Why Do You Write About Meta-Learning

One of my main goals with this blog is to study high performers of various fields, and dissect why they are so good at what they do.  I want to decode their excellence and break it down into stealable chunks that you and I can learn.  What are the habits, routines, strategies, techniques, and tools of the successful, or in this case, the ultra-smart?  I believe those skills and techniques should not only be reserved for the ultra-privileged who went to elite schools but to everybody.

The first education I received was in my local neighbourhood, which educationally and socially wise, was rather poor.  In this kind of ghettoish school, the focus was not to inspire or to thrive, but to give us an education at all, the minimal dose of education.  In consequence, I inherited dysfunctional learning habits and techniques in that school, which caused me major problems in my academic career.  It climaxed when I got kicked out for the first time of my university (It should not be the last one x).

At a certain point, I was just tired of fucking up at university, and I sat down and really asked myself: Why am I failing academically?  Why are my learning efforts so fruitless?  What is the difference between a straight straight-A scholarship student from Harvard, for example, and me?

I took a really, really long honest look at myself and my results, and I took full responsibility for my failures.  After all, blaming would not get me anywhere.  I realised that if I keep doing the same old approach, my life was going to be really painful.

Why Was I So Bad At Learning?

One of the simplest answers that I came up with was a realisation: I did not know shit about learning!  Like, how does my brain store memory?  How do I take in information?  What can I do to accelerate my memory intake?  What can I do to become a better learner?

I am a guy who is very extreme in everything he does.  This habit of going down all the way into the rabbit hole has its pros and its cons.  A big contra is that I am very susceptible to self-destructive stuff like alcohol or drugs (or even cake x), for example.  If I try something, I will go all the way, usually.

The good side of having this extremism about me is that I asked myself a very difficult question regarding the topic of learning.  I did not just want to become a better student, I wanted to be an elite, straight A level student.  So, I asked myself: How can I transform myself from a college drop out to an elite A level Student?

To answer this question, I began to research books, articles, webinars and tried to learn from the best learners in the world.  To do that, I needed to know where they actually are.

Where Are The Best Learners In The World?

At Harvard?  At Oxford?  Yale?  This is what I thought, and I was dead wrong.

Turns out that learning and memorisation is actually a sport, and that there are memory competitions worldwide.  So, my thought was; If I am somehow able to steal the techniques and mental approaches of the memory champions in the world, I would be able to completely rock every university in the world.  In this article, I am going to write about the second meta-learning technique that I have acquired.  If you apply this technique completely and invest some practice time in it, you will be able to learn any topic and any language in a fraction of the time.

What Is A Memory Palace?

The Memory Palace Technique is based on the fact that we are surprisingly good at remembering places we know.  A "Memory Palace" is a metaphor for any place that you know super good.  A place that is extremely easy for you to visualise would qualify for a memory palace.  This can be your home, or the route you take home, or your way to the gym, or your university.

My first memory palace was my home.  Of course, you can have more than one memory palace.  The idea is that you build a route, and on that route, you always visit some locations in the same order.  Those locations are called loci, this comes from the Latin locus, which means location.  Very easy loci could be your front door.  The idea is now that you visualise at those loci a mnomic.(²)

A mnemonic is any memory technique that helps you remembering something easier.

For example, you want to learn the word freedom, then you imagine a miniature version of the Statue of Liberty in front of your front door.  Studies have shown that our brain is terrible at actually learning stuff by just reading words over and over again.  Since I come from a psychological background, this seems very plausible to me, because our brain evolved thousands of years before there was any written language.  So, to learn effectively, we have to translate information back into the format that our brain can process.

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How Do I Build A Memory Palace?

1. Choose Your Palace

Pick a place you are extremely familiar with.  My first palace was my home, but you can choose any place you want, or you can create a fictitious place as well.  Any place where you can see visualise yourself walking around with ease is fine.

What I did to make this easier for me, was to take a picture of every locus (the different route stops in your memory palace) in my memory palace and put a number on it.  Then you can create a blueprint of your room and draw the route that you are walking.  Remember, the goal is that you visualise yourself walking through your memory palace from loci to loci.

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