Memory Palace Technique: Maximizing Memory Retention with Minimal Effort

The Memory Palace technique enhances studying by using logical associations in optimized memory palaces for long-term memory retention and efficient recall rehearsal.

### Mastering the Memory Palace Technique for Effective Studying
* 🏛 The Memory Palace technique is an ancient method that helps you place information in your long-term memory through **active learning processes**, allowing you to **pass exams** and **minimize study time**.
* 🔢 The Memory Palace technique involves five systems - **Memory Palace system, alphabetical associations, numerical associations, symbol associations, and spaced repetition** - that work together to **maximize memory retention**.
* 🖼 In the Memory Palace technique, it is crucial to establish **clear and distinctive locations** within each Memory Palace, ensuring that they are based on memory and not invented or imagined.
* 📚 To make the Memory Palace technique effective, you should only memorize information that **truly matters** and use a systematic approach to **identify and memorize key points**.
* 📜 You can also use the pages of books as mini Memory Palaces by assigning an image to each number on the page, but this method is more suitable for **non-exam study**.
* 🧠 When using the Memory Palace technique, you need to combine information with associations to link them logically, using **highly sensory images** that are already in your memory.
* 🔠 Instead of creating images, focus on using logic upon logic to **combine memory palaces and images logically**.
* 🏞 To refine the Memory Palace technique, you can use the "**CAVI Cogs**" formula, which includes kinesthetic, auditory, visual, and conceptual elements, as well as olfactory, gustatory, and spatial elements.

### Mastering the Magnetic Memory Palace Technique for Studying
* 🏛 Create a **Memory Palace** by associating each **letter of the alphabet** with people, objects, and numbers to **train your memory quickly**.
* 🔄 Use **recall rehearsal** to revisit the information in the Memory Palace, applying the **primacy effect**, **recency effect**, and **skipping stations** to strengthen your memory.
* 🧠 "If you can memorize **one word**, you can memorize **thousands**. If you can memorize **one string of digits**, you can memorize **thousands of them**."
* 📚 To study multiple subjects, have multiple Memory Palaces, such as **one for each letter of the alphabet**, to enhance your **mental dexterity** in switching between them.
* 🧙 "The key is to have **as many memory palaces as possible** to prevent issues like **overcrowding or overpacking**."
* - Use mnemonic systems for **numbers, symbols, and concepts**
- Don't consider anything that appears in **words, numbers, letters, or symbols** as difficult.
* "If you're going to have an exam and you can find out where that exam is taking place, use that room as **one of your memory palaces** for the exam."
* Master the fundamentals of the **Magnetic Memory Palace Technique** first, and then explore and incorporate other teachings while sticking with each approach for an **extended period** to form a **strong foundation**.

The Memory Palace technique for studying is an absolute waste of time unless you're going to use it correctly. And there's a correct way to do it for sure. Unfortunately, a lot of people do not teach it in its full glory the way that I used it as part of getting my PhD. I had to spend hours and hours and hours of time figuring out how was it that the ancient people carried entire books in their minds when they couldn't carry them on their backs. And part of the reason why that isn't taught correctly is simply because a lot of other people haven't read the ancient books that I found to work it all out. So if you want to stop wasting your time and get maximum results with minimal effort, get subscribed, hit that thumbs up for the love of memory, and to help me train the robots to remember that humans care about the great memory tradition and the truth about what the Memory Palace technique is and how to use it so you can get A+ all the way.

[Music] [Music] [Music] Down. Now we got to talk a little bit about the origin of the method. And no one knows exactly when the Memory Palace technique first arrived on the scene, but lots of people sure like to argue about it. Now there's good research that's been done by Lynn Kelly on prehistoric and some of the early historic origins of the Memory Palace technique in The Memory Code and in Memory Craft, but I think she'll be the first one to tell you that a lot of her ideas are speculative. We just don't know exactly how ancient people around the world came up with the concept, but we do know a lot about how they used it. And we know that since time immemorial, teachers have said, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't use it that way, use it this way, because there are particular ways of using it. But there are also lots of people who like to spread the general idea without the completeness of the idea. So when it comes to using the Memory Palace

technique for studying in a way that basically is going to help you deal with the current school systems. Or if you're going to do it so that you can pass certification exams for work and so forth, the earliest place to look if you want to get into the history, I believe, is a person named Hugh of St. Victor. So his approach to the Memory Palace technique is one of the first examples where you'll see number systems applied to memorizing historical dates, for example. Now you might not have to memorize historical dates, but it's information encoded in numbers. And you can see him also using the idea of reusing memory palaces. So you would take one Memory Palace, memorize a layer of information in it, and then add another layer of information. One of the places that you can learn about Hue of St. Victor is the medieval craft of memory, a really excellent book. There's a lot to study about Hugh St. Victor in particular, and I have a whole video about his imaginary Memory Palace technique, which is essentially using Noah's Ark and then

reusing Noah's Arc or different versions for versions of Noah's Arc. In any case, you can spend your entire life studying the history of the Memory Palace technique, and the more, the merrier, if you ask me. I just love when people find new things that I haven't seen before. There is a wealth of information that hasn't been translated into English yet, and so, by all means, get into it now. The benefit of using the Memory Palace technique correctly in the way we're going to talk about today is really super easy to summarize. So, if you've ever had any doubts like, Why am I bothering to learn this at all? let alone learning it correctly, which you should, is that it is a way of helping you place information in your long-term memory through a variety of active learning processes. That's what helps you pass exams without stress and makes it that you can minimize the amount of time that you have to spend on using the technique. And then you get to enjoy this feeling of confidence every time.

you study, and then later when you sit for your tests, or if you're learning a language, you're able to just use new vocabulary and phrases, etc. relatively fluidly. There's more to it because you actually do have to read, write, speak, and listen to a language in order to get that sort of fluidity, but nonetheless you have this onramp that allows you to access information from your long-term memory without having to go to the Memory Palace. So, all that side, let's understand what the Memory Palace technique is. It's actually not just one technique; it's at least five techniques coming together, and the trick, the secret if you will, is to make all of those things come together as one seamless move. And they'll never be perfectly seamless, but you can get it quite close to seamless. Think about the old Abraham Lincoln thing, you know, Give me six hours to chop down some trees, and I'll spend the first four sharpening my axe. Then take that further. So, we're going to talk.

about sharpening your axe, but then the actual move of chopping down a tree isn't just one move. It's several moves. Your eyes have to have coordination with your hands in order to make the axe fall in just the right way. You have to have a sense of saving your energy so that you actually make every strike of that axe have maximum velocity to reduce the amount of times that you have to hit the tree in order to make it fall over, etc. So it's quite a nuanced thing, but not super nuanced to the point that it's impossible. It's just that you've got to find the knack of it and then work on it and actually get out and chop some trees, you know, in order to figure out how you're going to use the sharpness of your axe to maximize the results with minimal effort. And those come together with the five systems. So the Memory Palace system is one of them. Then you have alphabetical associations, numerical associations, symbol associations, and spaced repetition itself, which is a system. And all of this

combines and blends beautifully within the Memory Palace technique, and it leads to maximum memory retention. Now, alphabet systems, number systems, symbol systems. Two words: mental imagery. What you do in your mind is your imagination. So, a mental image or association doesn't have to be seen. This is one of the biggest keys to getting The Memory Palace technique to work flawlessly. You don't have to see memory palaces, you don't have to see any of your associations that you use in memory palaces, you just have to figure this out because it's knacky. It's going to be a little different in your mind, you got to lean into it, and you got to get away from this Sherlock Holmes mythology. You don't say, I must go to my mind Palace, you just have the information. That's why we use the Memory Palace technique for studying, so that we just have the information. So, we need to use these five systems so that the information enters your long-term memory, and then you can access it without having to think about the Memory Palace technique at all, in a way.

these five systems, when they work together, are like the training wheels that you would have on a bike. As soon as you're done training your mind with the individual sets of information, those training wheels or the pneumonics, including the Memory Palace itself, just fall away. All that remains is the target information when you need it, and that is such a glorious and beautiful thing. I have so many thousands of drawings from students who have sent me their memory palaces and thanked me. Why didn't somebody tell me to do this before? It is so critical because if you don't allow yourself to plan and the Memory Palace, you wind up building it as you go, and that's trying to do two things at once. You want to establish clear and distinctive locations within each and every Memory Palace. The key is making sure that the Memory Palace is clear to you and that it is clearly based on what you remember. Don't invent things. Don't get caught up in, Well, this couch might move in the future, or This

couch has been in different different places in the past if that is going to be in your mind at all just don't use the couch, and don't think yet about having pretend couches or imaginary bookcases stunts like that can be useful, and they can come later, but what we want to do in the beginning is make it as based on memory as possible 100% based on memory so that you can not have to worry about visualizing it many people they start with this their memory is too rusty to worry about visualizing you just want corners and walls if that's what it takes, or you just want to use the center of a room to add anything things like flying off of balconies passing ghostlike through walls anything that you don't do in reality is giving yourself something to remember that's called a memorized Palace and it places cognitive load on the tool when the whole point of a true Memory Palace is to maximize the power of using distinctive locations exactly the way you remember them without having

to elaborate anything, rest assured there's plenty of opportunity to elaborate things when you're using your alphabet system, your number system, your symbol system. And we're going to discuss that in a minute, but get this, most important points of all of them. If you're worried about couches moving around, you're adding unnecessary thinking. If you're thinking about, Well, I could pass like a ghost through this wall, you're giving yourself unnecessary thinking because you're going to have to remember that detail. You want a clear, encompassing journey. You want to start at a location and move in a linear fashion through your mind, whether you see it or not. And you don't have to see it 'cause you can just draw it. You're going to move from station to station to station based on your memory. That's a true Memory Palace, and anything that has to be memorized about it is gone because that's not the art of memory. So once you do this with a couple memory palaces and you use them and you fill them, you'll go

oh yes, that's why he's so insistent about this, right? And yes, later you can do all kinds of fancy stuff, and you can use memory palaces that are memorized in all kinds of different ways. There's endless ways to play around with this, but if you're studying, you don't want to take the risk of having fiddly little nudely memory palaces that are not optimized based on this simple principle. Now, the next thing that's really important here to make sure that the Memory Palace technique for studying is worth your time is to make sure you're using it for the actual information that matters. And so I'll share with you how I've used this technique and I've always studied with wild abandon. I've tried to extract as much information as I possibly could within certain limits, training my mind to understand what is actual information that's worth memorizing, and what you kind of have to do is make an assessment on the fly. So what I love to do is extract information onto

cards. I'm reading a book and I'll make a little mental note. I'll say, This book looks like it's got 10 chapters. Probably there's going to be 10 points, let's say, in each chapter, maybe three, depends on what the book looks like. And I will limit myself to a certain amount of points. And when I find a point that I don't know, I don't recognize it, I don't know it before I do any memorizing, I will extract that information onto cards. Now, that's phase one. No memory palaces are in play at all. Phase two is to go through the cards and then check, Does this really need to be memorized? Does this need to be memorized? What about this? And I will throw cards away or place them in a different area because if it doesn't need to be memorized, why memorize it? Why use the Memory Palace space for information that hasn't passed the test? Now, the key with this to understand this is that this process of weeding through notes that have been

taken is itself part of forming memories right. And it is about summarization. It's about annotation. And it's about assessing the validity and the value of key points and calling them out. This will itself form memories and it will help you understand, Ah, this key point I need to memorize it. And then you memorize only those things that are the key points, knowing that you're forming memories throughout that entire process. Now there's a principle that I call the romatic effect, and it basically is a less is more approach, and less usually is more. So let's say that you started with 30 cards from a book and you've winnowed it down to 10 things that you need to memorize. Those 10 things that you memorize, they're probably going to connect to the other things that you've weeded out simply because you focused on the 10 but you read the entire book and so your mind is going to be able to send out tendrils like ra romes send out little tend

to connect, and they may be connections that are like non-coupling magnets. So, I don't know if you've ever seen these trains that they don't actually attach to each other physically, but they attach to each other magnetically, the individual cars between the trains. In any case, the whole point is that things can connect without being connected, and that's what this whole windwing approach is all about, the culling approach going through cards and then selecting what you're going to memorize. So, what you're going to do is once you have identified the information where the stakes are high, these are terms you don't know, these are words that you need to memorize, these are phrases that you need to memorize, names of figures, historical dates, etc., then you're going to use your memory palaces for that stuff, not everything, but the most likely to be tested information and the most likely to create this romatic effect that draws things together. There's another little thing that I'll mention here that has to do with using the pages.

of books as memory palaces in themselves, or mini memory palaces. So, how that works is that you're going to have your number system built out that you can watch in the POA system video to learn what that is. But basically, what it is, is you're going to have an image for every number. And so, when you have a page, you can turn any page into a mini Memory Palace based on your image for each number. And so, the book, in effect, becomes a kind of Memory Palace unto itself where instead of the wall being a station in a Memory Palace and then the corner being a station in the Memory Palace and a couch and a fridge and a chair and all that sort of stuff, each page is the equivalent of a wall and a corner. And you distinguish it in your mind because page 99 is an image for you. My 99 is the pope, not the Pope in Rome, the singer from Ghost. The point is that 99 is very, very distinct. And then whatever information is on that page, I will then elaborate it and link.

it together with the ghost so there's lots and lots of examples. I can give for this page 79 in a Eugene ther book well actually page 71 to 79 talks about the I think it's the 19th sermon from Meister eart where he's quoting acts 98 which is something like Saul rose up from the ground and saw nothing and then he talks about the four kinds of nothing and the way that the this is not in a Memory Palace and it never was except for the book has a Memory Palace is that that passage starts on page 71 it ends at page 79. There's an image for 71 and there's an image for 79. The image for 71 seven is a k one is a t or d so I make the word cat and there's a specific cat and then seven is a k nine is a p so I have capped in crunch because cap is the sound for this. So now there's this range and then the cat who is the Cheshire Cat.

is then linked with Captain Crunch and linked with the images for the 19th sermon of Meister eart. The numbers for Acts 98, the whole idea of there being four kinds of nothing for symbolized by a sailboat, and on and on and on. So this is a little bit more intermediate and advanced, but it's still the Memory Palace technique looked at in a different way because each and every station is clear and distinct in My Mind by virtue of each number having an image. In the same way that every corner in a room has an image, the corner itself, every wall has an image. Now if I'm studying for an exam, I'm probably not going to use that technique. I'm probably going to use the standard Memory Palace technique because it's much more effective and efficient, and it reduces the feeling of being overwhelmed because a corner has space between itself and the wall. And then that allows for a broader painting, so to speak, with the mental imagery, and it allows for more spaced repetition to work with space.

between the stations now. The ancient memory technique books talk about this. They always talk about having your stations in your memory palaces have some breathing room, right? And you don't get that with the page technique. If you have something on 98 and on page 99, there's no breathing room between those two pages. And it is a little bit of an issue and a problem, but that's why I only use it for my reading when I'm not having an exam. I'm studying, so to speak, but I'm not under the pressure of having an exam. So if I lose little details here and there, no pressure, no worries. So for a proper Memory Palace for studying, if I have an exam, I'm just simply not going to use the book as a Memory Palace. I'm going to have a proper room, a house, a home, a church, a cafe, etc., in order to give myself more space for the recall rehearsal. And really, recall rehearsal requires a bit of mental dexterity, and I don't want fiddling.

around, I don't want to have to worry about distinctions between page 98 and 99, no matter how clear they are at the level of the different images because it still doesn't have that spatial room in which to do station skipping in recall rehearsal, which we'll talk about later before we get to recall rehearsal though, and space repetition systems, and using the Memory Palace in that systematic way, we got to think about the way you use a Memory Palace to combine information with associations to link those individual spaces through Association. Now, Memory scientists call this step elaborative in coding, and this is why you want your memory palaces to be as clear and distinct as possible because if you have to Fiddle in your mind with the Memory Palace technique, then you're not going to have enough enough cognitive space to work on elaborating and associating your images with that space. So think about each station as just needing to be what it is. When you go to your fridge in your home, right, you don't want to have to have all

kinds of issues with it. You just want to go to the fridge because you know clearly where it is. And then if you want to take a fridge magnet, you want to stick that magnet on the fridge to hold concert tickets in place or something like that. So if you want to memorize a word, like I wanted to memorize a very simple example recently, enantio, right? I want to memorize this word. So I'm going to go to my brother's place, right? And I'm going to use his living room in this particular case. And anoia and I'm going to imagine Ant-Man watching Videodrome in his living room. There's a bit more to the image than that, but the core technique was executed by paying attention to the alphabetical construction of the word, the relationship to my brother, which is also alphabetical, and then placing it in a place that is clear and distinct in my mind where I don't have to think about the place at all. I just have to have the alphabetical Association, and then I put

Ant-Man in that place watching video Drome. So, the N has to do with my brother. The enantio antio has to do with Ant-Man. The Ria has to do with video drum. They're paired with the living room, and the success of pairing them together so quickly has to do with the memory Pals just being a non-issue. It's worked out in advance. I know where I'm going to go. I know what the next word will be if I want to add one in the Memory Palace or the next phrase or whatever the information is. It could be a symbol from math and so on and so forth. All that stuff has to be super clear if you're going to use the Memory Palace technique for studying efficiently because then when you come across hard words like an antio, you want to just be very quick in putting those associations there, and you want to have memorable mnemonic images, not vague weak things where you have to go, Oh, what was that image there? No, no, no, no, no. You don't want any of that stuff.

right you want Vivid images and this is where it's really important to understand that the images are not about images. [Music] [Music] what is really about is using logic upon logic using the Memory Palace as a logical sequence of stations throughout a space a journey to link highly multi-sensory images that are already in your memory. So my brother's already in my memory Ant-Man is already in my memory and video Drome is already in my memory and I'm just linking these things together with the sound and the meaning of an antio. Right This is So Glorious when you start to get this when you start to practice it on this basis it's very very important because you don't want to invent stuff you don't want to have to create images. I get messages all the time I'm struggling to create images whoever taught you to create images in the first place I don't know oh why that that people talk about it that way that's not the art of memory the art of

memory is to use memory to use memory palaces that are based on memory to use images that are based on memory and to combine the two logically. First and foremost, then you add different forms of elaboration where images might be involved. Now to refine everything to the nth degree, I prefer what I call the cave cogs formula. So rather than bus around with all this stuff to elaborate it, I simply follow that formula. So rather than seeing Ant-Man as such, I first get a kinesthetic feeling. That's the K in cave cogs. So what might that feeling be? Well, it depends on what's going on, what is the meaning of the word. So I will try to feel Ant-Man, you know, somehow being overwhelmed by a force and then responding to that force in a particular way physically because that relates to the meaning of this word. Then I'll hear an auditory sensation in my mind's ear. Then maybe I'll have some visual. In this case, I didn't really have any visual because it's just not necessary. So I don't always have kav

kinesthetic, auditory, visual, but I do have an emotion, and that emotion is also felt, but it's not felt physically in Ant-Man's body. It's felt in his emotion. So Ant-Man is played, you know, by a particular actor. And so, uh, is it Paul Rudd who plays? You don't even have to remember who it is that plays the character, as long as you can get that sensation in your mind of what his way of feeling emotional would be relative to the sound and the meaning of the word. Then there's conceptual, which is the C in CAVI. Cogs, and that can be a hard one for people to understand, but basically I just want to think a little bit, what's the genre here, what's going on. So Videodrome is kind of like a body horror movie, and Ant-Man is a Marvel picture, I believe, and so these ideas are going to be touched upon, and then I'm going to try to relate them logically to the meaning of Antiotheia. Then we have olfactory, gustatory, and spatial.

that's can get a little smell and a taste in there, and then think about the sizes of things in relationship to each other, so literally feeling what it would be like to watch a movie in the body of Ant-Man creates all of these multi-sensory associations. It is so important, and you can train yourself to do this very, very quickly, and all the more so because you're basing your images on things that you've seen in the real world. Now I know you may not have seen Videodrome, I know you may not have seen Ant-Man, but this is the art of memory. It's for you to practice using what you have seen, what you have a relationship with. Some people, they absolutely love anime, right? Because they just spent a lot of time with anime. Great. Some people like Pokémon, some people like all kinds of things. I happen to like weird Canadian movies like Videodrome, and I like Ant-Man. So, you know, these things have come to mind, but they don't come to mind out of nowhere. They come to mind

because I've trained myself to do this. So, how are we going to train ourselves to do this? As a rabbi once told his student who said, How is it that you guys are memorizing the Tanakh with such great tenacity? Well, the rabbi said, You must become a student, a serious student of the alphabet. So, please become a serious student of the alphabet. Get yourself a blank faed deck of playing cards or just some of these wonderful index cards blank and write out the alphabet and look at letters. So, when you have the letter U, instantly come to your mind should be Uma Thurman, right? Or whoever it could be, Uve B. You don't know these people necessarily. I do. I worked with Uve B on a movie when I was a story, but that's who I have here instantly when I look at you. And I train myself just go through here. Who else could I add? Alberto Ekko, the great writer who wrote The Name of the Rose and wonderful non-fiction. And then you know

you go to R and Ricky J comes to mind and so on. You go to Jay. The Joker of course should come to mind. Everybody knows the Joker, don't they? But also Jack Nicholson who played The Joker, and on and on and on. John Connor, it could be a fictional character. John Connor, of course, being J.J.C. in The Terminator series, and Jesus Christ, which is probably why he was named J.C. Cookie Monster, on and on and on. X, I know this is a letter that troubles a lot of people. Zentia, Zen, Xenophon, Xerxes, Professor X from X-Men. Did I say Zenia? Yeah, that was, I believe, the wife of Socrates. The whole point is you got to train yourself to be able to do this, and also objects are useful too. Xylophone comes to mind for X. Malcolm X, you know, on and on and on. And if you don't have a Memory Palace for X, then you could think of a library where you read about Malcolm X. That s

sort of thing. You also want to include some numbers in here because you want number systems as well. So this has particular symbols, and it depends on which number system we're using. I know this is all mentally overwhelming for people who are new to it, but you reduce the overwhelm by training. What do you know that starts with S? Superman. Probably most people know Superman, and you can go from there, right? And there's all kinds of people, and you just got to train yourself. And that's one of my favorite ways to train and practice: simple cards. You don't have to go to the extent that I've gone to to make your own deck, but I recommend that you at least do it with this, and then have one just for numbers and just for symbols, and train yourself to constantly come up with these associations. Because then when you're studying, you won't have any issues whatsoever coming up with these images. You won't. And I know you won't because the memory science is very, very clear. You are going to train your procedural

memory and procedural memory is a superpower when you're using the Memory Palace technique for studying. Now the other thing to do with this is to also train Cape cogs. So let's say you have Superman or you have ananodromia and you're thinking about Ant-Man or whatever. The whole point is to elaborate this thing. So let's say we're in my brother's house. We're memorizing anantiotheria and we have Ant-Man smelling steak right, and it's covered in ants. And then we have Superman serving the steak or whatever. Well, we're going to feel Superman serving the steak. He's really going to hold the plate with the steak covered in ants in his hands. We're going to feel that in our hands. We're going to hear of all these ants moving around. We're going to have a visual of it. I mean, you don't even have to see the visual in order to imagine what it would look like if you could see it.

usually no time when you're memorizing then we're going to go through the emotion. So Superman, what emotion does he have when he's handing a steak to Ant-Man in order to help us remember this word right? And then you can have the smell and the taste of what stake is like. You can have the concept, which is like Superman is actually from DC instead of Marvel, etc. And on and on and you can have the size of Superman's muscles relative to Ant-Man's muscles. You can train on every single card, right? So you get to Q and you think of Quincy Jones. And then you can think of Quincy Jones doing something. What does that physically feel like? And you can rotate through your cave CS. So you get to your ex and you have Xerxes or Xenophon or whoever. And you can think, well, okay, so what is he going to have a physical sensation of? And you can actually take two of your cards together. So if you have, I don't know, Kurt Russell and Zenfon. So now what are they going to do?

to each other, to have a kinesthetic association, to have an auditory sensation, to have a visual, to have an emotion, etc. So train, train, train in advance so that you're able to come across information, rack it and stack it in a Memory Palace, and have images that are already in your memory. Because you look at the letter H and you don't have to hum and haw over this. You got Harry Lorraine for H. I mean, of course, we're in the memory world here. We have Harry Lorraine, but we have all kinds of people, and we just train, train, train. And it doesn't take more than a second to just think of who we're going to have. People named Frank, I have a friend named Frank. There's a philosopher named Michel Foucault, on and on and on. Einstein for E, etc. But who else? See if you can always push yourself to get five people, etc. So Eric from blah blah blah, like on and on and on. Work at it. It's really, really important. Chances are you already know.

five people that have the letter V somehow in their name train train train and then you're always going to have sharp associations that are based on what's already in your memory to place in well-formed memory palaces that are also already in your memory with no invention. You don't have to create anything if the memory palaces aren't well formed and you're sitting there trying to come up with things that don't exist or that aren't already in your memory you're making it too hard. So the next question that we want to cover assuming you have all of this fundamental optimized wonderful strategies and tactics under your belt or at least you're practicing them based on the real tradition the way it really has worked for thousands of years you're going to be wondering like well how do I now do this with multiple subjects. I have chemistry on Tuesday I have philosophy on Wednesday like how do I juggle all of this well to use the technique for a variety of subjects make sure to have multiple memory palaces and

the simplest way to set up for the mental dexterity involved in switching between multiple memory palaces is to have them in the first place. Have one for each letter of the alphabet so that you're able to encode always at the alphabetical level. Now that doesn't mean that you are always going to encode at the alphabetical level. You might want to build a number-based Memory Palace system and have sub memory palaces, memory palaces within memory palaces on and on and on and on. But the reality is the easiest way to do it is just to simply have one for every letter of the alphabet. Only scarcity-based thinking holds people back in this regard. In reality, there is more space around each and every one of us than any of us could ever hope to use in a lifetime. So get busy, get a piece of paper out, write the letter a and then write all the letters from A to Z or whatever letters are involved in your mother tongue and then just think who can I use for a oh I got

a friend named Adam. Oh, I got a friend named Brad. And just draw out their memory palaces so that you never have to really think about those memory palaces again. Because you'll have based them on memory. And then when it comes time to use them, you'll have them ready to go. Your journey sorted out in advance. Now there's the point about memorizing dates. So let's say you know you're doing history and you have to switch from philosophy to history. Or you had to add a historical date to a philosophical point and so forth. You're going to want a number system. Now the most popular system is the major system. Or its big brother, so to speak, which is a 00 to 99 Pao system. All of that is covered in its own video. Video you can look in the resources for links below. And whatever it is studying for science for concepts for theories. It comes down to these five systems. And the way that you got to deal with Concepts and Science and theories and formulas is really make sure that you're

not hypnotizing yourself into thinking that anything that appears in words numbers letters symbols is difficult. It's not. If you can memorize one word, you can memorize thousands. If you can memorize one string of digits, you can memorize thousands of them. If you can work out a way to memorize an imaginary symbol like a two with an umlaut on it, you can memorize any symbol in the world. You know, you've just got to work out, well, what is going to be my mnemonic association for an umlaut. And you know, in Greek, you may see two dots. It's not an umlaut in Greek, but in any case, there's lots of places where these things come up with. So you might need to know the difference between the umlaut, how it's used in German, and then how these two dots are used in Greek, and then you just place those things in different memory palaces. But if you sit there and trick yourself into thinking, oh my goodness, there must be some different

system for this there isn't. It's always the same system. All you need is to make your systems in advance. So, Memory Palace system, alphabet system, number system, symbol system, and then comes the spaced repetition system, or what I prefer to call recall. Rehearsal recall rehearsal is the core reason to use the Memory Palace technique for studying in the first place. It is beautiful for space repetition, and to do it well, you will practice with a specific kind of retrieval that will strengthen your memory and usher your target information into long-term memory quickly. So, basically, what you want to do is have enough information in the Memory Palace. First, let's say you have 10 pieces of information in a Memory Palace. And how this works is you want to apply equal doses of primacy effect and recency effect to each piece of information using the serial positioning effect. So, without going into a long speech about Hermann Ebbinghaus and the forgetting curve and all of that, all you need to do is revisit the information in the Memory Palace.

Palace by moving forward, backward from the middle of the Mary Palace to the beginning, and then from the middle of the Mary Palace to the end of the sequence. And then you want to skip the stations. Each of these recall patterns will challenge you, and that's precisely the point because you're dipping into what scientists of learning and memory sometimes call Active recall. And it is the challenge that helps form the memories. And when you're making mistakes, that's not a problem. That's actually an opportunity to think, what was wrong with my image in the Memory Palace that needs just a little bit of tweaking, a little bit of improving. This goes back thousands of years. You can find this in Aristotle's deoria. And I've talked about it in a video called Aristotle's nuclear alphabet if you want to know more about just how old this principle is. So you need to follow those orders. And then you solve all your problems because a lot of people will say, well, how do I extend a Memory Palace? Can I alter a Memory

Palace. Can I change its size dimensions? Can I extend its size, all this stuff, right? Well, if you develop them optimally in the first place, and you use recall rehearsal to get the information into long-term memory, extending a Memory Palace should never be needed. And plus, you'll have a Memory Palace for every letter of the alphabet. And then you'll have another Memory Palace Network, again based on the letters of the. So, in other words, you'll have two memory palaces for a, eventually, if not three, if not four, etc. And you just don't have to extend any individual Memory Palace because the whole point is to use it to get the information into long-term memory. Now, there's a principle called compounding, which is if you have memories established, you can add on details. So, let's say I've got an antio dromia set up. I remember that it's in a particular Memory Palace. And then I want to add on some facts about Carl Young and connect it to another one of his cool words like

cryptomnesia, right. Well, I can compound that on in the original Memory Palace. But I should be just as capable of making a new Memory Palace or using a pre-assigned Memory Palace, and then just adding on. This relationship shouldn't have to go back, back to the original Memory Palace. Shouldn't have to extend the original Memory Palace. I shouldn't have to connect one Memory Palace to another in ways that don't actually reflect the reality of those spaces. You certainly can, but it shouldn't be necessary because the new information can just be memorized new. And here's the beauty of it all. You sometimes just remember it because you've already established this core piece of information in your long-term memory. And if you want to not have any risk at all, you just grab one of your Memory Palaces and you weave it into space. And then you use recall rehearsal to get the information into long-term memory so you don't have to worry about overcrowded Memory Palaces. You don't have to worry about overpacking your Memory Palaces.

the end of the day, although that is bound to happen if you're a serious user. The real key is to have as many memory palaces as possible to prevent these issues from ever happening in the first place. And then when they do happen, you can correct course and just say, Oh wow, I'm really getting scarcity mindset here. I'm trying to put too much stuff in this one place. I'll just move this into another Memory Palace using the alphabetical method, drawing upon other places that I have established. So, I've really wanted to focus our minds on just using the marry Palace almost purely logically, but there are some other ways that you can play around with this, and they really ultimately come down to Cave cogs. So, one thing you can do, for example, is Imagine riding physically onto the walls of your memory palaces. Aquinus suggests this based on the wax tablet metaphor of memory that we see in Aristotle, Plato, etc., and I found that that is just an additional amount of cognitive effort that isn't necessary.

like to float my associations so they're not physically connected to the walls, or the floor, or the ceiling of the memory palaces. This approach gives more breathing room in my experience to each and every image. Now, sometimes they may be connected. So when I think about an anoia and Ant-Man, he's kind of in a recliner. He's connected to the station by virtue of the fact that there is a recliner in the location that I used. But if there was nothing there, I would just float the image in space and not have any special need for connection. So, I will use the physical space if that it lends itself to what I'm doing, but not if I'm worried that that chair might move, the recliner moving, just not use it at all or just remember the core information through recall rehearsal. So it's not an issue, right, because I never want to have to go back to a Memory Palace to recall that word ever again. I want it in long-term memory. So you can get really into connections, but I think

the ideal the nepu ultra if you will is to not have connections at all unless they're just happening happening naturally due to the way. The Memory Palace is another thing that we should talk about. Is people ask well, how can I clean out a Memory Palace? I used to do this a lot. I'd get a broom sweeping out the associations. I'd get the mops that Mickey Mouse has in Fantasia and have them washing out memory pales. This really just seemed ultimately to me to be a waste of time relative to just having multiple memory palaces, using them with recall rehearsal to get the information into long-term memory, and then going on to more memory palaces. There's so much space in the world. The key is to really make sure that you're doing the art of memory in a way that works for you. So there's lots of advice out there from all kinds of people, and you want to explore, but try to make sure that whatever you're exploring, you explore for long enough without muddying

the water of other people's ideas to get a sense of one person's style. So if you pick this set of suggestions, stick with it for at least 90 days so your brain can formulate the neuronal connections that will help you really understand it. Start wherever you are now and understand that if you keep moving around from this or that teacher and getting shiny objects distracting you over and over and over again, you're going to interrupt the for of any skill. By all means, study this technique from all the people you can find. That's what I did, but I stuck with one approach for long enough to really feel what that individual was talking about. Then I added different ideas and worked with those. There's a key example I can share with you about this. I did this for years and years and years, and I came across one idea from Ron White. We talked about it in our discussion, which you can watch on my channel and listen to on the audio magnetic marry method podcast. And then I just stuck with his Association or his way of dealing with numbers relative to

having a body, a number-based body Memory Palace, and I've been using it ever since. But I paid the due diligence, so to speak, by actually not doing anything else for enough time to nail it, to make it really, really useful. And that's what I suggest that you do too. So it's not an ego thing where I'm saying, Hey, if you're going to do my training, stick with it for at least 90 days. It's a neuroscientific thing, and it's well, it's well established in all kinds of Science. And I practice it myself, not just in memory but also in meditation. When I came across the Gary Weber approach to memory-based meditation, memorizing Sanskrit, I stuck with it before I started to bring in other ideas in order to allow myself to really feel it and knowing what I know about how memory formation Works relative to Habit formation, letting that time build a foundation before adding the next strata on top of it, so that the next technique had a foundation to settle upon, right.

this is going to be so much better for you over the long term. Even if it's a bit of a sacrifice in the short term, you will ultimately benefit more from other teachings, precisely because you have a foundation upon which to base the other teachings. So go nuts, but always, always, always keep this in mind. It's been so useful for me. I hope it'll be useful for you. And the other thing about this that I think is really, really important to understand and to allow yourself to absorb deeply is the principle in memory science of context dependence or state-dependent memory. And get to that in a second. But thank you for being here. Thanks for hitting that thumbs up. Thanks for getting subscribed. If you're new here, leaving your comments, sharing this around. And if you'd like to go even further into some of the issues around the Memory Palace technique as such, but also in terms of reusing memory palaces and using memory palaces specifically for studying things like languages and so forth, make sure to go to Magnetic.

method.com YT. I've got four videos there that are going to take you deeper into the fundamentals of creating well-formed memory palaces. There's more examples from students, PDF worksheets that you can complete that make everything faster for you at magnetic method.com YT. Now here's the thing and is you can't always use this, but when you can, it is so wonderful and Powerful to do. If you're going to have an exam and you can find out where that exam is taking place, use that room as one of your memory palaces for the exam because this will give you better context-dependent memory. You're going to be in the space that you used your memory Palace for. Now again, it's not always possible, but there's also the alternative which I used a lot when I was at York University and I used it again when I did a ma in Switzerland is to use the campus use the area where you're studying as a Memory Palace so it's close enough so even if you can't use the room where you're taking an exam.

As your memory Palace, you can use the surrounding area, which will give you a little bit of that context dependence or state-dependent memory. You will be in the context of where you need to recall the information. You'll be in the state, and that will give you an extra boost of recall. I don't know exactly why it works, but I think it works probably just quite in a common sense way. You're in the context; you're in that state. But the trick still is to master the fundamentals first so that you enjoy smooth sailing with all of the five mnemonic systems, and that you're able to use them as if they were just one move, even though they are built from several moves. Sharpen that axe, study the individual moves of chopping the axe, and you will be able to cut down the forest of anything you need to study in minimal time with minimal effort and maximum results. That's what the magnetic memory method is all about. Thanks for joining me. I hope you found this useful. I hope you had it as fun to go through as I had.

fun making it for you. Get subscribed if you're not already. Hit that thumbs up. And until we have a chance to speak again, keep yourself magnetic.

The Memory Palace Technique For Studying

Bestselling author and Memory Palace enthusiast, Anthony Metivier is the founder of the Magnetic Memory Method, a systematic, 21st Century approach to memorizing foreign language vocabulary, dreams, names, music, poetry and much more in ways that are easy, elegant, effective and fun.

If you want to learn more about mnemonics and memory techniques like the Memory Palace, Mind Palace, journey method, Roman Room and meet multiple memory experts, get subscribed to this channel to learn as much as you can. We talk about everything related to memory improvement. 

And to learn how to create a Memory Palace properly, grab Anthony's FREE Memory Improvement Kit here: http://www.magneticmemorymethod.com/yt

Anthony Metivier

The Correct Way to Use the Memory Palace Technique

The Memory Palace technique is often taught incorrectly, but when used properly, it can significantly improve long-term memory and learning efficiency.

The technique, dating back to ancient times, involves using five different systems - Memory Palace, alphabetical associations, numerical associations, symbol associations, and spaced repetition - to encode and retain information.

Victor was one of the first to apply the technique to memorizing historical dates, and his approach included the reuse of Memory Palaces for layering information.

The Memory Palace technique relies on mental imagery and doesn't require actually seeing the palaces or associations.

It serves as a tool for studying and long-term memory retention.

Clear and distinctive locations within each Memory Palace are crucial, and it's important to selectively choose the information to be memorized.

Extracting information onto cards and assessing its worth before using the Memory Palace space is a key part of the technique.

The Role of Annotation in Memory Formation

Annotation and summarization help in forming memories by identifying key points for memorization.

The "romatic effect" principle suggests that focusing on a few key points can help in connecting and memorizing other related information.

Using book pages as mini Memory Palaces is a more advanced technique, best suited for studying outside of exam pressure, while proper Memory Palaces are more effective for exam preparation and recall rehearsal.

Using the Memory Palace Technique for Efficient Studying

The Memory Palace technique involves creating clear and distinct mental spaces to aid in memorization and recall.

It focuses on logically linking sensory images that are already in the memory, rather than inventing new ones.

The technique can be enhanced by following the "cave cogs" formula, which involves kinesthetic, auditory, visual, emotional, and conceptual elements for a more holistic memory experience.

The Art of Memory: Training Your Brain with Multi-Sensory Associations

Training your brain to create multi-sensory associations is crucial for improving memory.

Using familiar images and objects, such as playing cards or letters, can help strengthen your memory recall.

The key is to engage all the senses, including emotions, smells, tastes, and even the size of objects, to enhance the memorization process.

The Memory Palace technique involves creating strong associations and using well-formed memory palaces.

Having multiple memory palaces for different subjects allows for easy switching between them.

The technique also relies on the use of specific systems for memorizing numbers, letters, and symbols, as well as spaced repetition for strengthening memory recall.

Using the Memory Palace technique involves challenging recall patterns to form memories, following a method that dates back thousands of years.

It is not necessary to extend or connect Memory Palaces, as the focus should be on using recall rehearsal to establish information in long-term memory.

The ideal approach is to avoid physical connections in the Memory Palace, instead allowing images to float in space, and there is no need to clean out a Memory Palace, as the key is to use multiple palaces effectively for memory recall.

The Power of Sticking to One Technique in Memory Training

Sticking to one approach for an extended period helps in forming strong neuronal connections and deep understanding.

The principle of context-dependent memory in memory science emphasizes the importance of using the exam room or campus as a memory palace.

Mastering the fundamentals first is crucial for smooth utilization of mnemonic systems and achieving maximum results with minimal effort.