The Memory Palace by Lewis Smile Read Free Book Online

I am about to tell you a stupid story.
    It begins with you in your warm and cosy bed, and ends with you taking your seat in your local theater (or cinema), moments before watching one of Shakespeare's plays.
    Along this journey, you will see absurd images representing each play, dropped at specific locations. The images will be linked in some way to the names of each play, and your only task is to vividly picture each image, at the specific location. You are not trying to memorize anything, you are simply picturing each step in your head.
    The actual journey we will be treading is loose enough for you to bend to meet an actual route in your real life. Please do this. Plop the route on top of an actual route from your house. You will be imagining the crazy things along the way, but make sure the route is real. Your journey will be mad, boldness will be our friend, and your job will be an easy one.
    Wisely and slow? Ha! We will move at breakneck speed, on buses and donkeys and bicycles and tightropes, and at the end of our journey you will be able to fly back through in your mind and recite the names of every play. Just as if you had installed it in your head like a computer installing a program or document onto its hard drive. You will know the information so well, you will feel it. You will not just know the information intellectually, you will know it spatially. You will have plotted knowledge along a spatial memory, which is the closest you'll likely ever get to simply installing knowledge directly into your brain. Until you can walk into a pharmacy and buy a protein-microchip-neural-prosthesis, insert it inside your head and have it latch onto your brain and install knowledge... this is the best we've got.
    There is no such thing as a bad memory - only an untrained one.
    The Memory Palace technique is not just about the specific information you memorize, however.
    The list of plays will function as a timeline of Shakespeare's work. If you don't know much about his work (like me, before I started this journey myself) you will find the resultant list inside your own mind has become the perfect scaffolding onto which you can hang more information. Things come alive when you begin your educational journey into a subject with the Big Picture already installed in your head. It gives you an incredible perspective.
    I'm excited that I get to be the one to share this with you!
    There's no need for repetition. No need to make a song of the words. No need to write out the list a dozen times and stick it around your house, on your fridge, on the bathroom mirror, on the cereal box, on the dog, on your hand. None of this.
    You don't need to write a single thing down, because this will work automatically. It will work for you because it can't fail to work. When presented information in this way, your brain can't help but learn it.
    Your Mission for the next 30 minutes: Read the story. Get used to punctuating memory journeys with weird images. Go forth and make your own to learn anything and everything.
    Learn Shakespeare's plays from this story, but also learn how to make your own. You can apply this same technique to any other subject, and learn any amount of information you want. This will work because it is about imagination, and no matter how bad you may claim your memory to be, you can't possibly argue there's anything wrong with your imagination. Every day, innocently in your own private thoughts, you are vivid, crude, cruel, loud, and explicit... oh, there's nothing wrong with your imagination...
    Walk through this journey in your own way. Inspect details. Picture yourself there. Talk out loud to the characters along the way if you want to. Just make it real.
    It will take you 20 minutes to read this story, then 10 minutes more to run through the list in your head forwards and backwards (and then to high-five the nearest person). So in 30 minutes from now you will have absorbed the names of all of Shakespeare's plays, and you won't