The way exams work means that whoever has a better memory wins. And well, life isn't that kind and we probably have a very average memory. So when the results come in, we hear a lot of "your cousin Dopinder got 100%, why can't you be more like him?" The good news is, I learnt how to transform my average memory into something that could recall all of pre-clinical medicine in just 1 day. And even better new is, I'm going to teach you how to do the same. Almost all of the exams we'll do in our life-time, is really just a test of memory. But let's be real, it takes us a life-time to commit this stuff to memory. Personally, I'd rather spend my life-time doing anything but trying to memorise for exams. So how did I win at this game? I became Mike Ross and developed a superhuman memory. Well, not quite but I did use 3 key strategies to speed up my memorisation process and make it stick for longer. Before I explain my process, let me explain how memory works.

🧠 Memory

I like to think of memorization as a 3 step process.

In this post, I'm going to walk you through my scientifically legit strategies that helped me improve each of these 3 stages.

📍Encoding
Encoding of information is the process your brain has to go through when it comes across something new for the first-time. It'll first try to make sense of it - also known as understanding. If it can understand it, then it gets encoded relatively easily. However, sometimes, the fact is far too complicated and the time it takes to understand it is just not cost-effective. (coins) So the brain tries to blindly encode it. This is where the trouble begins, because encoding without understanding is like trying to hang decorations without a tree. It becomes very difficult to hang these facts onto our memory. Now, sure you can try to understand it by spending hours researching the topic and finally grow the tree. But it's kinda costly, when the exam is only going to want the decoration What I'm trying to say is, understanding is the holy grail and best way to ensure reliable encoding, but it comes at a time and effort cost which doesn't get rewarded; i.e. the exams don't really care if you understand why this virus is called a togavirus, it only cares that you know it is.

The Story Method
So instead of using understanding as the tree, I use blind associations.
There are 2 blind associations I use:

Here's how this works. 

Here's another example from the story I made to remember the different conditions that cause flank pain which is pain on the sides of your lower back.

This way I can remember the causes in the order of importance and how common it is with very little effort. Our brains are great at remembering vivid stories so this speeds up the encoding process as we take advantage of the story to pin on the medical condition. In this way, the story becomes our tree. This process allows me to reliably encode a lot of things very quickly. I'm not faffing about trying to understand why and how, instead I'm rapidly encoding information into my memory stores.
Now the disclaimer is that this works for exams that just test facts, other exams may test your understanding of a topic, for which you're going to have to bite the bullet and invest some time. But the advantage is that you've freed up a lot of time by speeding up memorization of the mundane stuff, so you can actually invest it in trying to understand other topics.

The Journey Method
The Journey Method is all about taking a mental journey through a known area and pinning on facts and memories to the different locations. It can be a familiar place you know well like your house or a well know journey like the journey to school. For example, I chose the journey taken by food from mouth to bottom, to help me remember the different causes of abdominal pain. First place food goes to in the tummy, is the stomach so I think of all the different conditions that can affect the stomach and cause abdominal pain. Then it passes across into the duodenum and I think of all the conditions that could affect this. Then I also consider nearby structures like the pancreas, liver and gall-bladder. Like this I rapidly encode lots of conditions based on which location of the journey they belong to. I found that this strategy also massively sped up my recall of information, as I would start with an organ as the prompt and recall all the associated conditions, then move on to the next. Anyway more on recall, later. Now for the next method.

The Mnemonic Method
The mnemonic method is another powerful tool I used to encode information rapidly. Mnemonics are a great way of converting a lot of information into a singular easy to remember word.

For example, to remember the questions to ask when taking a chest pain history, I used the mnemonic POPSAC. The word POPSAC reminded me of the chest pain because the heart was kinda like a sack that goes pop which then causes chest pain. This way I could rapidly encode and also rapidly recall these questions. Sometimes I also used mnemonics that was just outright silly but I found I could just remember. Sillier it was, easier I could remember it. 

For example, the symptoms associated with depression, I learnt using the mnemonic: MAE SWAG CAD.

😓M- low mood

😐A - anhedonia - can't enjoy things you previously enjoyed

🥱E - low energy

😴S - loss of sleep

⚖️W - weight loss

🍔A - loss of appetite

😞G - feelings of guilt

😵C - decreased concentration

🤸A - reduced activity

⚰️D - death or suicidal ideation

I found that creating mnemonics was great for rapidly encoding information, but also facilitated rapid recall. It allowed me to carry out a focussed recall for each letter, meaning I had a prompt and also a fixed number of things to recall. But more on recall phase of memorisation later.

📍Maintenance
The next step after encoding is maintenance. The aim of this step is to ensure whatever information you encoded, sticks around. Encoding is the step that takes the longest and now we've sped it up with our blind associations. But even that takes some time - especially the first time you form the associations. So what you don't want to do is go back to step 1 by allowing yourself to forget things. You want to maintain the memory so that you never have to go back to the slowest stage. Now, we've all heard about the big don Ebinghaus and his forgetting curve from the even bigger don Ali. So we know that we are bound to forget stuff as time passes. So in the maintenance phase, we want to aggressively disrupt the forgetting curve. After you've encoded information, go through it repeatedly every day. Now this will take up some time, but only a fraction of the initial encoding stage. And with every practice, you become faster and faster. Eventually, you'll get to a stage that it's encoded into your long term memory and you can go by a few weeks without practicing something, and still recall it just as fast as before. Which bring me onto the final stage of memorisation which is recall.

📍Recall
Ultimately, you want the recall of information to be rapid and specific. In the exams, you don't want to spend a lot of time going through all your associations just to find the final fact from your story, you need to be able to go straight to the fact you're interested in. Recall is heavily dependent on a solid maintenance phase. If you've practiced the information enough times, the memory will become very fluid and it'll allow you to jump straight to the fact you're interested in without having to go through all the other steps. Testing is a key strategy to ensure your recall is rapid and specific. You want to expose your brain to every possible trigger there is, so it can recongise exactly which fact the question is after. The best way to do this is to go though a lot of past exam questions, do them and mark them to give yourself feedback. This way, when it comes to the exam, your brain spends less time trying to figure out what they're asking and it can work almost on recognition which is a faster process that active retrieval.