How to Memorize
Crushed med school and law school and business school and every exam before and after by studying for each exam (even the most major licensing exams) only in the hours/days leading up to it. How? Because I can memorize. And everyone else can’t.
The most efficient and effective memorization technique involves creating a mental landscape of the subject that capture each concept in visual/cartoon form, maximizing connections between concepts through use of the same item to represent the same idea when it’s present in other concepts and through smart organization of the concepts in space. There can be some temporal play in the various images but don’t take that too far, such that you’d have to wait for a whole 10 second video to play out to see all the elements of a concept. Choose for the landscape a place from your past that you know well and that has many different areas within it so you can separate the ideas as needed. And only use one landscape/location per subject.
Happy to answer any questions.
Edit: more detailed breakdown in response to a comment below asking for more detail:
Well, there are two limiting factors: one’s ability to visualize (some people toward the aphantasia end of that spectrum simply won’t be able to see anything with their mind’s eye) and creativity. The most laborious process is just the mental energy of creatively coming up with mental images to represent things. It definitely is a challenge of creativity, but worth spending the time to come up with something good bc it’ll be locked in when you do. So, start at the beginning of the space (let’s say the driveway if you’re choosing your house for this subject) and come up with a mental image to represent the first concept to do with the subject (and different items to represent each element of that concept). Every time you add a concept, first walk past the one(s) you already created and call out each of the things the parts represent. This way, as you get deeper and deeper into the space, you’ll be reviewing everything so many times you won’t even have to write anything down bc you’ll have it all so locked in. As a quick example, say you wanted to create an image for the concept of “battery” in law (physical contact with the person of another; can be done by causing something to directly contact them; doesn’t have to result in any actual harm; any harm that occurs as a result of them being hypersensitive is still your fault) - I might imagine a guy holding a bat (BATtery) standing in front of a girl with blue hair (hypersensitive) and hitting her in the body with the bat (physical contact) and then hitting the ground with the bat which creates a crack that leads to her foot (indirect cause) but doesn’t actually do anything to her foot (no actual harm necessary). So that might be at the front of the driveway and then I might try to include all the rest of the “intentional torts,” of which battery is one, on the rest of the driveway so I have them all in one place. And I’d try to make as many connections as possible between the concepts. So for ex, any time I need to represent hypersensitivity after that I’d be sure to always use blue hair or any time battery comes up again it’d be a bat etc. the more connections the better. Eventually, when the space is mostly filled out, I’ll increase the connectivity (and my ability to manipulate the whole image and access all of it at once) by testing myself to, for example, find everywhere there’s hypersensitivity and then I’d have to fly around the space and find all instances of blue hair, which helps you make the whole thing way more accessible in your brain as you come to a problem and need to figure out where exactly to fly to to find the info to answer it. Notice that the concept I created had a little temporal play in it in that it was more of a video than an image. That can be good and make it stick more in your head, but you want to limit as much as possible how many seconds need to play out bc whatever is at the end of the video won’t be as immediately accessible as you can imagine. Mnemonics are okay to use to pack in a ton of items into one concept if it’s too overwhelming but limit the use of mnemonics bc they represent ideas with single letters rather than with full objects/people/actions, so each idea will be less memorable even if the complete set of the ideas will be easier to recall. But for example, if you’re doing “please excuse my dear aunt sally” for PEMDAS order of operations, you might have someone pushing someone else out of the way for a sweet old lady walking by with a name tag on that says “Sally” or even better might be to just have two pandas sitting there putting ABC blocks in order (pandas sounds like pemdas and they’re putting blocks in order to make you think of order of operations). Lastly, you want to use each location only once, not reuse it for multiple different subjects. So that means being efficient with space and putting as much as you can in each area to save space for other sub-subjects or other subjects altogether (hopefully related ones), and it also means being creative with your own past and finding new places from your past that you can use (always best if that place itself has some relation to the subject somehow, so when you want to access that subject it’s easy to remember what location it’s in). You can also create novel places to use that aren’t places from your past, but that should only be if you literally run out of places (which wont really happen if you’re being creative enough with your memories) and when doing that you should create a place that has a lot of separate areas to it. (I used an imaginary field in the wilderness once and that wasn’t very effective bc all the areas kinda blended together in my head bc they weren’t separate/distinct enough which made it hard to navigate them and fly around and link them.)