Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0556: Reprise: Can I memorize the Bible in just two years?

Episode Date: April 25, 2016

Reprise: Can I memorize the Bible in just two years? 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.

Hey guys, this is Timothy, and I'm publishing a book. Now, this may not be new news to all of you, but I bring it up because it's temporarily changing some things here on the show. We're going to be running a series of reprise episodes for the next few weeks due to my need to focus exclusively on this writing project. The book is going to cover absolutely everything about language hacking that I've learned from years of working directly with fluency coaching students and native speaking coaches to see what truly works and gets amazing results. It's going to be a high-end book with the hardcover copy priced at around $40, and that's if I can keep it as short as I'd like to keep it.

But as podcast listeners, you can actually get a free digital copy of the book if you sign up early. Just go to Spanishin1month.com, and you'll be on the early bird list to get access to the book the day that it's released. Meanwhile, for now, enjoy this rerun of one of my favorite episodes from the last few months. 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. David wrote in an email, I have a dream that I would like to memorize the entire New Testament in a year and the Old Testament the following year.

How would I go about it? So David, forget every accelerated learning tactic in the world. There's no question that this would be really tough, and you would make history because it hasn't been done before, but I would definitely be interested in collaborating with you on this and making it happen if you're actually serious about it. Now what I would do is I would proceed according to this system that I'm going to lay out. It'll get you results very quickly, and the beauty of it is that even if you don't completely finish or end up having to stop at some point,

you'll still know the whole Bible. And so even if you stop, this is designed so that even if you stop after about 10% of the process, you still know the whole Bible very well and the way that it's laid out. So first of all, learn all the sections or topics of each chapter. Do that first before anything else. You're going to use a memorable character in a building for each book. So we have 66 unique characters in 66 unique buildings or outdoor locations for the 66 different books.

So that's your first step before anything else. Then you're going to have a different room in each of those places or a different area for each chapter. For example, if you use Central Park, New York for one of your books of the Bible, you're going to use a different major area of Central Park for each chapter. Find a way to remember the topics of the chapters tied to each room or to each outdoor area. On average, there are probably about three topics or stories for each chapter, although, for example, some of Luke's chapters have as many as 15 different stories within a single chapter because they're absurdly long, but you just want to try to lay that whole thing out for yourself,

and if you do that, you tie the stories of these things to these different areas, and bingo, you know the layout of the whole Bible. Now that you have the topics memorized, the second step is to memorize one key verse per section. So we're talking about three key verses per chapter on average. You're going to use an object peg to remember the verse reference, and these object pegs are going to be based on the major system for remembering numbers. So, for example, 14 would be a tire. It could be 1-4 for a tire. So, if you're memorizing Philippians 3-14, you're going to use a tire to represent the proceeding toward the goal, racing toward the goal, using a tire,

maybe jumping through a tire. Do that for all of those verses. There are going to be a lot of them, but see how many of them you can do before you burn out. At that point, you not only know the whole layout of the entire Bible, but you know a lot about every single book and every single topic, basically, covered by the whole Bible. Third step is is now that you have all the key verses memorized, start to memorize the verses in between, going sequentially through each area in each memory palace. You're going to use more object pegs for different verses. So before the tire, you have your memorable character for Philippians

doing something with a dime, and right after the tire, you're going to have him doing something with a doll. At this point, I would select maybe one section or one chapter at a time, and also be listening to recordings of them, you know, basically constantly while you're doing this memory project. So alternate between quizzing on the keywords of these sections and listening to the entire thing and trying to recite along based on your imagery. This will be the long and tedious part. Everything else has been fairly quick, relatively speaking, and so again, even if you burn out 20% of the way through this project, we've used the exclusivity

principle to learn the 20% that give you the 80% of results of being able to say that you know the whole Bible really well just from that first amount of work. So best wishes for you, David, on this. And again, I'd love to collaborate with you and work on your imagery for all of these different palaces because this is definitely something that I'd like to do as well as far as memorizing the whole Bible is concerned, although I don't find it something that I expect to do in two years.

For everyone listening, what do you want to learn or memorize? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question and I'll talk to you again soon.