So this article is part of our ongoing series called Study Skills where we show you different learning techniques with examples so they can apply them yourself okay I tried just about every memory technique out there and since I’ve been through Medical School I’ve had a lot of time to experiment I came across the fundamentals of how memory and Brainwork from the books Limitless and moonwalking with Einstein. I learned that almost all memory techniques can be boiled down to three simple steps.
Visualize:
One is to visualize our brains to remember images much better than numbers or words like when I say apple you instantly think of the red fruit or maybe you think of the iPhone but either way your brain is not thinking of the text a-p-p-l-e so step one is to take everything you need to memorize.
Turn it into an image whether it’s a list of drugs or steps to a chemical reaction or I don’t know the dates to the battle everything can become an image for For example, the number nine to me is a cat because a cat has nine lives if something is uncommon or rare then to me but for a more complicated.
For example, let’s say I wanted to remember that labetalol is a blood pressure medicine that’s safe to use during pregnancy labetalol to me is a betta fish laughing out loud so I could imagine that a betta fish is laughing at a baby and taking this as a step further if I have the scene drawn in a specific location like in the corner of a mind map then I’d be using visual-spatial memory.
Structure:
Step two is to structure there are many ways to do this because the brain is good at remembering things like story acronyms mnemonics alliteration rhymes and so on so what we want to do once we’ve turned all of our info into images is to link the images together using some sort of structure in med school we had to memorize the cranial nerves which control our senses so like one does smell Tuda’s vision and so on for example once I’ve converted all the cranial nerves into images I could then imagine each of those images on each of my Knuckles that’s called the knuckle method I can imagine the images in specific areas in my house or in my bedroom, that’s the mine Palace or I can tell a story about the images and have them interact with each other in some sort of order for example once upon a time a nose gave birth to two children.
Cyclops and sleepy and so on and so on that’s called the story method or the link method and the best part about this is you only need to remember the first item and the story should just naturally flow there’s also this cool program called sketchy.com I know this is not sponsored by them they’re just a really a good example, of what I’m talking about they take all these complicated medical topics and turn them into visual storyboards for us then they tell us a narrative to make memorizing these things like drugs bacteria and diseases are so much easier another tip for linking is to chunk things together normally we don’t think of a phone number as 10 individual digits we chunk them together so that the brain only has to process three individual units another tip is to make the stories interesting and what our brains find interesting action humor and sex so for example don’t just turn an image into a ninja you want to make it Vivid like tell a story about how the violent ninja would assassinate people and make it sexual like how he would use naked women to beat his toughest opponents and step.
Repetition:
Three is repetition whenever we practice recalling things from memory that knowledge becomes stronger in med school my favorite way to use repetition was through flashcards because flashcards utilize multiple strategies that boost our memory active recall space repetition and interleaving each of those could be their entire videos so if you’re unfamiliar with these topics I’ll link them here or in the description of another tip for using flash cards are to put the images and stories you made from steps one and two onto your flashcards to make the most out of this entire memory system so now I’m going to do a walkthrough of all the tips that we’ve mentioned so far and try to memorize the shoulder muscles and I’m going to try not to go too deep on the medical stuff so focus more on my thought process rather than the info itself so for this particular exam there are four muscles I need to know their names I need to know how each muscle moves the arm and I need to know what test to perform like if a patient comes in complaining of shoulder pain I need to know how to maneuver the arm to figure out which muscle is injured so that’s 12 different things.
I have to memorize but I can chunk things together and reduce the total amount of things I need to memorize by just taking more time to understand the big picture Concepts so an important concept here is that if the muscle raises the arm then an injury to the muscle makes it hard to raise the arm and the test you want to do applies pressure against raising the arm basically what I’m saying is that column two and column 3 are opposites of each other so if I memorize one column then I know the opposite is the other column so I’ve essentially chunked those two columns together reducing 12 things down to eight now we can start to memorize first is turning things into images Terry’s minor me is Terry McGinnis Batman Beyond and a side note here is that we all have unique ways to visualize Things based on our unique interests personally I use a lot of images from comics and Anime but you can use what’s most memorable to you anyways I’ve turned the muscles and their tests into images the test for the tree’s minor are abduction and internal rotation which it look like you’re throwing a baseball so the image to me is a baseball the test for the supraspinatus looks like you’re emptying a cup so the image is spilled coffee the test for the infraspinatus looks like you’re backhand slapping someone so to me it’s a slap and the test for the subscapularis looks like you’re arresting someone so it’s a pair of handcuffs then looking here I can chunk these two muscles together because they share the same root words spinach meaning spine and I wanted an image that would reference the spine so I chose Professor X because of his the origin story is that he got shot in the spine and then I can chunk even further by combining the images of the muscles and the images of the tests so now this image of Terry throwing a baseball to me represents multiple pieces of information representing Terry’s minor muzzle.
The way that you test for that muscle is to make the patient do a baseball-throwing motion and the opposite of that motion is how Terry’s minor muscle moves the arm likewise, I’ve chunked all the other images of the muscles with their corresponding tests step two is to link the images together and go on for example here, I could tell a story; Terry threw a baseball at the professor’s spine causing him to Spill the coffee on himself it hurt so much that he accidentally slaps Sub-Zero they get in a fight and then Sub-Zero got arrested it’s a little over the top I’d say but remember you want to try to make it as memorable as possible with things like action violence humor sex.
but notice that this story has been now chunked down to only three plot points yet in my head it represents the original 12 pieces of information and you can really do this for hundreds of pieces of info right this is how someone would memorize pi to the nth degree or memorize an entire deck of cards in exact order after seeing it only once so for step 3.