how to memorize a book (part 2 - Vocabulary: don’t forget that definition!)

So you’re reading your book and you come across a word whose meaning doesn’t immediately come to mind. Dangit, I know it has something to do with oscopy. You look up the word real quick and then you’re back at the book, reading away and enjoying yourself. All of a sudden, that word appears again, and you’ve forgotten the definition already! What the crap, I just looked this up, arggg …something to do with. You look the word up again, and decide to learn that word for good.

Why didn’t you memorize it the first time you looked it up!?! It’s because that word didn’t really mean anything to you, or at least not to your brain. You see, your brain handles pictures a lot better than it handles unfamiliar words that it can’t connect to. Yes, your brain needs to connect! Brain needs to relate one thing to another in order to remember it and retain more stuff. Brain acts like connect the dots: each dot is an item to remember, and each line is a relation from one item to another. Without any relationship between one item and another, BRAIN CAN’T CONNECT THE DOTS!!!

Back to the point - so how do you remember that word on the first go? Well, just make a ridiculous association between the meaning of the word and the phrase/word(s)/thought that sounds similar to the word.

Example:

Word: Emancipate

Meaning: to free from restraint, influence, or the like.

Sounds like: Man, Plate

 

*apply method*

 

Picture show for brain: Just picture a man freeing a plate from its restraints/influence.

You see how we connected the dots there? The part “eman-” in emancipate is unfamiliar, but man is familiar! And “-cipate” is unfamiliar but plate kind of sounds like it and is familiar. So when brain sees emancipate it can be reminded that eman sounds like man and cipate sounds like plate. And then… well you’ve got your relationship between man and plate (i.e. man freeing the plate) and brain remembers the story of man and plate because … well it can see the image of a man freeing a plate and it’s a pretty ridiculous image and also hard to forget. Look at those dots connect; relate the unfamiliar with the familiar to remember the unfamiliar. Brain can hold all this information, but it needs to be reminded of where it put the info sometimes.

So the trick is to create a picture show that links the meaning of the word to the words that are familiar and sound similar to the original word. Basically the familiar words (man, plate) are stars in your little mind picture show and they just act out the definition.

Sound good? Try it on a word from a language that you don’t already know. The method works there too.

How to memorize a book (part 1 - every word or certain passages)

If you want to memorize verbatim text –and I don’t know why you would want to do that, but what do I know- you can picture an exaggerated story in your head that reminds you of the text. With practice, you could do this instantaneously as you read. But for beginners, just keep practicing and you’ll get better and better with each attempt. Of course, let’s say you have an assignment or a desire to memorize one certain passage word-for-word; in that case, you can easily sit yourself down with the text and make up some ridiculous image story help you memorize the whole thing really easily and effortlessly.

Sound good? Let me show you how to start memorizing the Gettysburg address as an example. Here’s the first part of the Gettysburg address:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

• Four score - picture a scoreboard on a baseball field called “continent field” (you’ll see why in a minute) set to four
• and seven years ago - you purchased the scoreboard 7 years ago
• our fathers - picture your father on the field
• brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, - picture your father carrying a baby new nation the shape of the US that was just born from the statue of liberty (picture the statue giving birth to the US shaped “new nation”) to the middle of the field
• and dedicated to the proposition - picture the baby new nation with legs clinging to a proposition (picture a sheet of paper)
• that all men are created equal. - picture a bunch of man cloans all over the paper proposition

You can do the same thing for the rest of the Gettysburg Address if you wanted to. Go ahead and try it out for yourself! Practice makes perfect, so try this with a bunch of different stuff. It’s fun, easy, and pretty cool if you ask me.

There are other methods that help you memorize text word-for-word, but I think this one is the easiest and most fun. Also, it’s pretty hard to forget the text when you have that hilarious picture story in your head.

PS: Did someone say something about a photographic memory?

how do you memorize a book? (intro - part 0)

It’s simple …I think. I’ll explain the steps in more detail sometime down the line, right now I’d just like to scrape the surface and talk about what, in a book, you would want to memorize anyway. Out of all the memory books that I’ve read, no one really covers this topic well, if at all. I think the basics are pretty simple though. Let me elaborate with some bullet points.

There should probably be different strategies for different books though. So what types of books might we come across?

• Story books -harry potter, vince flynn, tom clancy, etc
• Educational books -dummies books, books for class, self-help books, programming books, history books, etc.

What would you memorize in a book anyway?

• Title
• Author
• Table of Contents - be able to recall a chapter heading from its number (i.e. Ch 2. How to memorize…)
• Important points in each chapter
• The sequence of important points in each chapter - be able to talk about the chapter from beginning to end
• Every page in the book - recall what each page number was about
• Lists given in the book -numbered instructions, bullet points, etc
• Vocabulary
• Every single word in the friggin book, or maybe just a few particular passages word-for word.

Hmm…. what about the self-help books where you’re assigned things to learn and do? Well that’s not stuff to be memorized. That’s stuff, as you already know, to DO! When you’re reading books like that, you’re supposed to keep a list of “next actions” and to-do’s that you get from the book - you could just fold up a sheet of paper, stick it in the book, and write them on there.

In this post, we’re not talking about actionable items. We’re talking about stuff to be memorized.

Now, where’s the fun, or desire, in memorizing all this junk if you can’t do it really quickly and easily and be able to recall it as if you had actually studied the material over and over? There no fun in that at all. If you’ve ever read any memory book worth its salt, you’d know that memorizing stuff is not as hard as our peers, grade school teachers, and college professors made it out to be. On the contrary, it’s actually really easy … and fun! Did I say fun? Yeah, it’s actually fun.

Most of the people who write the memory books are magicians with a memory show, scam artists who stole someone else’s material, self-help books that don’t know what they’re talking about, and pointless drivel that was published to turn out a cool million. While some of the methods are great and some of them are completely missing the good stuff, a lot of them are targeting the wrong audience -or so it seems to me. In my opinion, it would be great if elementary school kids learned this memory-speed-reading stuff from the get-go; imagine how kickin rad they could be if they were able to start out memorizing books at the age of 10. Think about it - when they’re like 25, they would be winners, at least in that (reading) aspect.

Also, Speed Reading. Speed reading is great and all, but going faster does not mean you’ll remember more. None - NONE - of the speed reading books that I’ve read (a lot) show you how to ACTUALLY remember that stuff that you read. They’ll just tell you to skim the chapters before you read them, then skim again, and again, then read it. You gottah read it three times before you start to remember anything.

Anyways, if the magician memory guys and the speed reading crew and the school kids would get together, they could probably make some real magic happen. And that’s why I’m here. I’d like to get the ball rolling, and show at least a few people how memorizing a book, or anything else that you read, is fairly easy.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series! For now, I’ll leave you with some reading material.

Harry Lorayne - Super Power Memory

Triple Your Reading Speed