Ma Yun（马云）, founder of Alibaba, once said, “We’re crazy, but we’re not stupid.”
You need to do something crazy, to do what others aren’t able to do. With the Memory Palace, I’ve been able to get 100% on in-class essays and finals regularly. I look around, and I am surprised that no one else does this.
My goal through these substacks is to teach you how, and eventually build a community of “Mem-bers” who can share our experiences and make the effective technique more efficient.
Before I teach you the method, a few words of warning:
If you’re just beginning, START SLOW. I’ve used the memory palace for a year now, which is how I can memorize such a large amount of information in a short time. If you are just starting, don’t be discouraged that you are only able to memorize a few words at a time. I encourage you to use this to memorize small things first, then gradually memorize everything with this technique.
This is gonna stretch your brain. Once you start using this technique, it’s gonna feel weird. You’re not gonna like it. But nothing is free, you need to earn it, including academic freedom. You need to practice and train your brain so you can most efficiently use the technique.
Efficiency > Understanding. I’ve talked about this last post, but I want to reiterate this time, that this technique is all about efficiency. It won’t help you better understand the material, that’s on you. But it will help you memorize everything and anything.
Here’s how I used the memory palace to memorize 25 pages in 3 days:
Find a room that you are familiar with. It can be your living room, bedroom, kitchen, just anywhere you go to a lot. Even your school works! Any classroom, or hallway that you are familiar with works.
Pick 10-30 points as “sites” in your room. Now, in your room, pick 10 - 30 things that you can use as anchors to memorize your items. These need to be physical objects that you can distinguish. For example, a lamp, a computer, a cabinet. These are some examples of items I used as part of my memory palace.
Associate the stuff you want to memorize to the “sites”. Final step, and the trickiest step. You want to associate your words/phrases/formulas with the objects in your room. Here are the steps to do that:
“Physical Transcription”. Turn ideas into words. Just like what I talked about last time, turn things you can’t touch into things you can. Make “checks and balances” turn into “balances on top of checks”. We as humans are better at memorizing visual pictures so make them visual. If you’re memorizing a name, like Fred Korematsu, then imagine Fred from Harry Potter, with corn (Korem) as teeth, dancing on a mat (matsu). Voila! Fred Korematsu!
Attach! Next, you need to attach the object to your “site”. You have to be creative at attaching the item to make it memorable. If you are attaching an elephant to a lamp, memorize a “tiny pink elephant dancing on a lamp”. You won’t get that out of your head, will you? Or if you are attaching a train to a table, think of the train dangling from the table. If it doesn’t make sense, good. Then chances are, it will be memorable.
That’s how I memorize for tests. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me via email at eric.chen.zhu@gmail.com. I will be more than happy to talk with you about using this technique.
One last note: Based on my experience with friends, out of everyone who LEARN this technique, about 14% of you are gonna TRY it. Then out of the 14% of you who tried it, around 14% are gonna USE it. 14% * 14% = 1.96%.
Hmm, that looks kinda familiar…
That's a good summary of the technique, concise and objective, congratulations. However, I would like to add something:
Before choosing the objects in the room, make a list of all the items you want to memorize, then you'll know exactly how many items of information, and consequently, you'll know how many objects you need! It's more organized to do it in this sequence.