Lewis Smile - The Memory Palace - Learn Anything and Everything

The Memory Palace
Learn Anything And Everything
(Starting With Shakespeare and Dickens)

by Lewis Smile

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

"As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words."
- William Shakespeare

I am about to tell you a stupid story.

It begins with you in your warm and cosy bed, and ends with you taking your seat in your local theater (or cinema), moments before watching one of Shakespeare's plays.

Along this journey, you will see absurd images representing each play, dropped at specific locations. The images will be linked in some way to the names of each play, and your only task is to vividly picture each image, at the specific location. You are not trying to memorize anything, you are simply picturing each step in your head.

The actual journey we will be treading is loose enough for you to bend to meet an actual route in your real life. Please do this. Plop the route on top of an actual route from your house. You will be imagining the crazy things along the way, but make sure the route is real. Your journey will be mad, boldness will be our friend, and your job will be an easy one.

Wisely and slow? Ha! We will move at breakneck speed, on buses and donkeys and bicycles and tightropes, and at the end of our journey you will be able to fly back through in your mind and recite the names of every play. Just as if you had installed it in your head like a computer installing a program or document onto its hard drive. You will know the information so well, you will feel it. You will not just know the information intellectually, you will know it spatially. You will have plotted knowledge along a spatial memory, which is the closest you'll likely ever get to simply installing knowledge directly into your brain. Until you can walk into a pharmacy and buy a protein-microchip-neural-prosthesis, insert it inside your head and have it latch onto your brain and install knowledge... this is the best we've got.

There is no such thing as a bad memory - only an untrained one.

The Memory Palace technique is not just about the specific information you memorize, however.

The list of plays will function as a timeline of Shakespeare's work. If you don't know much about his work (like me, before I started this journey myself) you will find the resultant list inside your own mind has become the perfect scaffolding onto which you can hang more information. Things come alive when you begin your educational journey into a subject with the Big Picture already installed in your head. It gives you an incredible perspective.

I'm excited that I get to be the one to share this with you!

There's no need for repetition. No need to make a song of the words. No need to write out the list a dozen times and stick it around your house, on your fridge, on the bathroom mirror, on the cereal box, on the dog, on your hand. None of this.

You don't need to write a single thing down, because this will work automatically. It will work for you because it can't fail to work. When presented information in this way, your brain can't help but learn it.

Your Mission for the next 30 minutes: Read the story. Get used to punctuating memory journeys with weird images. Go forth and make your own to learn anything and everything.

Learn Shakespeare's plays from this story, but also learn how to make your own. You can apply this same technique to any other subject, and learn any amount of information you want. This will work because it is about imagination, and no matter how bad you may claim your memory to be, you can't possibly argue there's anything wrong with your imagination. Every day, innocently in your own private thoughts, you are vivid, crude, cruel, loud, and explicit... oh, there's nothing wrong with your imagination...

Walk through this journey in your own way. Inspect details. Picture yourself there. Talk out loud to the characters along the way if you want to. Just make it real.

It will take you 20 minutes to read this story, then 10 minutes more to run through the list in your head forwards and backwards (and then to high-five the nearest person). So in 30 minutes from now you will have absorbed the names of all of Shakespeare's plays, and you won't be able to forget them even if you try. From now on, you will be able to recite the list of plays to anyone who will listen. And my god, oh how they will listen.

"Isn't it interesting how this, one of his last Tragedies, is so vibrantly different from his earlier Tragedies? I wonder where it pivots..." - THIS can be YOU, faking smart conversation, in 30 minutes from right now!

You get to talk to your brain in its own bizarre language - a language of color and volume and location - and learn faster than you ever have before. And never forget.

The Memory Palace Technique

"Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved."
- Thomas Fuller

Memories are not made equal.

Your brain is great at remembering some things, and utterly terrible at remembering others. Can you remember a 20-digit number a day after hearing it one time? No. No you can't. If you are nodding your head right now saying yes, Yes, YES, then your yeses are lies. Your brain is bad at remembering dry data because it wasn't built for remembering dry data. Think of the millions of years of evolution of the human brain. We need to be able to remember smells. We need to be able to remember our way round our forests and caves and towns and cities. We need to remember routes and journeys. We need to remember physical things, not data. Objects, not lists. Three-dimensional space, not text on paper.

The solution: Play to your strengths.

If the solution sounds surprisingly simple, that's because it is. Learn how your brain works, then learn everything you've ever wanted to know. That's the Memory Palace technique in a nutshell.

Do you know all of Charles Dickens' novels? Do you know all of Shakespeare's plays? Do you know the world's longest rivers? The most-populated countries? Can you name every President the United States has ever had? Can you list the entire British Monarchy all the way back in time to 757AD? Can you reel off the geological time periods? Can you name every 'Best Picture' Oscar Winning Movie since 1928? Can you reproduce the Periodic Table of Elements if asked to do so?

If not, why not?

Well, probably because you haven't fed the information into your brain in a way it can remember.

Instead of having memories "in there somewhere", with everything in your head swirling around like a shaken cocktail, you will have an organized library of information. Learning in this way means when you come to recall something, you go to exactly where that memory is stored inside your head. You can even look around at the related memories. A Memory Palace makes memories accessible, clear, vivid, and most importantly, unforgettable.

What is a Memory Palace?

A Memory Palace is a spatial memory. It is nothing more complicated than this.

A Memory Palace doesn't have to be a palace, or even a building of any kind, but is simply a series of locations you know very well. It could be your walk to work. It could be your trip from bedroom to car. It could be the stops on your bus route. It could be a walk around your local museum. It can be anywhere you can travel in your mind.

If you can close your eyes right now (wait until you finish reading this sentence first) and walk around your house in your mind, you have all the skills necessary to do this. You already have all the tools you need to devour any information you wish to learn. Let no book, course, or website tell you it is any more complex than this. The Memory Palace technique is simple in both concept and execution.