Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0493: Using key verses to memorize the topics of Matthew

Episode Date: January 27, 2016

Nathan asks about memorizing the topics of the book of Matthew by using key verses. Is it possible to use the references of key verses, such as Mathew 6:26, to remember the associated general topic, such as “worry”? I talk about how to integrate these two things into a memory palace at the same time. […]

Master of Memory 493 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. Nathan asked a question about memorizing the topics of the book of Matthew by using key verses. Is it possible to use the references of key verses, such as Matthew 6.26 in particular, to remember the associated general topics, such as worry? So I'm going to talk about integrating two things at once into a memory palace that we've talked about before in memorizing texts. I've talked about using the general subject of a chapter. For example, you could memorize what

all topics Matthew 6 is about. And I've also talked about memorizing key verses by reference. But in this episode, I'd like to address something that I'm actually doing myself with several books of the Bible, and that is to memorize the reference of the key verse, but not the verse itself, to represent the topic. For example, with Matthew 1, I could just memorize that Matthew 1 is about the genealogy of Christ and then the birth of Christ. But if instead I'd like to be able to point to certain verses that will give me a reference point within those chapters and not necessarily memorize those verses, but just be able to point to them, I can memorize that verse 17 is basically a summary of the genealogy.

It sums up the genealogy at the end there. And then verse 18 is sort of a summary of what's about to happen in that story of the birth of Christ. So if I memorize just the reference 117 in reference to the genealogy of Christ, and then I memorize 118 in reference to the birth of Jesus Christ, I'm not actually memorizing any text, but I am memorizing these references. So it's like I have bookmarks, and I can just go and pull open my Bible and look up these particular verses. Now, interestingly, this actually makes the memorization in some ways easier to do, because I'm going to use a twig as my memorization for verse 17 to represent the

genealogy. So, okay, let's look at Matthew 1. Matthew 1 is a chapter, and if I eventually want to memorize things from Matthew, I'm going to place the chapter one of Matthew in a particular place in a very large memory palace because Matthew has 28 chapters. It's really long. So I'm going to have this big palace with 28 big areas, and I'm going to want to store all these little verses in it. So what I'm going to do to differentiate chapter one is I'm going to decide, okay, chapter one is this room in this house, and it's going to be dark in that room, because chapter one is always dark, so this is a dark room. Okay, now I have to remember that the genealogy of Jesus Christ is in a dark room, and that the birth of Jesus Christ is also

in a dark room at the beginning of this palace. Now, isn't it so much easier if instead of doing that, I actually place a twig in that dark room, and that twig represents the genealogy of Jesus Christ? So that twig, it's like a family tree, and it represents the genealogy of Jesus Christ because it's verse 17, and 17 for me is a twig. And then for 18, since for me the number 18 is toffee, I imagine that Joseph is in bed with his hair covered in toffee and is dreaming of an angel, which is what happens at the end of chapter 1 of Matthew. So now I have a dark room, I have a twig that represents the genealogy of Christ, and I have this toffee where somebody's dreaming about an angel visiting them and telling them about the birth of Jesus that's coming up. And now I've effectively memorized the topics of this chapter and the key verses that are going to help me, kind of give me some reference points for that, and it's actually made my job easier on both counts. To continue on with chapter two, which for me would have a bright room with

the sun shining in, chapter two has the visit of the wise men. It has Mary and Joseph going to Egypt. It has Herod killing the children of Bethlehem. And it has the return to Nazareth, that Mary and Joseph, you know, they come back from Egypt because Herod's died. So I could just try to store those in a sunny room, or I can use the objects to do it. And I am improvising here, but let's see. I've chosen verse 11 as my key verse for the Magi, and it says, And going into the house, they saw the child with Mary and his mother, and they fell down and worshipped him. Then opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. I just have to choose a place in this sunny room where I guess I store

some teeth to represent verse 11, because for me, the number 11 is teeth. I'm going to store those in a room and imagine that one of the teeth is gold, one of the teeth is, you know, kind of like it's made out of bark or incense, and one of the teeth is myrrh. So these teeth have changed into those gifts, and this is where it mentions the gold and frankincense and myrrh. So that works nicely. And then my next key verse is verse 13, where the angel appears to Joseph in a dream again and says to go to Egypt. And so I have to represent that with a coin or a dime, which is my object for 13. In this sunny room, I'll just imagine what the light shining off of that dime would look like, and it might look like the vision of an angel. So there you go, verse 13, where

they're told to go to Egypt. The next key verse is verse 16. My object is a tissue, and we have Herod being angry that he's been tricked by the wise men, and he goes and kills all the male children in Bethlehem. And so we're in this sunny room. We have this Kleenex. I imagine a lot of dust floating around in the light that you see. And the Kleenex doesn't help with the dust at all. And it's not too hard to think of an image that has that dust representing the babies. And then you have the Kleenex and stuff like that. Not a pretty picture.

And then finally, the key verse for chapter 2 at the end is verse 23, the very last verse. And this is when they come back to Nazareth. It says, he went and lived in a city called Nazareth so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled. And so we have a gnome. And I guess we just have to find some way for a gnome to represent the city of Nazareth, which is kind of interesting. But depending on the room that you're storing it in, you might just have the gnome in a particular place in that room that represents dwelling there. And so there you go. You have your four key verses, the teeth, the dime, the tissue, and the gnome for verses 11, 13, 16, and 23, referencing all of those topics in what you know is chapter two, because it's in that sunny room. So I would just continue that way. I've already done some episodes on the Sermon on the Mount, but to go and just give you the verses that I would use

for continuing in Matthew chapters 3 and 4, we have chapter 3 verse 1, chapter 3 verse 16, chapter 4 verse 1, chapter 4 verse 17, 419, and 4 23. So I hope you can make good use of that, Nathan. I'd be happy to collaborate with you further on this. It's something that I'm doing myself, as I've said before, so I'd be happy to work with you on this. And for everyone listening, tomorrow is Thursday, so it's going to be Geography Day. We have a question from Gretchen about learning the geography of continents based on rivers and how you memorize the positions of rivers, which are pretty complicated. So I'm looking forward to that episode.

And 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.