7 min read
My 14-year-old daughter used this memory technique and won a contest with her teacher.
How did she do it?
The teacher challenged her class to a geography quiz competition using this Sporkle Geography Quiz. To win, students needed to memorize all 197 countries and enter the countries into Sporkle faster than she could.
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Despite the prize offer, none of her students took her up on this challenge … except my daughter.
Why did she do it?
My daughter raised her hand and accepted the challenge because she knew she had a secret weapon. A few years before, I researched memory techniques and taught my kids a very effective way to remember long lists of information. For practice, we all memorized the 50 US States. It was actually fun, and it worked!
So, when the competition day arrived, my grade 9 daughter had already memorized all 197 Countries and filled them in faster than her teacher! The students in her class went wild! Let’s just say I’m a proud papa 👴.
Today, we’re going to talk about how she did it.
While she put in the work, it was easier than you’d think.
She used an incredibly important tool in your toolbox of learning. It’s called the Memory Palace. This approach is not exactly new. It’s been used since Ancient Greece and is sometimes called the Method of Loci.
No One Knows About It = Huge Advantage For You
The thing about the Memory Palace that makes it especially interesting is that very few people know about it.
Maybe 5% of the people I mentioned it to had heard of a memory palace beforehand.
If you’ve ever seen the World Memory Championships (and yes, that is a thing), you’ll be familiar with it. If you can take advantage of this incredibly powerful technique, you’ll have a huge opportunity.
You could apply this to learning the Periodic Table, all 197 countries in the world or all the US states.
Or any other lists that you think might be relevant to your coursework.
Why Memorize - Shouldn't You Understand Instead
One objection people have is that memorizing is not the same as understanding.
That may be true, but if you know your geography with this level of recall, you’ll more quickly understand the complexities of different supply chains. For instance, Peter Zeihan, in his book The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning, (not an affiliate link) discusses the difficulties of getting oil from the Middle East to China should there be any sort of conflict.
Fair enough, you might think. Now look at a map, and you’ll see how complex it really is.
First, you have to take a slow-moving tanker out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz (which might be a problem).
After passing Pakistan, you go all the way around the bottom of India’s ice cream cone shape. Then the fun continues as you pass through the Malacca Strait, which is just 1.7 miles across at its narrowest point and sees 100,000 ships per year pass through it. Things get (only a little) easier after that as the tanker heads toward the South China Sea, passing Vietnam before reaching China.
That is a long, potentially hostile route (did I mention oil tankers aren’t exactly fast and agile) if we live in a world where the US Navy doesn’t guarantee freedom of the seas.
I suspect 95% of the people who just read this didn’t realize the potential complexity before I went through the details. I certainly didn’t until I grabbed a map while reading Zeihan’s book.
Now imagine yourself conversing in operations class or writing an exam on marketing, and you’ve memorized the three most important global supply chain routes.
Can incorporating that into your analysis push you from a B to an A?
Will you be one of the only people in your class who can pull that analysis out?
Hint: the answers to those questions are definitely yes.
The beauty of this is that it’s dead easy, so easy you wouldn’t believe it…
The Memory Palace - An Imaginary Map With Weird Images To Cue Your Recall
A memory palace is actually pretty simple to understand. You may recognize this from the BBC show Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch, where he uses something similar.
In this case, it’s an imagined map in which you move through a very familiar setting (maybe your house, school, or frequent route) in your mind’s eye. In each room you move through, you identify 5 very prominent items or objects. We’re going to call those “structures.”
Once you can recall your structures you attach images to each one.
The purpose of the image is to remind you of the thing you’re trying to recall.
We use images to take advantage of a peculiarity of our brains. We seem to remember images far more effectively than words.
This is illustrated in the Baker/baker paradox.
If I took a group of people and introduced them to a guy named Baker, about 20% of them would remember his name a week later. If I took a different (but comparable) group of people and introduced them to a guy who is a baker, around 80% of them would remember his job a week later.
This is because when we learned he was a baker, our brains were filled with images of cakes, the smell of flour, and tall baker hats.
That’s the power of visual memory. The memory palace takes advantage of that.
Let’s get into how to build one.
Steps to Making A Memory Palace
The first step is to create your “palace.” You do this before trying to memorize anything.
A memory palace itself is an imagined building in your mind.
When starting out, it’s usually easiest to imagine your home or some place that you know incredibly well, so well that you could easily imagine yourself walking around in it, picturing everything in vivid detail. In this building, you mentally set a path that you’ll walk, from room to room, going left to right through the building.
You’ll take this same path every time.
Select 5 “structures” in each room, imagining yourself looking left to right. These structures should be obvious when you imagine that room.
For example, one room might be your bedroom and the 5 prominent structures you see looking left to right are a closet, a window, your desk, your bed and a bookshelf. Keep doing this for a second room to build 10 structures, so 5 structures in each room. Review this a few times, and voilà – you’ve just built your first memory palace.
How to Use A Memory Palace
Now that we’ve built a memory palace, let’s start putting it to work.
Suppose we want to memorize the countries of Central and South America. The first country is Guatemala. So, we want to attach an image to the closet since that’s our first structure. Remember, we’re not trying to create an image of Guatemala itself; it’s just something that would cue us to recall Guatemala.
In this case, the initial “gua” sound is similar to the “gua” in guacamole.
An effective image might be your closet full to the brim with gooey guacamole. It’s so full that guacamole is oozing out of the gap at the bottom of the door. Really visualize this in your mind, and it will become hard to forget.
The next structure is a window.
The country that comes after Guatemala is Belize.
Remember, you’re not trying to come up with an image of Belize itself unless you’ve been there and have a distinctive memory you can associate with the window. If you haven’t been there, you might imagine looking out the window and seeing an old-school revivalist preacher with his hand on someone’s forehead screaming “Believe” as he tries to heal them of their illness.
As you imagine this vivid image, the “Believe” that he is shouting sounds like Belize and cues your recall.
Adding to Your Memory Palace
Since you’ve learned the basics of building a memory palace, the next question is how to add to it and remember it.
Here, we rely on the good Professor Ebbinghaus, the 19th-century German scientist who discovered spaced repetition. He found that reviewing material just as we were about to forget it increased our recall of that information. This results in the ability to increase the time between reviews without loss of recall.
How does that work here? Let me show you…
If you’ve never done a memory palace, you may want to start with something smaller than all 197 countries.
Let’s say you’re going to do the 50 US states. Here’s a possible way to go…
Day 1
- Create 10 structures
- Create an image for state number 1 and associate it with the first structure
Day 2
- Review the 10 structures and 1 image
- Create an image for state number 2 and associate it with the second structure
Day 3
- Review the 10 structures and 2 images
- Create an image for state number 3 and associate it with the third structure
Continue doing the above each day until day 6 when you’ll also create another 5 structures so you’ll have 15 in total.
Repeat this process creating 5 new structures on days 11, 16 etc.
Day 22
- Review the last 20 structures and 20 images
- Create an image for state number 22 and associate it with the 22nd structure
Once you get past 20, only review the 20 most recent countries and structures daily. On Saturdays, review all of them from the beginning of the list to the end, and on Sundays, do it in reverse order.
To be clear, review means going through the structures, images and associated states in your head and saying them aloud.
Keep going with this until you’ve memorized all 50 states.
Advanced tips
- 🚶🏼♂️➡️Your early memory palaces will likely be where you live or frequent. As you walk by your structures initially, mentally count off the 5 structures as you look from one to the other in a room. This is not “extra” time but the background to your normal activities
- 🤮 It turns out our visual memory remembers things better if they are gross, scary, loud, smelly, raunchy (don’t overuse this one or it won’t work anymore), bright, unusual etc. The bottom line is that the weirder, the better. We used some weird ones. For instance, I had “The Kurgan” from the movie Highlander posing with us in our family photo to remind me of Kyrgyzstan and an imagined poster of “The Battle For Azeroth” (from World of Warcraft) on my closet door to remind me of Azerbaijan. It was bright, and like in the Harry Potter universe, the poster was talking to you, trying to get you to fight for Azeroth.
- As you select the 5 structures in each room, go top to bottom and left to right. If you don’t remember which comes first, you can reason it out.
- As you build your memory palace, especially in the early days (though I still do it), make an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets with 3 columns. The first is to record your structures, the second is to record your images, and the third is to record the States. This way, if you have any uncertainty, you have a record of what you picked.
- As you get more comfortable with this, you can add more than one daily. For example, we added 5 countries a day for that challenge since we’d already done a few big memory palaces.
- Notice that you are doing 5 structures in each room. This allows you to count quickly to figure out what is 50% of the way through or what is #29 on your list. It’s less relevant for states but highly relevant for the Periodic Table.
- When doing a memory palace, imagine walking through the rooms in your mind. I go so far as to close my eyes as I’m learning it and my head will move with my eyes closed as I envision where the structure is in the room.
That’s about it.
The memory palace is enormously powerful. Try it out for yourself, and let me know how it goes.
This is one of the trickier ones to get across in writing, so let me know if you have questions.
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That’s it for this week…don’t be shy to reply if you have any questions.
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