5 Day Memory Mastery: Learn to Memorize Anything With Ease | Jonathan Levi | Skillshare
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5 Day Memory Mastery: Learn to Memorize Anything With Ease

teacher avatar Jonathan Levi, Entrepreneur, Eclectic, Lifehacker, SuperLearner

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      What You'll Learn In This Course

      0:51

    • 2.

      Day 1: Introduction & What You’ll Learn

      10:16

    • 3.

      Day 2: What Neuroscientists Know About Memory

      13:10

    • 4.

      Day 3: Using Visualization To Enhance Your Memory

      12:11

    • 5.

      Day 4: The Mnemonic “Nuclear Option:" The Memory Palace

      11:46

    • 6.

      Day 5: How To Never Forget Anything You’ve Learned

      9:05

    • 7.

      Day 6 (BONUS): How To Truly Master These Techniques (And More)

      5:15

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About This Class

If you're like the vast majority of people, you probably think you have an "average" or "below average" memory.

Sure, you can remember some things - sometimes, but you're far from being able to memorize all the information you wish you could learn and remember.

  • Information like
  • Names and faces
  • Birthdays
  • Mathematical formulas
  • Phone numbers
  • Credit cards
  • Historical facts
  • To-do lists
  • Foreign language words
  • Speeches
  • Bible verses
  • Legal frameworks
  • and more...

But what if I told you that...

You Are Just 5 Days Away From Having An Absolutely Superhuman Memory

In this course, you'll meet Jonathan Levi.

He's a published author, TEDx speaker, award-winning podcaster, and online course creator.

Over the last 5 years, Jonathan has touched the lives of over 150,000 people in 203 countries and territories with his 10-week programs in accelerated learning, speed reading, and memory enhancement.

In fact, you may be familiar with some of them - they are among the bestselling courses on the web today!

But here's the thing:

Though just about everybody out there would love to improve their memory, learn faster, and maybe even pick up some speed reading skills...

...very few people can devote 10 weeks of their lives to doing so.

Introducing: 5 Day Memory Mastery

In this all-new, fast-paced, and to-the-point crash course, we've condensed our bestselling teaching methodology down to the absolute essentials.

We've cut all the fluff and the in-depth background.

All that remains are the absolute best memory techniques - techniques that are neuroscientifically proven and guaranteed to work for everyone, no matter how “lousy” they think their memory is.

In just 20 minutes a day for 5 days, you'll learn and practice the exact techniques that are being used to set world records, win championships, and perform superhuman feats of memory every single day.

You'll apply what you're learning in a fun and easy way, and begin to understand how these techniques can and will transform your entire life.

Best of all, you'll join our members-only community, where you can share your results, ask questions, and learn from others.

Start Today, and Stop Settling For An “Average” Memory.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Jonathan Levi

Entrepreneur, Eclectic, Lifehacker, SuperLearner

Teacher

Jonathan Levi is an experienced entrepreneur, angel investor, and lifehacker from Silicon Valley. Since 2014, Jonathan has been one of the top-performing instructors on Udemy.  

After successfully selling his Inc 5,000 rated startup in April of 2011, Levi packed up for Israel to gain experience in the Venture Capital industry. While in Israel, Levi enlisted the help of speed-reading expert and university professor Anna Goldentouch and Machine Learning expert Dr. Lev Gold, who tutored him in speed-reading, advanced memorization, and more. Levi saw incredible results while earning his MBA from INSEAD, and was overwhelmed with the amount of interest his classmates expressed in acquiring the same skill set. Since acquiring this superlearning skill, he has become a proficient lif... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. What You'll Learn In This Course: Hey there and welcome to five-day memory mastery right here on Skillshare. I'm so excited to have you here learning with me. In this course, you are going to discover the life changing skill of upgrading your memory by learning the actual techniques and methods that have been used by memory champions all over the world for decades. You're going to learn how to memorize any new piece of information, whether it's names and faces, dates, decks of cards, numbers, or anything else that you could possibly want to memorize. And best of all, in this super short condensed course for people who are short on time, you're going to do it in about 20 minutes or less every single day for five days. So I hope you're really excited to learn these skills. And without any further ado, let's go ahead and dive in with day one. 2. Day 1: Introduction & What You’ll Learn: Hey there, my name is Jonathan Levy and I'm going to be your instructor in this all new first of a kind, five-day memory Mastery Challenge. So let's get on with today's lesson. First things first, I want you to take a moment and pull out the PDF companion guide that we've created for this course. On the first page, you'll find a free writing area asking you to write out three or more reasons why you want to improve your memory. Don't skip this. Doing this exercise is an important part of increasing your motivation and priming you to succeed in this course. In fact, according to one of the most important and seminal researchers on adult learning, Malcolm Knowles, it is essentially impossible for the adult brain to learn something new unless it knows why it is learning it and how it will be applied. So as you write out your three or more reasons, I want you to get specific, dig into some specific scenarios or stories where you felt that your memory is holding you back. Come up with some clear ways in which you would like to be able to rely on your memory. Here are a few examples. Whenever I go to conferences to network and build my career, I am embarrassed by my inability to remember people's names, even on the second or third day of the conference, by the end of this five-day challenge, I want to be able to effortlessly learn 50 people's names in a day and remember them permanently. Or how about I'm trying to learn a new language, but my progress has been slow. I feel unable to express myself even after a year of learning. At the end of this course, I want to be able to memorize 25 new difficult words per day and actually use them after. Or perhaps I recently had an emergency situation where I lost my bag and I was completely helpless. I didn't know any phone numbers. I didn't have my credit cards memorized and I had to ask people for change to get home. I want to be able to memorize the phone numbers of my top three emergency contacts plus the number of my backup credit card. All right. Are you ready at this point? Please pause the video and begin reading at least three specific reasons and goals that you hope to achieve throughout this course. I'll wait right here. All right, you're back. I am glad that you actually took the time to do that exercise because as you'll see, it is going to make a big difference in how devoted you remain to this course. Up next, let's go ahead and get a feel for where you're starting from. In the PDF companion guide, we've given you a link to open up our very own interactive game server. This is a portal where our students can complete various memory challenges. In this particular challenge, I'd like for you to open up the random words level 2 example. The goal of this exercise is to memorize a list of 20 random words as quickly as possible. Go ahead and pause the video again now and give that game a try. I'll wait right here again. Okay. You're back again. How did you do how many words did you memorize and how long did it take you? Take a moment to share your preliminary results in the comments section below. If you're like most people, you probably didn't get all 20 words or maybe not even half of them. But would it surprise you if I told you that by the end of this five-day challenge, you'll be able to memorize the entire list of 20 words in something like two or three minutes. I know. I know. It sounds impossible, but it's true. All of that will come with time for today. It is almost time to end. But first, I'd like to try a crazy little experiment with you. You see my team and I have long debated just how fast can we teach these techniques to people. Personally, I've always believed that people need to understand how something works before they actually use it. Which is why we're going to dive into some simplified neuroscientific principles and explanations about your brain in tomorrow's lecture, my team, on the other hand, believes that these techniques are so powerful, so revolutionary that they work on literally anyone, even if they don't know that they're using memory techniques. To be honest, I'm really not sure who is right. And that is where you come in for the following exercise. I need you to sit in a comfortable position, relax. Take a deep breath. This is going to seem a bit bizarre, but I need you to keep an open mind and just trust me on this 1 first, I'd like you to imagine that you're standing in the doorway to your bedroom. You can close your eyes if you want to or leave them open. But either way, pull up an image of what you see as you reach the doorway. Now, I want you to turn to the right and walk to the first corner of the room. In that corner, I want you to picture to see horses. Now I want you to imagine that they are on National Geographic and oh, oh, oh, no, oh, there in the middle of mating right on your furniture. Yikes, how embarrassing. Now I want you to get rid of those inappropriate seahorses by imagining them getting sucked up by a vacuum hose. Okay. Do you have that visualization? Let's go ahead and leave this corner and move on to the next one. Next part of the experiment. I want you to continue counterclockwise to the next corner of the room. I want you to imagine that in the next corner of the room where you're standing, there's a delicious container of chunky peanut butter tantalizing you. If there's a desk in that corner, you can imagine a plate on the desk. And if there isn't, you can imagine that someone is smeared that chunky peanut butter all up against the walls and the corner. Yuck. As you visualize this, I want you to think about the taste and the smell of that delicious peanut butter. Up next, I want you to continue counterclockwise into the third corner of the room where I want you to visualize a big, messy, tangled ball of wires. You know, the kind of ball of wires that you probably have in one drawer somewhere in your house. I want you to picture that exact bundle of wires and use some detail. Picture that old phone charger cable you have from the 1990s in there. Those broken iPhone cables that you still haven't thrown away gets specific. I want you to imagine that the wires are strong all along the corner of the wall or over whatever furniture is near the third corner of the room. For example, if there's a closet, imagine that the wires, they're all tangling up inside of your clothes hangers making it one big mess. You got it. All right. Let's go to the fourth corner of your bedroom. Now, in this one, I want you to imagine that there's a picture hanging right next to the corner. But it's not just any picture. It's your favorite historical picture of old time. You know, the one, the one that you saw in history class and you thought to yourself, Wow, it would have been incredible to be there on that day. For me, it's a picture from the 1968 Olympics because of my fascination with the US civil rights movement. But for you, it might be the famous picture of soldiers raising a flag that you would Jima or Martin Luther King Junior giving his speech in Washington. Any picture will work. Now imagine that the picture is hung right there in that fourth corner of your bedroom. Do you have it? Okay. So now we're back at the exit of your bedroom and there's just one more weird thing I want you to do in the doorway to your bedroom just as you're exiting, I want you to put a big location pin, just like the one you've seen on Google Maps blocking your exit. It's so big that you have to just squeeze under it. Okay. Do you have all of those visualizations? Let's go ahead and review. In corner one, you have to x-ray did see horses getting vacuumed up in corner to you have a bunch of chunky peanut butter making a huge mess. In corner 3, a mess of tangled cables in corner for you have a famous historical picture. And at the exit, a big location pin blocking your way out. Got it. All right. That's all for today's lesson. But stay tuned because tomorrow I'm going to be explaining some basic neuroscientific principles and concepts so that you can better understand your brain and how to use it. Plus, stick around to the end of tomorrow's videos were all reveal what all of those silly pictures in the corner of your bedroom actually mean. See you tomorrow. 3. Day 2: What Neuroscientists Know About Memory: Greetings everyone and welcome back to day 2 of your journey towards memory mastery. In yesterday's lesson, we got an overview of what we were going to learn. We set some goals and we tested out your memory. And so I know that you're eager to begin learning. And yes, at the end of today's video, I will reveal to you why I had you do that weird visualization experiment and what it all means? And the answer is really going to surprise you. Now before we dive deep into improving our memory, there are a few things that you need to know involving the way your brain and memory work. Think of this as the groundwork, the foundation upon which we're going to build your new and improved memory. Now, here's the thing. If you ask any neuroscientist, they will agree on one very important thing. We have only just scratched the surface of understanding how our brains and our memories actually work. It's true. After all, the human brain is the most complex object in the known universe with over 100 billion neurons. We know more about the ocean floor than we know about our own brains and how exactly they work. But there are quite a few things that we do know much of it from recent research. We know, for example, that the human brain is highly plastic, meaning that it continues to change, grow, and develop even after childhood. We know that the human brain has a theoretical limit of about 2.2 petabytes, which is something like 1 sixth of all the data that the NSA had back in 2015. We also know that the ability to memorize huge amounts of information, a superhuman memory, if you will, is absolutely not genetic, but rather something that you can learn. When scientists observed the brains of memory champions, they found no genetic advantage whatsoever. The memory champions just knew how to use their brains in a unique and more effective way. In fact, a 2017 study proved that with just a little bit of training in mnemonic techniques, anyone is able to triple their memory and that the effects are permanent. And that's what we're here to do. But before we can utilize the techniques used in that study, we need you to understand for important neuroscientific principles. Facts that neuroscientists and memory researchers have unearth that help us understand how to better use our brains. In this lecture, we will gain a cursory understanding, which we'll refer back to later on in the course as we gain a deeper understanding of each principle. So let's dive in, shall we? The first thing we need to understand is just a little bit about how the brain works, simplified. Now, I'm not a neuroscientist. And even if I were, I wouldn't want to confuse you with a bunch of crazy chemistry and biology. So instead, I want to tell you a story about two very important parts of the brain, the hippocampus. You've probably heard the term hippocampus to describe the seahorse shaped portion in the inner brain. But what most people don't realize is that you actually have two of them deep inside each one of the hemispheres of your brain. By observing an infamous patient, HM or Henry Molaison, who had his hippocampus surgically removed. Doctors learned that the hippocampus are instrumental in helping us create memories. Indeed, neuroscientists now understand that it is the role of the hippocampus to determine what is and is not worth remembering and to file it away in our long-term memory. Furthermore, because our brains are such energy hogs taking up only 2% of our body mass, but consuming 20% of its oxygen in calories, the hippocampus have to work to keep things running efficiently. In other words, they're in charge of forgetting stuff that they deem isn't important. If you've seen the Pixar movie Inside Out, You probably remember a scene where the cleaners come through the child's brain with a vacuum, looking at old memories and asking if they're still relevant before deleting the useless stuff. Though, memory is much more complicated than that. The truth is that simply by considering the hippocampus and fulfilling the criteria by which they determine if something is important or not. We can actually trick our brains into remembering things much easier and for much longer. This leads me to the second neuroscientific principle, chunking. Have you ever wondered why credit card numbers and phone numbers are broken up into chunks of three or four digits. The answer is as interesting as it is useful. Our brains, it turns out, are really good at remembering small batches of information. Typically between 35 numbers. As strange as it may seem, it's actually easier for you to remember 805557134. Then it would be to remember 800, 55, 57, 1, 3, 4, or trying to remember each number individually in a string by simply breaking the information up into groups of three to five numbers, you actually make it easier for your brain to remember the information. But this applies to much more than numbers though. You can remember groups of people by grouping them into smaller groups. You can memorize lists of words better by chunking them as well. The chunking phenomenon is an interesting hack that can instantly improve your memory. But it isn't until we connected to other more powerful techniques that you'll really see the full potential. On that note, let's talk about our third neuroscientific principle, Hebb's Law. In order to understand Hebb's Law, you really only need to know two things. First, your brain is made up of about a 100 billion electrically excitable cells called neurons. And second, those neurons are connected together by pathways called synapses. Your brain is constantly making new connections, breaking down or strengthening old connections and maintaining existing ones based on what you're learning. Hebb's Law then states that neurons that fire together, wire together. Meaning that if we use two brain cells together at the same time, they will create a connection. Now, you might be wondering, why does that matter? Well, I want you to think of your memory as if it were a spiderweb. Of course, spider silk is incredibly strong, but if there's just one thread, it's bound to break. Instead, spiders make their web strong by weaving intricate patterns with plenty of connections. Your memory is the same way. The more densely connected and memory is to other memories, the stronger it becomes and the more likely your hippocampus are to give it priority. This is why you'll never forget your childhood phone number. You probably have a 100 different memories of giving it to people of your mom writing it inside your jacket and of giving it to that special someone that you had a crush on in grade school. Later on in the course, we're going to teach you how to create lots and lots of these connections, even when you learn completely new things. Our fourth neuroscientific principle is a really interesting one. It's called the picture superiority effect. And it's the reason why literally every memory champion and world record holder uses visual memory techniques. It turns out that aside from smell and taste, which are deeply wired into our reptilian brain, visual information is by far the most memorable type of information to our brains. There are a lot of evolutionary reasons behind this, but we'll discuss those later on in the course. Now, you might be thinking right now, but I'm an auditory learner. Nonsense. Sure. Different people have different learning styles which they developed through years of schooling. But more and more research is proving that in fact, we are all naturally wired to have a visual memory, but more on that later on in the course. Finally, I want to give you a sneak peek on one final neuroscientific principle, location and spatial awareness. As we've just learned, our brains have a strong preference for visual information. But as it turns out, one type of visual information ranks supreme. Location. As a result of millions of years of needing to find our way back to the tribe, dig up our winter food supply, or find our way to the watering hole. Our brains are insanely good at remembering the places we go. What's even crazier is that they do this completely automatically without our even paying attention. Up until recently, we didn't understand how this could be, but recent scientific research has proven that a completely unique and powerful chemical process happens. Locus coeruleus and CA3 regions of the brain, whenever we enter a new space, causing especially strong memories to form. For this reason, we are going to teach you how to leverage location in creating stronger memories. But don't worry, you won't even have to leave your chair. So those are the five core neuroscientific principles that we need to understand in order to improve our memory. Did some of them seem suspiciously familiar? Did you maybe catch on to what I was doing as I spoke? If you did good for you and if you didn't, let me reveal the secret to you, you already had each one of my talking points memorized in order yesterday. Let's go back to our strange little experiment from yesterday, that bizarre visualization exercise that I had you do in the corners of your bedroom. Do you remember what the first one was? Close your eyes and take a mental visit to your bedroom. What do you see in that first corner to the right of the door? That's right. It was two seahorses making sweet, sweet love right there in your bedroom before getting sucked up by the vacuum. The hippocampus is named after the Greek word for seahorse, hippocampus, because of the way that it's shaped. The detail about the vacuum, of course, tells you about the hippocampus. Is role cleaning up irrelevant or useless memories? Or how about the second visualization? Do you remember it? That's right. Delicious chunky peanut butter. That of course, represents the chunking phenomenon that I shared with you earlier. Now let's go to the third corner. What did I have you visualize there? A tangle of knotted wires. Did you get it? This visualization reminds us of Hebb's Law. Neurons that fire together, wire together. It's supposed to remind us to create dense, tangled connections between our memories. All right, we're on a roll, so let's go to that fourth corner in your bedroom. Do you have the visualization of your favorite historical picture? You do. That then is there to remind you of the picture superiority effect. And what a great example. After all, you probably remember that picture much better than you remember the other details of that historical event, right? Finally, let's head to the door, but wait a minute, you're blocked. Do you remember by what the location pin reminding you that our brains are really, really good at storing locations. But that should be obvious by now. After all, you just used a location-based visual mnemonic to memorize a list of five items without even knowing it. So how did our little memory experiment work? Were you able to remember all five items and their location in your bedroom? Go ahead and let me know in the comments below. Well, that's just the tip of the iceberg because tomorrow I'm going to teach you how to create your own visual mnemonics just like these. I hope you're excited. See you then. 4. Day 3: Using Visualization To Enhance Your Memory: Hello again and welcome back to day 3 of your journey towards memory mastery. Yesterday, we learned about five key neuroscientific principles that are going to be absolutely instrumental throughout our entire course. Do you remember what they were? Of course you do. They are the items you stored in your bedroom. One, the hippocampus helps us remember or makes us forget to, by chunking information, we can make it easier for the brain to remember. Three, the more tangled we make our connections, the better. For pictures are much faster and easier to remember than anything else. And five locations are even more memorable than regular pictures. Now, I bet you're wondering how we are actually going to put this into practice. After all, though, yesterday's experiment was a neat little trick to get you to remember five items. I doubt that your list of goals for this course included memorizing a bunch of neuroscientific principles. How then can you use these techniques for learning the things that you want to learn? Well, the first step towards doing this is to master your visual memory. Yesterday, I made the bold claim that we are all naturally wired to have a visual memory. If you think about it, this makes sense. Our brains have evolved over millions of years and more than any other type of information, visual information gives us a powerful survival advantage. Most predators don't announce their arrival, making sound pretty useless. Whereas our natural surroundings give off all kinds of visual cues that can help a Paleolithic man or woman stay alive. Archaeologists will tell you that our paleolithic ancestors had huge amounts of knowledge, ranging from thousands of different types of plant medicines to what exact foods and animals in their environments were poisonous to being able to navigate their way back based on the stars and landmarks. All of this information gave them a huge survival advantage. And it's all highly visual. That's why you can remember that picture I showed you a moment ago very easily, but you definitely can't remember the exact words that you heard me say. Pictures. My friends are not only much more memorable, they are much, much faster to call up into memory. Research has actually found that our brains are able to recognize an image as little as 13 milliseconds. That's 0.013 seconds. In short, all the research agrees visual memory is vastly, vastly superior to rote memorization. Any other type of mnemonic device that you may have used in the past. This is why, while there are small variances in the ways that the world's top memory champions and record holders actually use the techniques they all use pretty much the exact same strategies I'm about to teach you. And they're all based on visual mnemonic techniques. Unfortunately, visual memory is something that most people aren't used to actually using through years of rote memorization and listening to teachers lecture at us, we have our natural aptitude towards visual memory beaten out of us by the time most of us reach high school. Not to worry though, because with some simple practice, anyone and everyone can rediscover and train their visual memory. The first step is to begin creating novel visualizations, which we call markers for everything that you wish to remember. At first, this might be difficult. After all, coming up with these markers is a creative endeavor. And many of us haven't trained our creativity muscles for years. Fortunately, we know from the research that creativity is not something you have or you don't. It's something that you train and something that you can learn very quickly by simply practicing visualization over time, you will come up with more and more creative visualizations and it'll be easier and easier to do so. So what kinds of markers should you come up with? Well, as you can imagine, not all visualizations are created equal. As a general rule, the markers you come up with should abide by the following rules. One, picture as much detail as possible by creating a high level of detail. You ensure that you are adequately visualizing and creating a vivid, memorable image in your mind's eye, fuzzy, non-specific images are much easier to forget. Plus, as we learned when we talked about chunking, our brains can remember three to five individual items at once. So by adding a high level of detail to our visualizations, we can effectively chunk more information in there, condensing it into one easy to remember visualization. To go for absurd, bizarre, violent or sexual imagery. Though it might make you Bosch, The truth is, our brains crave the novel, and our hippocampi are very attuned Picking up and remembering things that seems strange to us. Remember our sea horses doing the nasty in the corner of your bedroom and getting sucked up by the vacuum by leveraging all different types of inappropriate and unusual imagery, we make things much, much more memorable. After all, these visualizations are just for you. So the stranger, the better. Three connect to images, ideas, or memories you already have. As we learned when we talked about Hebb's Law, our brains pay special attention to things that are related to stuff we already know and care about. That's why I had you visualize your favorite historical picture in the fourth corner of your bedroom. Because of the way our brains work, it's best if you can incorporate people, places, or things that you know and love into your visualizations. Number four, create logical connections to what you're trying to remember. Obviously, a visual marker is no good if you can't remember what it stands for. For this reason, it's important to choose markers that will clearly symbolized the information you're trying to remember. Just like we pictured a bundle of tangled wires for Hebb's Law. Each visualization you come up with should explain some element of what it is you're trying to learn or remember with those fundamentals out of the way. Let's go ahead and look at some examples. Let's imagine first that we were trying to memorize someone's name. After all, names and faces are one of the most common challenges that students come to us with. And we all know the embarrassment of forgetting someone's name. Let's say that we meet someone named Mike. Now picture them holding a microphone singing embarrassingly off-key karaoke onstage. Or how about memorizing the name Alice by picturing the person chasing a rabbit down a rabbit hole like Alice in Wonderland. Or how about using visualizations of people that we already know, such as picturing this new person named Jenna, holding hands with a person that we know and love from childhood named Jenna. When you use visualizations in this way, memorizing names becomes simple. What else does this work for? You might ask, well, how about foreign language words? Instead of trying to memorize the word Kibera or to fit in Spanish, we can come up with a visualization of a taxi cab trying to fit a barren side. It's perfect. It has the sounds, cabin bear, and it has the meaning to fit, which is baked right in. Or how about the word CBA or thank you in Russian, imagine that a waiter is handing you a spicy been in a restaurant just outside the red square for which you are thinking them. Sspa Seba. But what about numbers? After all, how can you create a visualization for something like a phone number? Well, with the right system, it's actually easy. All you need to do is spend an hour or so learning something called the major method for converting each digit into an individual consonant. For example, one is t or d, two is N, three is M, and so on. Once you know that system, you can create words out of the numbers. Use visualizations to memorize those words with ease using this system. For example, the phone number 740927, 14, 15 transforms into crazy pink turtle, something that's really easy to visualize and therefore easy to remember. You might not believe it yet, but it's possible to create visualizations like this for literally anything that you can imagine. You can create visualizations for each card in a deck of cards and memorize their order. You can memorize music theory or the order of the chords in songs. Heck, you can even memorize scientific formulas by creating these types of creative visual markers. The possibilities are absolutely limitless. All you need is some practice and a vivid imagination, which leads me to your assignment for today's lecture. And it's an important one. You see, the students that most succeed in our programs are the ones who apply what they learn immediately. That's why for today's homework, I want you to go out into the real-world and memorize a minimum of ten new pieces of information using visual mnemonic techniques. These can be anything you want and they don't have to be complicated pieces of information. You can memorize a few new people's names, pick up a few words in a foreign language, memorize your grocery list, or just memorize a string of numbers. Whatever you choose to memorize, makes sure that you do it by following the guidelines in this lecture. Visualize a marker for that piece of information. Picture the vivid details that give you more information. Connect it to other things that you know, make it a wacky, violent, or inappropriate visualization. And finally, make sure that it's a logical enough connection that it reminds you of what you're trying to remember. Then we suggest sharing the information that you learned and how you did in the comment section below, so that others can learn and benefit from it as well. Tomorrow, I'm going to teach you how to supercharge this skill by showing you how you can literally organize your brain into a library of information searchable in a split second, and capable of holding huge volumes of information in any order you want to access it. Get excited because tomorrow we take your skills to the next level. 5. Day 4: The Mnemonic “Nuclear Option:" The Memory Palace: Greetings and welcome back to day four of your journey towards memory mastery. Over the last few days, we've learned a lot about how our memories work and how we can better leverage the evolutionary capabilities that they've developed over millions of years. In today's lecture, we're going to take that skill to the next level with a skill I like to call the mnemonic nuclear option, the memory palace. The memory palace is an ancient technique originally discovered by Simonides of CEOs. As the legend goes, Simonides was sitting one day in a large banquet hall in approximately 514 BC, when he was called away by a few visitors waiting for him outside. As he stood outside the lecture hall, a tragedy occurred. The entire banquet hall collapsed, killing everyone inside, under the rubble and the carnage, it was impossible to find and identify each of the individuals who had been killed for proper burial. In that moment, however, Simonides realized something incredible without having so much as paid attention over the food and the wine and the merriment, his brain had memorized the location of literally everyone in the banquet hall. The memory palace or method of lossy was born. You may have heard of the memory palace before or seen it used by mythical characters such as Sherlock Holmes, but it is much more than a myth. In fact, historians today believe that a great number of notable historical works, ranging from Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey to possibly even the Old Testament, were passed down from generation to generation via the method of lossy until they were ultimately written down. Even Cicero wrote about this powerful technique in his work, The oratory. It wasn't until the expansion of the Catholic Church, which shunned the idea of visualizing violent or sexual imagery that humanity lost this honored and all powerful technique. In more modern times, however, the memory palace has enjoyed a renaissance. In fact, every single one of the world's top memory champions and record holders from eight time champion Dominic O'Brien to my good friend for time USA memory champion Nelson delis. All use the memory palace technique to achieve their superhuman feats of memory. These include memorizing thousands of digits in an hour, hundreds upon hundreds of names and faces, and as many as 30 deck of shuffled cards. This is for good reason to. In recent years, scientists have begun studying the effects of the memory palace, and they've discovered that it can make significant and permanent positive changes to the brain. If you think about it, it's easy to understand why the memory palace works so well. For one, it forces us to create novel and creative visualizations, leveraging the picture superiority effect. Second, it connects new information to important existing knowledge, such as the layout of our home, office or neighborhood. Third, it triggers unique hormonal changes in the brain by leveraging the brain's emphasis on memorizing locations forth, it forces us to create linkages between memories even where no linkages exist. Fifth, it leverages parts of the brain that we don't often use for memory. Parts that normally would be used if you were a Paleolithic man or woman, learning about their environment. Finally, it helps us organize our thoughts in order. A powerful side effect when we need to memorize information like speeches or lists. So how does it work and how can you use the method of lossy? Well, the truth is, you already have, if you remember back to our weird memory experiment in day 1, this is precisely what you did. The method of loci or memory palace is simply a process of organizing and connecting together novel and creative visualizations using imagined or real-world floor plans. With that said, there are some best practices that you can use to ensure that your memory palaces are as effective as possible. First, use locations that you remember well enough or at least consistently when creating a memory palace, it's less important whether or not you are accurate as to how the space actually looks, but you need to remember it the same way every time. If you try, you can likely remember a hundreds of locations from your elementary school to the last hotel you stayed in, to the layouts of your favorite stores. Every apartment you've ever lived in. But don't just limit yourself to real-world places. Many students who are passionate video gamers report that they have had great success using virtual worlds from their favorite games. Get creative. As long as you can consistently remember a layout in the same way, it's a great idea to use it. Second, choose specific anchors to tie your memories to the memory palace technique works best when you can attach your visual markers to specific things in the environment that you're imagining. Furniture, drawers, corners of rooms, windows. These are all great. One power tip that I suggest however, is to actually involve the anchor you're using in your visualization. What do I mean by that? Well, if you merely place your visualization in that area, it can sometimes be confusing as to which visualization is placed. Where if however, you connect the visualization to the object, such as visualizing the chunky peanut butter being actually smeared all over your wall, or visualizing the wires actually being tangled up in the hangers in the closet. Well, it'll be easier to remember which visualization goes where. Third, create a memory journey. As you walk through your palaces, you'll remember that I had you walk through your bedroom in a counterclockwise circle around the edges of the room. This is an important detail. While you can certainly use furniture in the middle of the room, it's wise to create a deliberate linear path. This will prevent you from getting confused and losing the order of the information that you're memorizing. As a general rule, it's okay to teleport from one memory palace to another by connecting their entrances or to walk through walls if you absolutely must. But it's not a good idea to cross your own path in a memory palace. Finally, create new memory palaces as you need them. People often ask me, how do I reuse memory palaces? Well, the truth is, you can erase memory palaces and reuse them. But for everyone, but competitive memory athletes, I don't really recommend it. This is because the memory palace technique works so well. You're actually at risk of experiencing bleed or remembering the memories from your last use of that memory palace. Instead, you'll probably be better served to create new memory palaces for each potential usage. In my case, I have a memory palace for Music Theory, a memory palace for the nato phonetic alphabet, a memory palace for russian grammar rules, a memory palace for new vocabulary words, and many, many more. My mentor, memory palace expert, Dr. Anthony met CVA actually has over a 150 of them. After all, creating new memory palaces is completely free. And as long as you review them from time to time, which we'll cover in tomorrow's lecture. You can keep as many as you want. With this simple yet powerful tool, you will now be able to memorize information more easily and effectively, then literally 99.999% of people. But here's the thing. This technique only works if you use it and practice it. In a study of the efficacy of the method of lossy, participants were able to double their memory capacity in just ten to 20 minutes a day. And the changes were permanent. So it is well-worth putting into practice and actually using this technique, which leads me to today's assignment. Remember that memory tests that we did on day one with the 20 random words. Your assignment today is to test yourself, again using everything you've learned so far. In order to score the highest score, you'll want to combine all of the skills you've learned. You'll want to chunk groups of three to five words together. You'll come up with novel, creative, and detailed visual markers that incorporate each of those three to five words into one powerful visualization. And then you'll store those visualizations in your very own memory palace, such as the room you're sitting in right now. Don't worry about time as you go through this preliminary challenge. It will take time for you to create visualizations when you're first starting out, and that's okay. Furthermore, if you're having a hard time creating visualizations that incorporate three to five words. It's perfectly acceptable to make visualizations for every two to three words or even for each and every word. After all, the memory palace technique is used every day to memorize thousands upon thousands of pieces of information. So even if you have to make a unique marker for each of the 20 words, it will still work just fine. And if you make small mistakes, like confusing, disapprove with disapproving, don't beat yourself up. You'll get better at making exact markers for exact forms of words with time. And with practice, you'll get better and better at creating unique markers that represent more dense sets of information. For now, head on over to the 20 random words game and see what you're able to achieve. Once you've done that, go ahead and you guessed it, share your results in the comments below. I think you're going to be very surprised with what you're able to achieve. That's all for today. Tomorrow we're going to learn why our brains forget new information and how to counterbalance this to retain our memories long-term with minimal effort. I can't wait. I'll see you there. 6. Day 5: How To Never Forget Anything You’ve Learned: Greetings and welcome back to Day 5 of our journey towards memory mastery. Over the last four days, we've achieved a lot. By now. You've probably already seen the power of the techniques we've learned because you've been applying it in your daily life and you've even tested your memory before and after. But here's the thing. Even with the most advanced and powerful memory techniques, there's a problem. Our brains are naturally wired to forget as we learned early on in the course, our brains consume a lot of energy, as much as 20 percent of the total resources of our bodies. For this reason, they are naturally designed to determine what information is and is not important, and then forget the rest. For the most part, this is a very good thing. In fact, people who are unable to forget things like traumatic events are in a very real way cursed. But what about the things we want to remember but are unable to? Things like books we've read in the past. People we've met throughout our careers or foreign languages, we've painstakingly studied how can we trick our brains into remembering that information without spending our entire lives reviewing and reviewing. In order to learn about this, I need to take you back in time to 1885 and teach you about a man named Hermann Ebbinghaus in a limited self experiment, Ebbinghaus devoted months of his life to memorizing nonsense syllables such as wind or Zoloft, and testing his ability to reproduce the lists of syllables after different periods of time. He plotted these results on a graph, creating what we now call the forgetting curve, and published his results in a book which was translated into English as memory, a contribution to experimental psychology. There are a number of things that we can learn from ebbinghaus and the curve of forgetting. First, Ebbinghaus was among the first people to realize that a multitude of factors ranging from sleep to stress levels influenced the ability to memorize and remember information. Beyond that, Ebbinghaus noted the efficacy of specific types of mnemonic techniques, like the ones that you've already learned in the course. But most importantly of all, Ebbinghaus discovered that the more we repetitively review a new piece of information, the longer we can push out the curve of forgetting, effectively remembering it for longer and longer and longer in increasing intervals. Sure, the first time we learn something, we may only be able to remember it for a few days. But the second time we can remember it for over a week, by the fifth time we review it will likely remember it for a month or more, depending on the difficulty of the information. Ebbinghaus called this overlearning. And it describes why information that we have used thousands and thousands of times, like our own phone numbers, will likely never be forgotten. So how can modern learners leverage Ebbinghaus his work to improve the duration and ease with which we remember new information. Fortunately in the modern era, Ebbinghaus, his work has inspired an entire category of learning tools called spaced repetition systems. In their most elemental form, spaced repetition systems, or SRS, or systems that strategically minimize the amount of review needed in order to push out the forgetting curve. Whereas many students will review all of their flashcards multiple times per day, an SRS based method will have you categorize flashcards by difficulty recalling and then only review those that are new, fresh, or difficult. Srs range from very simple methods, such as the Leitner box system for organizing physical flashcards. Too, complex computer programs that leverage algorithms for actually mapping out a forgetting curve for each individual piece of information. There are many different types of software have spaced repetition logic built in from World Memory champion, Ed Cook, startup, memorize to brain scape, and even a free open-source application called Anki. Some of these applications are easy to use and others can be a bit more customizable and complex. In all truth, the actual application that you use is much less important than the fact that you use one. To use a space repetition system, there is a bit of setup required. First, you must load the information you want to learn into the system, whether that's vocabulary for a new language. Sheet music symbols or the names and faces of people you have recently met. Anything can be loaded into a space repetition system. And if you're lucky, someone out there has already created a database of what you're trying to learn for the app that you're currently using. Once you've done that, the Apple create a schedule for you comprised of a short daily review routine. From there, all you need to do is dedicate a few minutes every day to review the Apple literally do all the rest. It will surface pieces of information for you to review without you having to think about or strategize as to which information you are likely to forget. As you go along, you'll inform the application as to how easy or difficult it was for you to remember the information in question. And it will do the heavy lifting of planning a review schedule for that piece of information with more sophisticated apps like Anki, you can even see statistics for how much of the total knowledge you're learning versus how much is already solidly in your memory. Now, it's important to state that this probably isn't appropriate for everything in life. Should you input every single highlight from every book you've ever read into an SRS and try to memorize long list of quotes? Absolutely not. But you can summarize the three to five key points from every book you read and use NSRS to strategically remind you of them from time to time. Where SRS is really shine though, are with massive learning and memory challenges, such as learning a new language, studying for the bar or board exam, or learning an entirely new skill like music. Whereas most people waste a ton of their learning time reviewing information that they already know pretty well. Spaced repetition systems eliminate this wast altogether and all the guesswork and planning that go along with it. Your assignment for today is to play around with some of the popular SRS is out there, which we've linked to in the PDF syllabus for this short course. And you should see which one you like. Then go ahead and load up some of the information that you have been trying to memorize and start reviewing. As you do this, don't forget all of the key fundamentals that we've learned along the way. While you can definitely use someone else's list of cards as a starting point. You should still be using the mnemonic techniques you've learned throughout this course. It's a great idea to give yourself notes about the visualizations you've created for each piece of information, or even make a note of where exactly in your memory palace that visualization is stored. Don't get distracted by the fancy software and lose sight of the powerful mnemonic techniques that you've learned so far. That's all we have for you in today's lesson. But don't worry, though the core of the five-day memory course is now over. I have a very exciting bonus lecture for you tomorrow where I'll be sharing with you how you can take all of these skills to the next level, apply them to anything and everything life throws at you, including the goals that you set out for yourself at the beginning of this course. And supercharge your skills with some next level techniques like speed reading, Environmental Design and much, much more. I'll see you there. 7. Day 6 (BONUS): How To Truly Master These Techniques (And More): Wow, Can you believe that our journey together is almost coming to an end? We've really learned a lot. We've learned about the hippocampus and the way the brain prioritizes new information. We've learned about various phenomena like chunking and the picture superiority effect. We've learned about the method of lossy or memory palaces and how to use them to memorize literally anything. And we learned all about spaced repetition systems and how to retain the information we memorize indefinitely. Hopefully, along the way, you've seen some truly dramatic changes to your memory. But memory is only one component. What's missing next is a deeper understanding of the techniques, including how to actually apply them to everything. I'd like you to take a moment and read through the goals that you set out for yourself at the very beginning of this course. Now let me ask you, what are you willing to do to actually achieve them? Don't get me wrong. You can definitely take what you've already learned and begin applying it on your own to create truly dramatic results in your life. But in my experience, the majority of people unfortunately won't. In fact, from my experience, in order to actually do this, you need the right in-depth explanations. The right training schedule, the right practice activities, the right learning environment, the right community, and the right support system. In addition, in this short five-day course, we haven't covered more advanced topics, such as applying these skills to a wider range of subjects. Speed reading, optimizing your environment and routine for Learning. Or the next level mnemonics being used to set real world records. Look in the next 60 days, you can learn to apply these techniques towards learning anything and everything quickly and easily. Plus, you can double or even triple your reading speed and waste less time banging your head against the wall. First off, I'd like to ask you, what would it mean for you to be able, not just to memorize new information, but to be able to actually learn anything three times more effectively, how much faster would you be able to achieve the goals you've set out for yourself? And furthermore, what is it costing you in your personal, professional, or academic life not to have these skills? Well, according to the research quite a bit. In fact, according to a recent study published by The Economist, each additional language you learn and can result in a two to 3% increase in your salary, which could mean 77 to a $128 thousand in additional income by retirement. On top of that, some professional certification programs, like those offered by Cisco or Microsoft, guarantee as much as $16 thousand a year in salary increases. Plus, there are numerous studies that prove the value of learning, whether it be studies that prove a direct correlation between vocabulary and income, or studies that show that 88% of wealthy individuals, our avid self-help readers. Not to mention the fact that if you learn a new and in-demand skill, like say, software development, your salary can easily exceed over a $100 thousand a year. Indeed, if you really think about it, it's easy to see that learning is the number one key to succeeding in life. Whether that means opening up a whole world of scholarships, learning new skills to unlock promotions at work, or learning new fields such as entrepreneurship or day trading that can guarantee your financial future. Heck, just four years ago, I knew nothing about creating online courses or podcasting or writing books. And today, I'm the CEO of a seven figure Internet Empire. If this teaches us anything, it's that being able to learn quickly and effectively is the gateway to literally anything you want to achieve in your life. But listen, you have a choice. You can just click out of this five-day course and tried to implement everything you've learned without any support. You can forget all about it. And you can continue to struggle to learn everything you want and need to in life.