How To Use Memory Palace For Studying

Memory Palace For Studying

To explain what a memory palace is and how it can be used for studying, let’s look at how people use it without even knowing that they are using it.

It’s Sunday and you and your friends decided to go out to play some basketball. Naturally, as one of the greatest shooters you know of, you are excited to go. You get to the place where you decided to meet and see a couple of guys who are already warming up.

Before you join them, you see a small table with a couple of mobile phones on it. Since you saw other mobile phones there, you put your own there as well. After you played a couple of games where you went 2/23 from the 3-point line (which is a shooting percentage of around 8.7%, if I am not mistaken), you start to question your validity as the best shooter you know.

Now, after a few hours of playing, you are exhausted and you go back to the table to pick up your phone. Now, stop there for a second.

How did you know that the mobile phone was on the table in the first place?

The obvious answer is that you left it there. And then you remembered that and went to pick it up.

But is that really all there is to it?

The answer is no (otherwise there would be no point in reading this article). You didn’t just remember where your phone was. You connected the table with your mobile phone. That is how you were able to remember where the mobile phone was.

How can this help me to study?

Good question. Let’s find out.

How does memory palace work

First, let’s clarify what the sentence “You connected the table with your mobile phone” even means.

How can you connect a table with a mobile phone?

There are two objects in this sentence: a table and a mobile phone. One is the place where the mobile phone is – the table. The other is the item you left in that place – your mobile phone.

You left your mobile phone in some place (in this case the table) and to find it you need to remember the place where you left it. This is how these two things are connected.

I still don’t understand how this is going to help me to study better.

Calm down (I don’t understand why you are so stressed). I am just explaining how the memory palace works, next, I will show you how you can use it for studying.

But, before that let me quickly explain how the memory palace helps you with studying. Memory palace is a memorization method that allows you to memorize anything. You can imagine how useful this can be when you have no choice but to memorize something.

To find out how it works, continue reading.

Learn how to use the memory palace for studying

First, you have to pick out some space that you will use as your memory palace for studying. If you are doing this for the first time, the best thing you can do is to use a familiar space, like your room.

Now, pick out a few places in your room that you can put the items on. I will be using this room to demonstrate the necessary steps.

Let’s pick out a few places in this room where we could put some imaginary items (for now, just follow along, everything will make sense). Here is a list of places where you could put some (imaginary) items:

1. On the clock
2. Next to that cactus
3. On one of those paintings
4. On a sofa
5. On top of the rug
6. And on the stone lamp

When you make a list of places make sure to put a number next to them. And, when you put numbers next to those places, make sure that you can recall what number went where. Look at this picture:

I went from top to bottom and left to right and put the numbers in. This makes it easy to remember them.

Now, you should do the same thing with your room.

Make a rough sketch of your room with those places you picked out earlier. Put a number next to each one and do it in a way you can easily remember. To make things easier you can pick the door as the starting point. From there, go clockwise and put number two on the second place you picked.

Do this for the third place, and so on, until you have a number next to all of them.

The items

Now that you have the places where you will place the items, the only thing left is to make those items (not literally, just in your mind). This process is rather complicated to explain without an example to go off of, so let’s just use something as an example, to make things easier.

Since I picked 6 places in the picture above, let’s try to memorize the 6 biggest countries. According to Google, the 6 biggest countries are:

1. Russia
2. Canada
3. China
4. United States
5. Brazil
6. Australia

Now, we are going to swap the names of the countries with something to remind us of these countries. For example, when I think of Russia, the first thing that comes to mind is snow. For Canada, it’s a moose. Here is how my list looks after I swapped all 6 counties with different things:

1. snow
2. moose
3. chopsticks
4. money
5. football/soccer
6. kangaroo

Wow, this looks awesome, but why am I wasting my time doing something that seems so useless?

Remember that you need the items to put in those places you picked. These things are the items you are looking for. The final thing you need to do is to put those items in their designated place. In the end, you should get something like this:

The result

Now, you have the whole picture. The only thing left to do is to memorize it.

But, this won’t be like any other memorization.

In the beginning, I told you that you remembered where you left your phone because you connected the place where you left your mobile phone with your mobile phone. Now you will do the same here.

When I look at this clock, I imagine a clock in the shape of a snowflake.
I imagine the moose looking at a cactus and choosing to avoid it.
I look at the picture and see chopsticks on it.
When I look at the couch there is money all over it.
On top of the rug, there is a football and I think about how I would play with it.
Finally, there is a kangaroo who jumps at the top of the lamp.

Imagine all of this together. The next time you have to recall the 6 biggest countries think of these images. Think about a clock in the shape of a snowflake, about a picture of chopsticks and a kangaroo who jumped on a lamp.

In this way, remembering what item is placed where becomes much easier. The last thing you have to do is to replace the items with the countries. When you think about a ball on a rug you think: The rug is the 5th place and the football represents Brazil, so the 5th biggest country must be Brazil.

4 things to remember

Notice that you have to remember 4 things to have a complete picture:

1. The place where your item is
2. The item you are remembering
3. The number of the place where your item is
4. And what your item represents

It may look hard at first, but mastering this technique will allow you to remember an unimaginable amount of things. And when you look at these 4 things, they are not that hard to remember.

The reason I told you to pick your room is because it is already familiar to you, making it easy to find and remember the places where you will place the items. When you think of an item, make sure that you can easily remember what it represents. You don’t have to use kangaroos when thinking about Australia, you could use snakes or spiders or something that doesn’t make sense to anyone but you.

While remembering the numbers for each place in the memory palace can be hard, it can be made easier if you number them in order which is easy for you to remember, like in the example above.

Finally, try to combine the items with spaces in your room to make them weirder.

The weirder something is the easier it is to remember.

Like a watch in the shape of a snowflake, or a kangaroo that is jumping on top of a lamp. If you combine all of these things you will have no problems in using the memory place for studying.

The example above is just a simple demonstration, memory palace is a much more powerful technique than it seems.

Don’t believe me?

Well, let me show you!

How to use memory palace more efficiently

Let’s take a look at the picture above one more time:

It’s nice that you can remember the 6 biggest countries so easily, but what if you wanted to remember more, something like 15?

The easiest solution is to find another room/place and make 9 new spots to put items in. With the 6 previous spots you will have 15 combined. When you get more comfortable, you will be able to use any space to make a memory place. Here is a list of potential places to use:

• Your whole house, with all of the rooms combined
• Your neighbours, friends or relatives’ houses
• The school or university you go to
• The park you walk in from time to time
• Even the route you use to go somewhere can be used

The method is the same no matter what space you use. Find a few places for your items, number them and place items in there. Now, this will be a bit trickier than your room, because you don’t spend as much time in these places as you do in your room.

But don’t get discouraged.

It will take a little bit of time, but I can promise you that the benefits are worth it.

This method works great if you have to memorize a small number of things, but what if you have to memorize more than 100 things? What about 1000 things?

Don’t worry it’s possible. Let’s see how it’s done.

How to memorize more than 100 things

You can actually use the same method as in the previous example. You just have to find 100 places and place all of the items there. But that is not what I want to teach you here.

What if you could put more than one item in one place?

Think about a clock in the shape of a snowflake. When you take a better look at it you see it has two moose horns, and you find that weird. What’s more, it doesn’t just have normal pointers. Instead, those have been replaced by chopsticks!

Now, you just put 3 countries in one place. However, when you do something like this, you have to make sure to remember the correct order. First goes the snowflake, then the moose horns and then the chopstick pointers.

Forget the order and you forget which country is first, second, and third.

Try to make a story

Take a look at the next 3 biggest countries. Let’s say that you are going around the room and next to the cactus you see some money. You wonder what you could buy with that money and suddenly a ball gets kicked into your leg. You think about buying that ball, but a kangaroo comes and takes it away.

If you don’t want to, then there is no need to make 3 things fit into one thing. You could make a short story with 3 things and remember them in that way.

Don’t just make a story, envision it as well.

Think about finding the money and how would that feel. How would it feel if a football came out of nowhere and hit you, only to be snatched by a kangaroo (if you lose a football to a kangaroo, what can I tell you, better luck next time)?

Make a connection with a word, not the meaning of a word

I told you that I think of snow when I think of Russia and use snow as an item to place in my memory palace.

But what if you don’t have anything to remind you of the thing you are trying to remember?

In that case, you can try to remember the word and not the meaning of the word. For example, instead of snow, you could think about a person who is in a rush. Rush sounds similar to Russia so it can remind you of it.

When it comes to Canada, you could think about a can of soda, since they both start with “can”. Don’t worry if you make some absurd connections that don’t make sense to anyone except you. The whole point is that you remember them. It doesn’t matter if others don’t get it, as long as you do.

Putting it all together

If you can master every single one of these steps, you will have no problems in using the memory palace for studying. It might take a little bit of time for your brain to grasp all of these concepts, but once it does you will get to know how amazing of a technique this is.

I now know that I can memorize a few countries, but how else can I use the memory palace for studying?

Here are just a few things you can memorize to help you with your studies:

• You could memorize the notes you made during your class
• Names of important people related to your material
• Years or dates that are important for your material
• You could memorize multiple lines of some text and recite them word for word
• Learn words in a foreign language
• You could remember a list of important terms and their exact order

As you can see, you could pretty much remember anything. To test out how powerful memory palace really is, I decided to try and memorize the first 1000 digits of pi.

You can read more about my experience here.