Name: How I Memorized Everything & Aced Medical School | 3 Memory Techniques
Uploaded: 2020-04-26T19:25:13.000Z
Duration: 9 min 9 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

If you've been anywhere near a computer screen recently,

Adverbs of manner

you've likely seen the ads to “supercharge your brain” using these 5 simple memory tricks.

The truth is, these memory hacks don't actually work,

otherwise, they wouldn't be hacks, and they would just be the norm –

I'll show you what actually works, and more importantly,

when and how to use each memorization technique depending on the content that you're studying.

When you're learning information in college or in medical school,

your probability of remembering it is quite high

you should try to understand why things occur in certain ways,

as this will reduce the need for special memory techniques.

Most information, however, will require an intentional strategy and technique to accelerate memorization.

We want to strike that optimal balance of understanding and intuition with memory techniques.

None of these techniques are fully generalizable to all learning scenarios,

and practicing a deliberate strategy with when and how you use each one will serve you well.

The goal in using these techniques is to get to the point where you no longer need them.

The images may fade with time, as you no longer practice them,

but the underlying information that you need to know should remain.

For example, I used mnemonics or memory palaces to memorize particularly challenging anatomy concepts,

but now I no longer need to, as I simply know the anatomy.

Not all memory techniques are created equal.

Therefore, it's important to understand their relative strengths and weaknesses,

and know when to use each one, based on the information you're trying to memorize

and the reason that you're struggling with it.

“Loci” is simply the plural form of “locus”,

and it references the technique in using spatial memory to quickly and efficiently recall information.

We'll use multiple loci, or locations, to help us string together important bits of information.

It's a great technique, and I used it extensively as a medical student,

but this technique is abused by self-help gurus

who like to show off by memorizing a list of names or random objects.

it's not some magical mystical secret that will instantly earn you perfect grades.

and I save it for pieces of information that are not sticking by traditional means.

I don't use it for everything I come across, and I recommend you also use it sparingly.

I relied on this primarily to encode bits of information that weren't sticking via flashcards

and didn't always fit well with mnemonics, such as the constellation of adverse effects from a medication.

The memory palace technique has a few distinct advantages,

namely that it facilitates organization and sequencing.

For example, if you were to choose your school's courtyard

as the exclusive area for memorizing the forms of nephrotic syndrome,

then you can choose spatial areas within or closely related to this area to further organize subtopics,

Additionally, proper use of the memory palace helps you chunk information,

meaning dividing a large set of information into smaller bits that are each individually easier to memorize.

For example, if you want to memorize a phone number,

versus three billion nine hundred and fourteen million, nine hundred and nine thousand

If the order of a set of items is important,

the memory palace serves additional utility as it naturally orders events in a properly mapped out locus.

and can, therefore, memorize the order of your items accordingly.

If you would like me to make a dedicated video on these steps in creating a memory palace,

and walk you through a real-life example, let me know with a comment down below.

Otherwise, I'll leave you with this truncated version.

First, consider what comes up initially when you first hear about a topic.

and see if they remind you or have associations with specific ideas, objects, or areas.

Using a locus that you more naturally associate with the topic will strengthen your palace.

This memory hook is how you will retrieve the palace when you think about the concept.

you may use the memory palace on the beach, with a volleyball named Wilson from the movie Castaway

each of which represents a piece of information that you're trying to memorize.

I imagine walking up to a Mazda 787B race car that's stranded on the beach,

to remind me that a mutation in the ATP7B gene is the cause of Wilson's disease.

Tom Hanks is laying on top, vomiting over the side with a distended abdomen and yellow skin,

reminding me of some of the liver-related findings.

The more ridiculous, obnoxious, and shocking your imagery is, the more likely it is to stick.

That being said, if you're not a car enthusiast, and the Mazda 787B race car isn't iconic to you,

then obviously do not use it. Find what is personally relevant and memorable to you.

In medicine, and in many classes, you need to recall information from multiple domains,

and then synthesize and apply said information to solve a problem.

If all the information were located in memory palaces,

it gets tedious to visit multiple separate loci to extract the information you need.

I recommend you reserve this for information that you're struggling with

and that isn't well suited to flashcards or simple mnemonics.

If you ever learned about PEMDAS in grade school, then you've used mnemonics as well.

Mnemonics include memory aids that can be rhymes, poems, acronyms, images, or other tools.

Let's start with images,  as these share some common DNA with the memory palace.

Think of an image based mnemonic as simply a less intricate form of the method of loci.

For example, for the drug tamoxifen, I had difficulty memorizing the adverse effects.

For that reason, I imagined my friend's sister, Tammy,

with a variety of strange physical findings to remind me of the side effects.

Normally, with the method of loci, we're using multiple images in a single space.

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How I Memorized Everything & Aced Medical School | 3 Memory Techniques

relevant

stick

struggle

ridiculous