Remember me (not just the title of a bad Robert Pattinson movie)

I know, I know, aren’t they all just bad? (Don’t all jump to kill me now, but I just don’t see the appeal of Robert Pattinson.)

My friend P sent me this great article in the New York Times about memory and how to improve your memorizing skills. As it turns out, memorizing is in fact a skill you can improve, like singing or painting. Sure, some people have the innate ability to be the Picasso or Pavarotti of memorization, and you may not, but there are still ways for you to improve.

“What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly,” Cooke said.

And there is even scientific evidence of their mediocrity: the brains of mental athletes are actually not very different from the brains of memory laymen.

One especially interesting they found was that “mental athletes were relying more heavily on regions known to be involved in spatial memory. At first glance, this didn’t seem to make sense. Why would mental athletes be navigating spaces in their minds while trying to learn three-digit numbers?“

The answer to this enigmatic nut significant discovery goes all the way back to the fifth century BC: “After a tragic banquet-hall collapse, of which he was the sole survivor, the poet Simonides was asked to give an account of who was buried in the debris. When the poet closed his eyes and reconstructed the crumbled building in his imagination, he had an extraordinary realization: he remembered where each of the guests at the ill-fated dinner had been sitting. Even though he made no conscious effort to memorize the layout of the room, it nonetheless left a durable impression. From that simple observation, Simonides reportedly invented a technique that would form the basis of what came to be known as the art of memory. He realized that if there hadn’t been guests sitting at a banquet table but, say, every great Greek dramatist seated in order of birth — or each of the words of one of his poems or every item he needed to accomplish that day — he would have remembered that instead. He reasoned that just about anything could be imprinted upon our memories, and kept in good order, simply by constructing a building in the imagination and filling it with imagery of what needed to be recalled. This imagined edifice could then be walked through at any time in the future. Such a building would later come to be called a memory palace.”

Why do we have better memory for spaces rather than verbal facts? Because our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t have to remember bank account numbers or grocery lists. But they had to remember where to find food, where the poisonous plants were, where the hut/cave/tent was. Makes sense. In the end, our environment changes but essentially our bodies are still not so different from those of our cavemen friends.

“What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I learned, is the ability to create lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly.”

Since being a medical student (at least in the first 2 years) is no different from being a memory athlete, I think the method of creating memory palaces is something that could be of crucial usage to those who devote themselves to the grueling study of medicine.

How does this work exactly? Well, for example, I would put the disease “SLE/lupus” in the lobby of my school. In the lobby,  two girls named Dana (ds DNA Antibody) and Anna (Anti-nuclear Antibody) Smith (Anti-Smith Antibody) are running around with a wire-loop net (wire-loop glomerulonephritis) to catch butterflies (butterfly malar rash). Dana is having a hard time because her fingers don’t work properly (arthritis). And so on… I actually took an exam  regarding this condition a couple days ago and still remember this ridiculous story.

So this is how I will be studying for the USMLE in the coming weeks. Personally, I think having to create scenarios and situations makes the whole process of studying more interesting and engaging.

See  more accurate instructions on how to create a memory palace here.