In this 20-minute video, I walk through how I memorized the entire facial nerve (cranial nerve VII) using a memory palace. The facial nerve is a key player in neuroanatomy and pops up repeatedly during gross anatomy in medical school. I explain how I capture the nuclei, branches, and key practical points in an efficient way.
This video covers: palace selection, loci selection, image creation, deciding what to encode, Anki card creation, writing mnemonics, reviewing mnemonics.
Hi Sir. I am Korean Med school student and I am a big fan of yours. I recently saw your post ‘Learning anatomy: a strategy for memorizing muscles.’ I fully agree with what you have said in this article. I think it’s the perfect way to study by reminiscent of images based on text. However, I think that loci is limited to memorize all texts using palace. May I ask how you solved this problem?
Hi Kango, thanks for your message. You’re right. Trying to turn everything into images to put into palaces doesn’t really work. I’d recommend checking out a few articles on the site that address this issue: 1, 2. The take home point is that images should only be made sparingly, so that you shouldn’t have to create tons and tons of loci. Additionally, we have tips for brainstorming/creating lots of palaces, so it really shouldn’t feel to onerous to set them up. Hope that helps. All the best!
