Not Quite Acupuncture

General Memory Chat
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Many years ago I read a book by Harry Lorayne, created a series of pegs, and have been hanging short lists on them ever since. That’s about as far as I ever went, but now I have a need to investigate memorisation seriously, and my requirements are much more complex than simple lists.

What I need to do will take some explaining, so please forgive the length of this post. I want to try to reduce the chances of starting on the wrong track and then have to make significant changes later on. Hopefully you folks can give me some guidance.

The easy explanation is that I need to learn some parts of acupuncture; not to the depth that a real acupuncturist has to go to, but I also need to learn some different related data that the acupuncturist doesn’t.

Three and a half years ago, at the age of 64 and after a period of severe illness, I took up the defensive martial art of Aikido for exercise and as recuperative therapy. More recently I also developed an interest in the art of Kyusho-Jitsu, which is the study and use of standard acupuncture pressure points for both combat/defence and healing.

Although I was recently awarded a black belt in Aikido there is still much for me to learn, and my next step in that direction will probably be to learn a lot more Japanese terminology, but the focus of this query is the Kyusho Jitsu aspect.

It goes like this …

Meridians (12) & vessels (2) are imaginary lines that trace very specific paths on the body. For the sake of simplicity I’ll only refer to meridians, as much the same applies to vessels, but even less information has to be known about vessels. First problem for me is to memorise the exact path on the body of these 12 meridian lines. This is a big one – some of the paths are quite complex.

Each meridian starts at a particular point, follows a very specific path over the body, ends at a specific point, and has a number of points along its path. The number of points on a meridian ranges between 9 and 67, depending on the meridian. Real acupuncturist have to learn the Chinese names of these points but I don’t (thank goodness!). I just need to refer to a point by it’s meridan name and a number, e.g. Spleen 6, Stomach 5, Heart 2, Kidney 22, and so on.

Initially I only need to learn a small selection of points on various meridians, but the number of points that have to be memorised will increase as we move on to more advanced parts of the course. Thus the memorisation technique employed must allow for knowledge about additional points to be inserted at later stages. That is, the memorisation requirements will be evolving, and obviously a newly introduced point must be located in its correct position between a lower and a higher number that have already been included and learned.

The exact location of each point is usually referenced in acupuncture textbooks in relation to a specific anatomical part of the body. For example, Spleen 6 is referenced as “3 cun directly above the tip of the medial malleoulus on the posterior border of the tibia”. It would be very cool to be able to quote those references verbatim from the textbooks, but not really necessary, so long as the precise location was achieved somehow.

NOTE: I’m considering purchasing the “Master Your Anatomy” book by Yan Minis to learn the necessary anatomy. Comments?

Each of the 12 meridians is associated with a different number 1-12, and the student should immediately be able to relate a meridian to its number or vice versa. Easy enough by itself, but…

Each meridian has a certain amount of necessary data associated with it. For examination purposes I need to be able to quote the following, in the order EPSSCD, when questioned on any specific meridian:

E - Element (metal, earth, fire, water, wood)
P - Polarity (Yin or Yang)
S - Striking action (vibrate, pentrate, slap, grasp, chop - directly related to the element)
S - Stance (45 degree Cat, horse toes ahead, neutral bow, crane, horse toes out)
C - Colours: a two-colour combination for each meridian (grey/white, green/yellow, red/red, blue/black, brown/green)
D - Diurnal cycle: a two-hour time period (0300-0500, etc.)

ASIDE: Learning the diurnal cycle isn’t really an issue because it can be mentally calculated very quickly from the meridian’s number in the 1-12 sequence. Double the number, add 1, and you have the start time of the diurnal cycle for that meridian in 24-hour time. E.g. Heart meridian is number 5 x 2 = 10 + 1 = 11; thus diurnal cycle for Heart is 1100-1300. The average person would simply say “5 10 1100 to 1300”, without even sub-vocalising the intermediate steps. Obviously 2500 hours is easily and instantly visualised as 0100 hours.

Anyway, there may be more that will occur to me, but I’ll leave it at that for the moment, and wait to see what you experienced people may have to say about it. I suppose what concerns me most is the fact that although the basis is a simple list of 12 numbered meridians, there are many branches and sub-branches off each, and that the information required can range from single words to complete phrases as in the anatomical location of points. With my inexperience in utilising memory techniques I just can’t see how to put all this together in a logical and manageable manner, and at the same time allow for future expansion.

Gavino's Massive Memory Palace System - Practical Examples
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Congratulations on your black belt. It is inspiring to see a person of your age for whom learning and personal development is still a priority.

Some of this post is a little bit out of order, so bear with me if I get ahead of myself.

This is a cool problem. For the EPSSCD, I think that Roman Rooms is the perfect tool. Let’s tackle that one first,

E+P+S+S+C+D=6: the number of facets of a cube. What I would do if I were you would imagine you are standing in a room - there is the floor, ceiling, left wall, right wall, front wall, and back wall.

To hold all of this information, it would be advantageous to have 12 “Rooms.” They don’t have to be rooms in a strict sense, but they should be somewhat large areas. Honestly, a phone booth would work just fine for a room, but the reason it’s good to go a little bit bigger is that there will be more room for imagery later if you need it. You should probably be able to make all 12 rooms at your house. Count how many rooms are in your house, add the front yard, back yard, as well as front and back porches if they exist, and see if you can get to 12. A hallway could count as a room if needed. You may need to extend a little beyond your yards to get all 12.

In the dead center of every room, imagine the organ that the meridian is named after. Do this for all 12 rooms, and imagine that you can walk from room to room, saying for example “One is Heart, Two is Spleen,” and so on. You know how to do this already - we’re basically making a new set of twelve pegs at this point. It should be a simple matter to learn the numbers of the rooms and the medians they represent. Just keep walking through them and repeating them until when someone says “Meridian 7,” you are automatically transported to the center of some room, maybe your kitchen, and you’re right by that organ. Then, by looking in front of you, or up, or down, or left, or right, you will be able to quickly access the image you have for whatever piece of “EPSSCD” information you need at that time.

Really imagine yourself walking from room to room. If you have to walk through a wall to make them all connect perfectly, go ahead and do it, because doing so will allow you to determine quickly and permanently which wall is the front wall.

Once you know what the “front wall” of every room is with certainty, you can just move clockwise, then to the ceiling, and finally the floor.

E)Front wall
P)Right wall
S)Back wall
S)Left wall
C)Ceiling
D) Floor.

You can remember the order of the last two because ceiling begins with “C” and the floor is "D"own.

Before memorizing anything (other than the organs in the centers of the rooms), just make sure you can quickly access each Meridian Room and that you have looked at the walls in each of these rooms so that you have a clear understanding of what kind of information each of these 72 walls will hold.

Then make six more images per room (you know the drill - be vivid and clear - and involve motion, sensation, and exaggeration if it is helpful).

That’s all there is to it. It’s a cakewalk, really. It may take a little time to set up, but with the rooms organized like this, you’ll be able to permanently hold and quickly access all of this information once you get it all of the images in there and review, review, review.

Has all of this been clear so far?

Moving on:

There are between 108-803 “nodes” or specific locations that fall along meridians. They are points on the body, right?

What kinds of things do you need to know about each of these individual nodes?

The problem of memorizing their locations on the body is an unusual one. I’ll look up the paths and ruminate on this. Hopefully, I will have thought of some practicable system to memorize these by tomorrow.

1 Like
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Hi Lance.

I’m very grateful for your time and the care you’ve taken with your response. At first glance I like the idea of the 12 rooms with the organ sitting in the middle. I’ll have to give it some careful thought and try it out to make sure I’m not going to get the “walls” mixed up between rooms. I already have a strong association between each meridian and its number 1-12.

Sorry, I was somewhat incomplete with my EPSSCD mnemonic. For the purpose of a grading exam, when asked to describe a meridian, a complete answer would be in this format:

  • Number of points
  • Starts here (indicate on a live body)
  • Traces this path (indicate on a live body)
  • Ends here (indicate on a live body)
  • EPSSCD

There are between 108-803 “nodes” or specific locations
that fall along meridians. They are points on the body, right?

I think in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) they use more than the basic 12 meridians and two vessels that we are concerned with, so the total number of actual points (nodes) is going to vary depending on who you’re talking to. Bearing in mind that the 12 meridians are bilateral, and including the two vessels (which are not bilateral), there are a total of 670 points on the meridians/vessels with which we are concerned. But if you know one side of the body you automatically know the other, so it really comes down to 309 meridian points + 52 vessel points = 361 total.

Now from reading through this site I realise that learning 361 or even 670 points probably wouldn’t be considered a significant task by most of you guys, but we don’t actually utilise anywhere near that many anyway. At this stage I don’t have any idea how many I’ll need to know intimately in the long term, but in the early stage that I’m at it will be well under 50. Ultimately I guess I would probably want to memorise them all if only for personal satisfaction. Thus my reference to being able to insert points as I progress through more advanced stages of the course. This module I may only need Lung 5 and Lung 6. Next module I may need to add in Lung 4 and Lung 8, but do I want to clutter my imagery with them now?

The hard part as I see it is knowing exactly where on the body each point lies, and that comes back to the exact path of each meridian. A simple way to learn these paths on the surface of the body has really got me stumped. Some of the paths are quite complex – take a look at the gallbladder meridian for example.

I need to be able to trace out the path of a meridian, and to precisely indicate certain (not all) points on that meridian, with reference to standard anatomical features. For example, let’s say I need to locate Lung 6:

The first thing that should pop into my head is the path of the lung meridian. Then the anatomical reference for LU6 as “7 cun above the transverse crease of the wrist” gives me the exact point.

If all I had was “7 cun above the transverse crease of the wrist”, but without the path of the meridian, I wouldn’t have the exact location. I’d only have a line around the arm on which the point lay.

I guess it’s a bit like learning to draw a map from memory. Is it even possible to use mnemonic techniques for that sort of task?

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There are certainly tricks that you can use to make things easier. I used to have an acupuncturist so I know some of what you’re talking about. So first off you will need 12 lists, one for each meridian. The lists can each have their own memory palace or you could put them in a large memory palace one after the other. Each list should start with an indicator that will name the list (and separate it from the previous list if you are putting the list one after the other). For the kidney list you could visualize that there’s an intruder in your house and you use a Kyusho-Jitsu style kidney shot to eliminate him. After the indicator you would place a symbol for the number of meridian points. I will explain how to memorize the start, end, and path at the end.

Since element, strike, stance and colour are linked information. You could learn that information separately then you only have to place the element symbol in your loci and you’ll know the rest. Linking each element to it’s corresponding strike, stance and colour is almost effortless since the content is consistently thematic. You could use a tuning fork to symbolize metal since a tuning fork is made of metal. Tuning forks vibrate when you use it so you know the strike is vibrate. This fork is odd, the top ends are bent out to a 45 degree angle which symbolizes the 45 degree cat. Metallic objects can appear to be any colour but to me it does seam to be naturally grey and white. The hardest part here seams to be linking the stance. Let us know what you come up with for the other elements.

To memorize locations, use word associations of words that describe the location. If you have to memorize knee, you could use a bee as your symbol. So you would symbolize a big bee trying to sting you as you walk through your loci.

It will help if as a side project you learn directional anatomy terms. This way you can me more specific than just knee. It also gives you more options for terms to use. Maybe you have to memorize bottom outside knee cap. ‘Outside’ could be replaced with the more accurate term ‘lateral’ if that is easier to symbolize. So to symbolize the bottom lateral side of the knee cap I would visualize a bee with a CAP on it’s stinger (bottom) that is looking at its watch or is in a hurry to leave (it’s late as in lateral). The white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of ‘late’ so I might include the white rabbit interacting with the bee symbol instead of the watch or the bee hurrying. Even the white rabbits voice is novel enough to stick. In that case the bee could be saying 'I’m late. I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!" in the white rabbits nasally voice. Any one of those or anything like that will do. In this case ‘bottom’ could have also been ‘inferior’ I chose to use bottom since it’s easier for me to visualize.

So each list with have a name indicator, a number (number of points), an elemental symbol, then a list of locations. To get the colours, stance, and strike, use your associations to the element. Look for the first and last location symbol to know the start and end of the meridian. Use the list of locations to indicate the meridian line.

I wanted more information so I just downloaded some videos with bittorrent you might also be interested in. Beware, side ads that are not to be seen at work in links ahead. But there aren’t any viruses are anything.

[Admin’s note: torrent links were removed. For more info on the products, research: Understanding Qigong, Dr. Yang, Jwing-Ming]

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Thanks for the input Aaron.

I’ll have to sit down and go through your post carefully to see what I can glean from it, but here are some initial thoughts…

I’m familiar with most of the directional terms on that anatomy flashcards page; it’s my knowledge of standard human anatomy itself that I need to significantly improve, otherwise I can’t precisely locate points that are referenced to a standard anatomical feature. That’s the reason I’m considering purchasing the “Master Your Anatomy” book by Yan Minis.

References to generic terms such as “knee” aren’t of much use because the knee consists of many parts. For example, the location of Stomach 34 is given as: When the knee is flexed, on the anterior aspect of the thigh, on the line connecting the anterior superior iliac spine and the lower lateral border of the patella, 2 cun above the patella.

To complicate matters further, six meridians pass through the knee/knee-joint on different paths, and there are more than a dozen points in reasonably close proximity to the knee. Each is precisely located either with reference to a standard anatomical feature, or to another acupressure point.

As far as Qigong is concerned, it’s certainly interesting, and I have a passing familiarity with it, but I don’t think it has any useful relationship to what I need to learn at this stage.

Perhaps I’m asking for too much to be considered in my opening salvo. Leaving out for a moment all the other stuff that I mentioned, my biggest challenge is learning the paths that the meridians trace on the surface of the body. As I demonstrated, some of these paths are quite complex, and with a dozen different paths it is a challenge I haven’t been able to solve. I’m trying to avoid having to resort to rote repetition. Without the paths as a base to build on I don’t think I’m going to get very far with a mnemonic solution.

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For memorizing the nodes along the meridians, like the for the gallbladder meridian above, I wouldn’t even use mnemonics personally. Mnemonic information is codified, so unless there were words for the spots along the meridian that you already knew, (Like the medical terminology you put as an example in your original post), there is nothing to link the number to that would have any meaning or “memory value” to you. I’d just print up a bunch of versions of that picture that don’t have the numbers written by it, and try to cover up the answer key and write in the numbers, only peeking when you can’t remember a number. Then, when you know those well, I would print out a version with just the outline of the body, and make sure that I could draw the meridian. After that is doable, draw the meridian AND the nodes. It’s just classic learning by repetition - nothing glamorous, but it shouldn’t be that difficult if you print out the tools and learn it by “testing yourself” over and over.

But to reiterate: mnemonics is all about association, and if there is nothing you can associate with those spots of the body already, then there is nothing mnemonics can do, as far as I know. It’s just like with memory palaces or roman rooms - they can help you retain information, but the rooms and palaces themselves are not learned with mnemonics, but by rote repetition - this is true for even the best mnemonists.

But the associations you have with the numbers (your pegs) could be helpful…have you thought of looking at one of these graphs and imagining that you have a real person on a table, and you pin tiny versions of your peg images along their meridian? That should speed up the learning, but drawing out the nodes and labeling them (repetition) is going to be the most powerful tool here I think.

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Apologies guys – after you’d gone to so much trouble to assist it probably looked like I had just disappeared. I had to leave this topic for a while for various reasons, and I’m just coming back to it now.

I think I’m resigned to the fact that I’ll have to adopt the old learn-by-rote method for memorising the paths of the meridians, as suggested by Lance – just keep drawing them out on practice sheets.

For the rest of the data I think I need to give more thought not only to what I need now, but where I might need to go in the future. I don’t want to end up with a restrictive model.

Thanks very much for your assistance. I need to find the time to read a lot more of what’s available on this site and come up with a flexible plan.

In the meantime, if any new arrivals have any thoughts I’d be pleased to hear them.