Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0505: Memorize the cardiovascular system

Episode Date: February 12, 2016

Kate asks about memorizing the cardiovascular system. I present mnemonic ideas for memorizing major veins and arteries, grouped into memory palace areas. 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 505. 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. Kate asked a question in an email about memorizing the cardiovascular system. So in this episode, I'm going to focus on memorizing the layout of the cardiovascular system so that you can identify major veins and arteries throughout the body. Now, once you've done this process, you can start filling in more details,

but what I'd like to do is just break the body down into major areas and talk about how you can memorize the names of the largest veins and arteries. With that in mind, I'm going to assume that you know the general building block vocabulary, such as what an artery is, what a vein is, what capillaries are, and so on. So basically, you're going to memorize the terms that I'm going to mention using a memory palace, and then what I'd suggest that you do is not just memorize these terms, but then make sure that you can identify them from an image and also perhaps even draw them. So you want to know these veins and arteries so well that you could sit down

with, let's say, a blank silhouette of a human body and roughly draw where these veins and arteries are. And I'm going to group them into a few major groups, just a total of five major groups. So we have the heart and lung area, the neck and head area, the arms, the lower abdomen, and the legs and feet. And since I'm only going to do up to five in each of these, five major, you know, vocabulary terms in each of these, there will be more things to learn within each of those, but I would suggest learning these as landmarks in a memory palace, and then filling in the details from there once you're really familiar with them. And so let's just go and name all of the major things that I would suggest learning first. In the heart-lung area, I would start with the aorta, which has both an ascending and a descending

version. So we have the ascending aorta and the descending aorta, but you want the aorta to be the major term that you learn in the heart and lung area first. Then we have the vena cava, including the superior and inferior. We have the pulmonary arteries and veins. We have the celiac artery and the hepatic vein. Obviously there are a lot more veins and arteries in this area, but I would suggest just starting with those. They kind of make some nice landmarks in here, and there are multiple components to each one that you want to memorize. And once you're at the point where you can draw those, you're ready to learn the rest of them. Next in the neck and head

area, we have the basilar artery, the carotid arteries including the internal, the external, and the so-called common carotid artery, and then we have the jugular veins including internal and external. Next we have the arms, and here there are so many different major, you know, blood vessels that I've decided to stop at the elbows because it gets really complicated when you go beyond the elbows. But just as a starting point, we have the subclavian artery and vein, the axillary artery and vein, the cephalic vein, the brachial artery, and the basilic vein. Now just to take a break here to make sure that people are clear on this,

you're not just trying to pound these terms into your head. You've, as I've described in other episodes about anatomy, you're going to be creating a memory palace with these different general areas, and then you're going to create imagery for these words based on the stressed syllable. For example, axillary has ax as the stressed syllable. So you're going to associate an ax with the upper arms or at least store an ax in the place in the memory palace where we deal with the upper arms. Then that gives you a prompt based on that stressed syllable to be able to label these veins and also to put them there if you're given the upper arms instead

to draw what's there. The next general area is going to be the lower abdomen, which is pretty simple. I just have the terms renal, gonadal, and iliac veins and arteries. But there are going to be 10 of those in total because of all of the different iliac veins and arteries. So they're kind of multiplied as far as the extent to which those terms are used. And that's kind of nice because you have fewer terms, but using them in a broader way means that you're going to have to do more drawing and a little more visual work. Next, we have the legs and feet. And I'm not going to name them all, but I'm going to name four of them. We have the saphenous veins, the great and the small. We have the femoral artery and vein. We have the

popliteal artery and vein. And then we have the tibial arteries, both anterior and posterior. For anyone who just wants to dabble in anatomy, I would suggest going ahead and creating this memory palace based on this episode, just to give you a beginning sort of hands-on experience in creating a memory palace for something like this. And if you're not dabbling in anatomy, but are actually studying it very seriously, I'd also suggest doing this memory palace exercise, even if you've already learned the cardiovascular system, because what you want to do is see what it's like to store these terms in a memory palace, and then to build on that based on what more you need to learn after having set this foundation. Thanks for the question, Kate. In Monday's episode,

which is going to be on history as always, we'll be looking at a timeline of Chinese history. 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.