I am a newbie psychology student and want to be able to remember all the dates of the major players in psychology, but I’m not sure what is the best method. For me right now, I have one date I tested out (621 CE) using the images from my playing cards. Worked and haven’t had any trouble remembering it.
But I don’t know if using this system for all my dates is wise when you have a lot to remember. I want to remember more than just the 50+ dates I need to. I also want to remember all the presidents names and dates in U.S. history too. And I don’t know if mixing the two lists is a bad idea.
I currently have 3 memory palaces with no real issues(two of them are 3 days old so it’s not perfect, but usable). I don’t know if making 2 more memory palaces is better than having just one big one with a lot of rooms. I don’t know how to organize and memorize a 150 or so things(which are dates with names and small explanations attached).
George Washington: 89 => link washing machine to your image for 89. (e.g., major system)
John Adams: 97 => link "atoms" to your image for 97.
Thomas Jefferson: 01 => link your image for Jefferson to 01.
Because the ending year of Washington’s term is the same year as Adam’s starting year, you know that Washington was 1789 to 1797. You can remember that it’s the 1700s by remembering that the Revolutionary War started in 1776. John Adams was in office from 1797 to 1801, because Thomas Jefferson’s starting date was 1801.
I have gone a slightly different direction, made some mistakes, but happier for it. Here is what I did:
I was slacking in a class I was sure to get an A in but decided to put my memory to the test on our final which was based on 325 quesitons. I broke out a couple open work video games I like to play and started attaching images and some catchy sayings to places. After 2 memory palace and 100 spaces in I realized that uninteresting items are far easier to forget than interesting ones. I am likely to scrap these 100 places because I hate them, lol. The second game was way better, I ended up making two memory palaces with 225 places total. The 325 questions took me 3 weeks memorize, but a big part of that was setting up memory palaces and playing around a bit. I was a little disappointed because I scored 100% on my testing of myself two days in a row and on that same day I only scored 87% on my final. Meeting with the teacher to see what I recording wrong. You have to answer a question correctly in your notes to get it right on the test, lol.
Now that I know it can be done, I’m planning on spending my next semester reusing the memory places I have and making some more big ones in my other classes. This has been a good learning experience. I will be using everyone’s input, thank you all.
Thanks for the pointer to my previous comments on history journeys, Josh. I have added hundreds of dates now to my history journey and it is infinitely expandable. Most I just have in the location which I can then judge to within ten years or so (if reasonably recent), thousands of years if you are going way back in prehistory.
If I want the actual year, then I add some further encoding to the location where the person is standing (sitting, yelling or doing all sorts of things which may or may not be suitable to discuss on a public forum). By using a continuous journey covering a few thousand years, I only add in dates when I need them rather than trying to have a few thousand loci in the journey. Hope that makes sense!