How do you memorize things verbatim? I turn the most important words into images and then repeat the sentence over and over. However, when I review it later, I often forget some small words and slightly change the structure of the sentence. How would you do it?
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If you are new, it is because of practice and how many words you memorize 1,500 or less… Choose well your images for each word, this is the most important thing.
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I’m currently memorizing austrian constitutional law verbatim and I’ve written up my process here: Memorizing Austrian/EU constitutional law verbatim: A hubristic journaling project
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Attach whole ideas to images.
Out of the night that covers me
I imagine a well, a shadow suddenly covers it (At location 1)
Black as the pit from pole to pole
I imagine a character named Black Pit swinging from a place to another (At location 2)
I thank whatever gods may be
I imagine a person praying (At location 3)
For my unconquerable soul
I imagine a flame as the soul (At location 4)
As long as you discover what you feel or how you’re sure you made an attachment, from idea to (“a bothering sound”) visualized concept (“imagined a dog barking”). It’s easy for me to know when I attached a concept to an image, I described it as visualizing the image and letting the image remain me of the idea I want to memorize.
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Also @turducken‘s thread:
Bruno and Verbatim Memorization of Law
—which he posted prior to starting his journaling thread (that I’m also following along with)—
has some insightful discussion on memorizing text verbatim.
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Repetition is not so necessary if you have good images, not that it should not be done, but not as much as if you did it without mnemonics, review your images and if they are clear images that you forget, reinforce them, for example I want to memorize the word limp and I see an old man limping, but his foot with which he limps is also bleeding and he curses in agony looking at the sky, if you realize it is harder to explain this than to do it in the imagination.
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Nelson Dellis, in his book “Remember It,” has what I think is a unique approach to verbatim memory that seems to be highly effective, although it may be better for shorter things (poems, quotations) than extended material. I can give a nutshell summary of it here if you’d like, but I’d rather you read Dellis’s book, which is very good.
Another book that might be helpful—which is still on my to-read pile—is “Solomon’s Memory Palace” by Bob Lingerfelt. It’s written from the perspective of the Freemasons, which I couldn’t care less about and don’t endorse, but its entire focus is on verbatim memory.
Bob
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