Hi, my name is Júlio César, I’m a new member and a beginner in the art of memory. I’m starting medical school and I see that there are many things that need to be memorized. I wanted to know what processes you use to consume lectures, memorizing them to review them later. Thank you!
(I also welcome a tutorial on how to get good at it. Training methods are very welcome!)
It is very draining for me to provide my tips. It is because it is almost infinite ways a person approaches memory techniques. A person might need years of deliberate practice to get good at nuicance of memory technique which another person gets instantly.
So I do not want to rob you of your approach that you might be able to memorize lecture and that of medical education comparatively quickly even when you say you are beginner to the technique.
However it took me quite a while just to be able to memorize significant amount of data using memory techniques and I am still unable to remember lectures without devoting proper time to it. My recommendation for you is to take minimal instruction just enough to get started and than use it. You will naturally evaluate your progress and see what you come up with.
Why am i recommending this? It is because the forum shares plethora of approaches, insights and findings which might confuse you more than helping you. The findings people have makes total sense to them but may not to you.
Once you get basics under your belt than the question of what to do, how to do etc rarely come to the mind and when it comes just come to the forum and read materials people have shared. Learning also becomes purposeful and not boring.
What is the bare minimum istruction to get you started for Method Of Loci(Memory Palace)? Say that you want to remember “myocardial infraction” which is a lovely word for heart attack(I watch Ninja Nerd videos haha).
You imagine yourself in the gate of your medical college. Now a mayonnaise dipped playing cards with infrared laser in it’s left hand stops you to scan you for your medical education capability. Mayonnaised dipped cards will remind you of “myocardial” and infrared laser will remind you of “infraction”.
I am really no expert compared to the people here and my field of study is much easier than medicine, but what I do for lectures is write notes by hand, often using abbreviations to write faster, then turn those notes into memory palaces.
Hi JC,
If possible I would record the lecture(s) via audio then break them down by sub-topic discussed.
You can use the Loci/Roman Room method for each sub-topic.
Remember to use the Major system for each sub-topic also together w/the Loci/RRM.
Stefos
What was the most helpful for me:
Before the semester starts: If you know which textbooks are going to be used (ask the teachers), read them in advance to familiarise with the subject, if there is a glossary of basic concepts, learn the definitions already, even if you don’t understand it fully yet (but not everything! Just the really basic foundations).
During the semester: If you can, get the slides of the lecture in advance (not all teachers allow this), and prep by reading them.
Then during the lesson you can be attentive and get answers about the points which you noticed were unclear during prep.
Also take minimal notes (completing the slides, not writing everything, only keywords to remember the practical examples and such, that often aren’t on the slides) helps better concentrate on the lecture and, ultimately getting more out of it. The last thing you want is to not be actually listening (as in thinking about what you hear and making links between ideas) because you were so busy transcribing everything the teacher was saying.
Right after the lecture: reread your notes and complete them with the things that are fresh in your mind that you didn’t have time to write down or insights that come to you at that moment.
If at all possible, record the lecture. Then you can focus on jotting down questions and ideas during it, instead of trying to capture the points.
With a recording you get to pause, rewind, and take notes in as little or as much detail as you need.
Because I wrote slow and we didn’t have laptops to type with, I ended up writing notes that were absolutely broken. Parts of words, single key words, single letters, symbols. It works very well, you can read most of them after the fact and translate them into real notes.
If I had to make notes on Hamlet they would seriously look like “2b n2b that is ? 
tis nbl mnd sfr sln → outra $”
I second the questions and ideas thing very very much.
But how would you find time to relisten to the lecture I have no idea. (And if you constantly stop you’re going to take even more time than the lecture itself took!)
Except if you have a really light load with only 1-2 lectures every day. Then, I could see it work. But if you have lectures all day, everyday, than no way you’d be able to relisten to everything. And you’d be constantly “playing catch up” instead of concentrating on preparing the next ones.
When I was in uni teachers refused to give recordings because of this btw. (Well and maybe to avoid people not paying attention thinking “I can just listen to it later”)
I had decent handwriting at school… Then I began uni and it morphed into something a doctor wouldn’t recognise.
I’m not sure a laptop would have helped all that much, because the temptation of just transcribing everything is too big (I can type fast). Being forced to think and take shorter notes was good in the end (at least for me).
For me personally I recorded whatever I could, which sometimes was 5-6 hours of recordings a day, and whenever I wasn’t in a lecture or lesson I had it playing on +2.5 speed while doing absolutely anything else. If something jumped out at me or left me confused it was only then I’d pause and get a pen and paper out. I couldn’t have ever gone so in-depth through those recordings, a single day’s work could’ve taken me weeks if I did that lol
I suggest using a variety of techniques. In medicine you want someone who is able to interlink ask their knowledge. For example, how many causes of chest pain? (You might know by the time you’re finished med school) That could cover many lectures, so memorising heart disease lecture would not help diagnose the pain if it was lung or musculoskeletal. Not sure recording would help but a lot of useful suggestions above. You’ll develop your favourites with use.
Hey,
I would suggest, to remember lectures in medical school, first try to understand the topic instead of memorizing everything. Then break it into small parts. Draw diagrams or charts to make it easier to remember. Use simple tricks like mnemonics or imagine facts in a familiar place in your mind. Test yourself by recalling without looking at nores and review regularly to keep it in memory. Explain things out loud to yourself.
i loved this trick and your knowlage is very usefull to me, thanks!
You made my day.
I used to dig up information about what the lecturer was going to teach the next day, and do my own web surfing and learning on my own. And then attend the lecture the next day, so I don’t remain totally blank, and almost whatever he/she is teaching, most of the things I have already prepared. So I just focus on what additional information is there so I can enhance my current knowledge, if there are doubts, I clear them by asking to lecturer. And explaining it to classmates, I even get more understanding of that. That’s how I did.
When seeing your post I immediately thought of a medical doctor, learning coach and Youtuber that you might find useful, besides mnemonics from the other tips here.
Check out Justin Sung on Youtube: Justin Sung - YouTube
I will share how I handle long verbatim text memorization. I do this frequently for a fraternal organization I participate in that uses old english phrasing that is often unnatural compared to modern conversation. My experience is typically with documents the rough equivalent of 1 to 3 pages of text. I start by just doing a read and ensuring I understand what the text is saying–context, order of topical flow, meaning, etc.
I then break down the text into linked images. One sentence might be two or three images linked. When I ‘break it down’ I am selective about the words I chunk together and the image I associate… sometimes I need the image to be an object with the same starting letter for example. Over time I build image dictionaries (not physical lists, just in my head) for common phrases or words (for example the word “maybe” is a bee on a flower… flower does not start with an ‘M’ but for me it is a trigger for ‘May’ due to the old ‘April showers bring May flowers’ line etched in my brain. Once I have a string of images I actually draw them out on paper. I then practice recalling the string of images and saying the text out loud until I get all of the filler/connective words correct (a/the/if/and/or, etc.). This might take me a few days for 1 page of text, practicing several iterations a couple times a day. I always to one paragraph at a time… sometimes a couple sentences at at time, until I can get through the whole page of text.
In my case, I may go 3 to 6 months between times when I need to recite this text. I always save my drawing that I create so that I can refer to it for practice to get the image strings back in my head. I have noticed that over time… about the 4th time I go through reciting a ~ page of text, I am able to significantly trim down the number of linked images so that I am only referring to a string of paragraph reference images.
Anyway, it takes work but that’s the habit I’ve adopted for this type of memorization.