The Best Memorization Method from the Ancient Greeks
Technique I used to memorize Greek words, the Iliad and German.
The memory palace has roots dating back 2500 years, being located in Greece and attributed to Simonides of Ceos.
The justification (or foundation) arose from a famous episode narrated by Marcus Tullius Cicero and later by Quintilian:
Simonides was reciting a poem at a banquet at Scopas’s house in Thessaly. At a certain moment, he was called outside. Shortly after, the hall’s ceiling collapsed, killing and disfiguring the guests.
Since the bodies were unrecognizable, Simonides managed to identify each person because he remembered exactly where each one was sitting.
From this, he formulated the central idea:
Memory is strongly organized by space and the order of places.
It’s incredible to realize that, unlike other theories that transform according to discoveries in numerous areas of knowledge, the memory palace has remained incorruptible since its primitive meaning.
Being practical for the reader who hopes to benefit from such a method, the question is crucial: what differentiates the memory palace from any other study method?
Being concise, traditional study comes down to memorization through brute force review. Conversely, the memory palace focuses on very little review, but on higher quality memorization.
What does higher quality memorization mean? Well, think of a remarkable place you went to, whether a trip to another country, a visit to the oceanarium, a waterfall, a beach, etc. These are remarkable memories; you didn’t need to review them to remember them at any moment.
Of course, our study material isn’t exciting scenes by itself; that’s where imagination comes in:
Upon seeing this painting, nothing catches our attention as impressive. However, it can be valuable material to use as our memory palace. Think about it:
Let’s suppose you want to imagine 3 scenes from the Iliad:
Helen is captured by Páris.
Menelaus (Helen’s husband and the king’s brother) speaks with Agamemnon (the king).
Agamemnon initiates the war against the Trojans to recover Helen.
Now, using the picture above, let’s make a path in order to memorize these 3 facts. And it will be like this:
The chair on the left
The brown table next to the left chair
The middle chair next to the bed
Notice they’re in order. In this case, one item is in front of the other. Why? Well, it’s easier to remember items in order than randomly. For example, 12345 is easier to memorize than 52134, even though they’re the same numbers.
Using the items we now have + the facts we want to know, so let our imaginative work begin!
First, [Helen is captured by Paris.] In this scene, we can think of Helen (white woman with red or black hair, with Greek phenotypes), sitting on the left wooden chair, Paris, a handsome young man, arrives to court her, as she rejects him, he breaks the chair’s leg, and, when Helen falls, Paris catches her in his arms, she blinks, but still, he flies to the skies going to the abode of the Gods.
You realize I painted a scene with the object from the painting; that’s exactly what you should do: create remarkable memories that capture your imagination’s attention. The example I gave above was still light; what you should do is go beyond, put more emotion in gestures and actions, because the more surprising, the better you memorize.
Going to scene 2:
Second, Menelaus (Helen’s husband and the king’s brother) speaks with Agamemnon (the king), the second object is the wooden table, so let’s imagine Menelaus arriving in the room and not seeing his wife, only Agamemnon standing in front of the table drinking wine while looking through the window. The king is warned, spills the wine on the table from the shock of the information and breaks it in anger, enraged by the Trojan God’s perversity.
Scene 3:
Third, Agamemnon initiates the war against the Trojans to recover Helen. To finish, we’ll think of Agamemnon standing in the room, telling him they’ll need more than 1000 ships! He takes the middle chair from the room and takes it to be used in building the ships; material can’t be missing for this great day!
Having used the objects + study materials in one thing, the result is surprising: still today, even without reviewing the stages I created from the Iliad, I remember almost everything I inserted in the palaces perfectly.
I memorized more than 400 ancient Greek words in the last 60 days, and the result was impressive: the more time passed, the harder it was to forget, being the total opposite of traditional study.
Your brain prefers to remember experiences and stories rather than empty content; this is a fact.
Moreover, in a traditional duty + review study, reviews are monotonous and add nothing to your learning.
In the case of the memory palace, your review won’t be just to remember, but to make the experience stronger, whether adding one more scene or creating absurd scenarios to make them impossible to forget: like using superpowers or altering time (yes, this is crazy to think about, but it works like hell).
Results?
It was using only this method that I memorized more than 400 ancient Greek words that to this day I can travel between the paintings where I inserted the knowledge and dictate them in order without problems. I also memorized more than 100 parts of Homer’s Iliad. To this day, I have in my mind the entire plot in order, from point 1 to 100, and I can say it in order at any time. This, with traditional study, is impossible.
I myself use the techniques I teach; I didn’t use ChatGPT to give you generic and abstract scientific explanations. Anyone can do that. But to tell the results of the experiments? That’s for a few.
Besides, I experimented with both sides: here’s the Anki app, for spaced repetition, which I used for a long time to study languages and which today I don’t use much:
I have almost 90 thousand reviews with it and 1161 days of studying until then. Did it give me results? It’s undeniable, but compared to the memory palace, it’s still child’s play.
If you want to use the ready-made memory palaces I created, including + 100 posts about memorization + explanations of how to use the palace using advanced techniques I didn’t explain here, click the button here below.
This was by far the best material I’ve made so far. It took me more than 1 month to create it completely 💫. Another thing, (there are no ready-made memory palaces like this available on the internet with practical techniques), I was the one who had this original idea due to a personal need.)
There’s still a lot to explain, but I would go on for thousands of words, that’s why I’ll wait for you on the other side, see you soon! ❤️
Thank you so much for the support you give me; these last days have been wonderful for me, all because my subscribers are like me, who love knowledge. We’re on this journey together!
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