I’m about to finish encoding the final five medications of the ClinCalc Top 300 List using the Memory Palace Technique so I figured I would walk through the process in real time and maybe touch upon how it has evolved since that first 25.
Right now my process is to pick a location that I’m relatively familiar with, or that I can walk to and view. Then I look through the five medications I want to encode and see if any words fit well into an object or scenario of some sort. For example, I placed Sennosides (Senna, Ex-Lax) - Laxative into a portable toilet in my local park. Sometimes the word fits the object like Dorzolamide (Trusopt) - Glaucoma which I encoded into a door. I also encoded Dorzolamide; Timolol (Cosopt), another glaucoma medication into a door in another location. I had encoded Risperidone (Risperdal) - Antipsychotic on the roof of my house so I used roofs in my neighborhood to do the same for Olanzapine (Zyprexa), Lurasidone (Latuda), and Ziprasidone (Geodon). This wasn’t the case for all medications of a similar type, but I was able to link together medications here and there to help me remember.
The location I am picking for the final five medications is a path in my local park that passes a baseball field and leads to a pond. Those five medicines, in order (296-300) are:
296. Sotalol - Betapace - Beta Blocker
297. Potassium Citrate - Urocit K - Urinary pH Modifier for Kidney Stones
298. Melatonin - Hormone - Sleep Aid (Insomnia) / Sedative
299. Isosorbide Dinitrate - Isordil - Nitrate / Antianginal
300. Guanfacine - Intuniv or Tenex - Centrally Acting Adrenergic Agent (Hypertension) - Intuniv is for ADHD
Sotalol is just too similar to soda, so that’s an easy connection. And Betapace is a similar last name to a friend of mine so I’m going to visualize walking down this path and my friend has a cooler full of ice cold soda and is handing me one; it’s been a long journey and I’m thirsty. Sotalol ends in -alol so I know it’s a beta blocker already. The next isn’t as easy; a banana is a good way to visualize anything with potassium in it and we also have citrate which sounds like citrus. And Urocit sounds like sit. So maybe there is a folding camping chair with a banana and an orange on it. And I can picture it soaked in urine. By the way, explicit scenarios are encouraged. Okay, so my friend with soda, and a urine-soaked fruit chair. I move on from this chair and maybe I see my sister on a picnic blanket taking a nap (Melatonin). She’s taken that before so that’s easy to remember. Next I am going to picture a giant stone with a sword in it, maybe two swords (Di-Nitrate), and my picture is being taken. Isosorbide was already on the list and I visualized a camera (a setting of which is ISO). So the camera is Isosorbide and the sword is Isordil. I already know Isosorbides are nitrates. And then last, which I already have memorized just because it’s 300 and so very meaningful, is Guanfacine. I don’t know that I need a specific scenario for that one, just that there is one more after I take the sword out of the stone! Maybe Guanfacine is a dragon I slay with the sword.
The cool thing here is that I didn’t even need to use the baseball field or the pond; I can save those for more medications if I want. Sometimes you can use a pretty small space to fit a lot of information into. For example I’ve encoded 15 medications using my car as a memory palace.
So what I will usually do is type these into a spreadsheet I have to track the mnemonics along with the drug class and any other details I uncover. Then I look away and try to immediately recall it all from memory. I can usually get 75%-100% right away but I may need time to practice spelling and brand new words. After that I write them down a second time, but this time I draw out the scenario. This allows me to better visualize that group of five, in order, and also any particular medication individually. That’s why handwriting is so superior to any other form of note taking. You can visualize the space and size of a piece of information. And if you drew a little picture, it just strengthens the connection even more.
This is what one of those drawings look like, on the back of an index card.
The last 50 or so are on a route I take every morning with my dog. So as I walk I recall them all. So I will do that tomorrow to reinforce these.
I made a preliminary attempt on the first 200 or so and did pretty good. My goal is to nail down the entire list of 300 and then repeat it after 1 day, 7 days, 2 weeks, 1 month, and then 3 months. I think the real magic of this method is that you are using free real estate in your head. You already have a memory of the places you’ve been taking up space in your head. You are just storing more information in the spaces, in the neurons, that already exist around that memory.