Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0557: Reprise: Navigating enormous memory palaces

Episode Date: April 26, 2016

Reprise: Navigating enormous memory palaces What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. It offers a broad range of criminal background check solutions, such as county, state and federal criminal searches, employment and education verifications, as well as the option of getting an online bachelors degree, and other selections like social security reports and […]

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. Chris submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Chris says, how do routes work in the memory palace? I read Yeats' book on the art of memory, and he said centuries ago people would have entire libraries in their head. Also, if you're aware, Hannibal Lecter in the Thomas Harris novels, The Serial Killer, had an amazing memory, and his memory palace consisted of thousands of rooms.

My question is, if he had to recall something quickly, how does he reach room 662 or 448 or 204 quickly? Do you have to have a route, or should you know your palace so well that you can start anywhere? So Chris, the short answer is you should know your palace well enough that you can start anywhere, and I would say that's the advantage of palaces. I mean, if you're using your childhood home as a palace, just as an example, if I told you to think of your bedroom, you wouldn't go, okay, wait just a minute, let me think. Okay, I have to go into the house and then down the hall. Oh yeah, now I remember what my bedroom was like. It's not like that at all. You can remember the place immediately. Now you're talking about these stations as numbered because you're thinking of linear indexes, but I would say that palaces don't have to be you know you go from one end to the other. They don't have to be structured that way. I mean you should be able to go through them entirely if you want to go through them entirely so you're not missing any information, but I like to

index memory palaces from more of a top-down approach. So you kind of have an index of large areas, such as buildings, and then smaller areas within that, such as rooms, and then within that you have substations so that you can place various things throughout those rooms, although you want to know where all of those indexes are, of course. Now there should be a trigger that immediately puts you where you want to go. Like if I was to say, you know, the Constitution, Article 3, Section 2, Paragraph 3, then you would quickly think of your palace for Article 3, your sub location in the palace, you know, your room in the palace for Section 2 of Article 3, and then the location within that for paragraph 3. Maybe it's under your bed if section 2 is the bed in some apartment that you've lived in at some point for article 3.

So the point is you don't have to go through the entire Constitution to remember what that is. You quickly have it indexed, and you can bring yourself directly to the location from a top-down approach rather than from a linear approach. Now, with that said, here's my challenge for you, Chris. Why don't you think of some sort of field of information or some sort of document or something like that that you would like to know about or to be able to navigate well,

whether it's a text or a field of knowledge, a textbook that you might have to study for some particular class. I would suggest that you might have to study for some particular class, I would suggest that you take a top-down approach and just even arbitrarily choose a few locations to put the different major sections of this thing and then decide how you would subdivide those major sections into smaller sections based on the rooms of those buildings that you pick or the areas in the parks or whatever it might happen to be. And then from there, just make sure that you can remember all of those indexes. Just make sure you can relate the ideas, not the specific information within those ideas, but maybe just the names of the chapters or whatever it happens to be along with those locations. And I'm not

asking you to do this with some sort of information that you're wanting to remember long term. I'm not asking you to create a memory palace that you're going to use for the rest of your life. I'm asking you to do this just as an exercise in seeing how it is that memory palaces work. Because you're asking from a theoretical standpoint, whereas I'd be interested in helping you create real palaces that you can use after you've had some good experience in storing things in a location-based method like this. So start doing something like that, even minimally, and then shoot me a message at timothyatmasterofmemory.com, and let's see where we can take this from there. For everyone listening, 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.