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Gmail - Day 2: How to remember huge quantities of information quickly and permanently

Sudhin p k <sudhin.spk@gmail.com>

Day 2: How to remember huge quantities of information quickly and permanently

1 message Scott Young <personal@scotthyoung.com> To: sudhin.spk@gmail.com Hey , This is the second day of the free one-week learning faster bootcamp. If you missed yesterday's email, check it out here: Day 1: The principle you can use to amplify your focus and stop procrastinating http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/day-1-bootcamp-2013/ Today I'm going to tackle a common problem--how do you remember everything, especially for subjects that appear to require a lot of memorization, such as languages, biology and law. ---How would you remember 1500 new words in one month? What if you had only 30 minutes a day to learn them? This was the experiment I set for myself when we did the first edition of Learning on Steroids over three years ago. I wanted to see what was the best method for remembering French vocabulary words. I tested three distinct methods and a control. Two of the methods were a bust--they didn't help better than simply repeating the words to myself. But one was golden--it allowed me to remember twice as many words correctly without taking up more time. (35% to over 70% correct recall) Before I explain the technique, I'm going to tell you why it works. First we'll do a brief tour into the world of competitive mnemonics. ---You might think the world of memory competitions is dominated by savants. Rare geniuses who memorize information effortlessly because their brains are hardwired differently than yours and mine. And you'd be wrong. In 2005, journalist Joshua Foer started researching the little known field of memory competitions. As documented in his book, Moonwalk ing with Einstein, he learned that having an incredible memory is mostly based on training specialized techniques, first discovered by the ancient civilizations to memorize information before the advent of writing systems. After a year of preparation, Foer managed to win the 2005 U.S. Memory Championship, even though he had only an average memory before his research began. ---How did he do it? The key is realizing that all memories are not created equally. The brain stores information differently depending on how it is packaged. Emotional, vivid and connected
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Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 11:03 PM

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Gmail - Day 2: How to remember huge quantities of information quickly and permanently

information is set in the brain much more deeply than abstract, boring or arbitrary facts. But many of the things we want to memorize are abstract or arbitrary (and maybe even boring). As a result, we are using the least efficient part of our brains memory to store information. The trick discovered by the ancient Greeks was that you could put hard-to-remember ideas into easy-toremember packages. ---In practice, there are many ways to achieve this hard-to-easy memory repackaging. I teach dozens of different methods in Learning on Steroids, but for the purpose of this bootcamp, I'll share a couple of the most common:

1. Visual Linking
This was the method I used to double my French recall. It works by forcing a connection between two facts, words or ideas. In my case, that meant searing a link in my mind between the English word and its French translation. The method is simple: 1. Come up with a visual symbol for your first word, fact or idea. If I were memorizing the French word chavirer which means to capsize, I could use the "sounds like" approach. To me, chavirer sounds like "shave" + "ear". So I imagine an ear with a big beard getting shaved. 2. Come up with a visual symbol for your second, word, fact or idea. Continuing our last example, I imagine a boat getting capsized for this part. 3. Combine the two visual symbols in an interesting, bizarre, perverse or disgusting way. Sometimes if the symbols are weird enough (like shaving a bearded ear) a simple combination is also memorable (a shaving, bearded ear getting flipped over in his canoe). But if the visual symbols are more mundane (clock + table, let's say) then you might need to spice it up (a giant clock replacing your dining table). The first time you do this it may take a few minutes. But, with practice, you can reduce this down to 10-15 seconds.

2. Atomic Mnemonics
Linking works well when there are only two ideas that need to be joined. Most of the time, however, you'll need to memorize a more complicated system of facts. If you're trying to memorize the properties of all twenty amino acids, you can't link them all pairwise or that would be horribly inefficient. The key to solving this memory puzzle is that each item you're trying to remember has a collection of properties (acidity, polar side chain, etc.). These properties are not singular, often multiple items will share a property and each item has multiple properties. Here we use a simple method to fix it: 1. Create a visual symbol for each property. When I had to memorize the amino acids, I visualized a lemon for acidity and a box of baking soda for alkaline. 2. Come up with a character to represent each item. Lucy from Charlie Brown for leucine, for example. 3. Visualize, in combination, the visual symbol for each property interacting with the character. If you have more than a couple items you need to link, organize them in a weird story so you don't miss any properties later (Lucy walks to the pool but is repelled from the water when she tries to jump, then she goes to the table with lemonade and baking soda, but doesn't feel like eating either). This method also works well for remembering Chinese characters. Make visual symbols for the radicals (very easy since they often have easy-to-visualize meanings) and link them together when you need to remember a more complicated character.

3. The Memory Palace

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Gmail - Day 2: How to remember huge quantities of information quickly and permanently

What if you need to remember dozens or even hundreds of items in a list? One way is to use the visual linking method--just form connections between the first and second idea, then second and third idea and so forth. The problem is that this quickly becomes tedious. Worse, the link method has no fallback. If you accidentally mess up one link later, the whole subsequent chain is forgotten. The fix here is to use a method called the Memory Palace: 1. Pick a place you can imagine very well. This could be a childhood home, a commute to work, a jog you take every day. Anything which you could imagine all the landmarks on the route easily in your mind. 2. Now, walk through that route in your mind. Make a note of all the major landmarks you walk by on your way. 3. Next, rewalk this route, but make a visual link between every landmark you walk by and the idea you want to remember. Use the same process as in the first technique. 4. When you need to remember the list of ideas, just walk the path in your mind and remember the link when you go by each landmark. This was the main technique Joshua Foer used in his memory championship and it is a versatile one if you need to remember more than a few items. ---These are just three specialized memory tools for particular jobs. There are many more you can use to remember all sorts of things easily. What's more important is developing the skill of experimenting and training these methods yourself. Building a memory system isn't necessary for all tasks (other, more general methods I'll share later in the bootcamp work well most of the time), but if you are facing a learning situation with tons of memorization, these can drastically cut your studying time. Whenever I face a new situation that requires a lot of memorization, I run some experiments to try out some variations of these methods until I get a method fine tuned for the job at hand. This requires a little prep work (maybe a day or two to test each variation), but it can pay of handily since a well-tuned approach can be an order of magnitude more efficient than simple rote repetition. As a side note, some repetition is usually a good idea--even if your system is well-tuned. I suggest getting the program Anki to help you with managing your review schedule, since it will automatically reduce the amount of review time you need when your system works well: Anki: https://ankiweb.net/ ----

Day Two Homework Assignment

Now you've learned three different mnemonic techniques to memorize information more quickly, here's your homework: 1. Choose ONE of the three techniques listed above. (If you've never tried any of them before, I recommend Visual Linking as a starting point, because it is the easiest). 2. Pick something you're trying to learn right now. It should be a small set of facts to memorize (only a couple items) for practice. If you can't think of anything to practice on, try memorizing the French word gendarme -> police. 3. Go back, re-read the steps and try applying the technique on the set you want to memorize. If you're having trouble coming up with a visual symbol--look for "sounds like", "looks like" to help you come up with something. Once you're done hit REPLY with one sentence describing the link you made.

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Gmail - Day 2: How to remember huge quantities of information quickly and permanently

That's it for today. Tomorrow, I'll share a more general method that works on understanding and remembering bigger ideas which have more complicated features than can be covered with a simple mnemonic. Best, -Scott P.S. - Thanks for everyone who submitted their REPLY to the first exercise. If you still haven't done yours yet, you can still submit it! I'm looking forward to reading everyone's results (and don't forget to hit REPLY to this one too).
ScottHYoung.com , 1529 W . Pe nde r Stre e t, 1101, Vancouve r, C anada V6G 3J3 Unsubscribe | C hange Subscribe r O ptions

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