything like that, then maybe you do want to use those ants just to make sure that the keyword invasion is a big part of it.

But if you think that you'll know that, you know, Germany was going into Poland and that's how the war started, then you don't necessarily need to use the ants because those ants are just there to sharpen this one word. And it's kind of like what I talk about with the keywords in poetry and things like that. Maybe you have a particular word that represents the word because for a poem. Maybe you actually have an image that represents the word because in a memory palace. Does that mean you have to use that image every single time there's a because in a poem? Not necessarily. If you just remember the key words and you've said the poem a few times, you can probably just remember that because. We use our imagery to memorize the key points that will prompt us to remember the rest of things.

And that's why you don't necessarily, even if you create a peg for a particular topic, you don't necessarily have to use that 100% of the time that that topic comes up. Only if you want to make sure that you remember that specific aspect of that topic. Now, for everyone listening, if you have any more questions about learning history, memorizing historical facts and things like that, I'm giving that a huge priority on the show in the future. In fact, I'm starting each week. On every Monday, I'll be addressing history.

So I'd love to hear your specific questions about things you want to learn about history, and I'll address those on Mondays. If I don't get any questions, then I'll just choose what to teach about history, but I'd really like to get questions from you because this has always been a listener-driven show, and I've always been addressing questions. So this change to the format is starting next week, and so I'll be addressing history on Mondays, language learning on Tuesdays, some sort of passage memorization such as, you know, poetry or scripture on Wednesdays, language learning on Tuesdays, some sort of passage memorization, such as, you know,

poetry or scripture on Wednesdays, and then geography on Thursdays, and then it's just open to questions, as we've always done, on Fridays. So 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.