Many have heard that human memory is infinite, but this probably does not reflect your experience in education. Indeed, we forget the vast majority of what we are exposed to in school. On the other hand, there are things for which we have acquired incredible recall, and without any effort at all. We can see a face or a home just once, and recognize it for a lifetime. Sometimes we can even remember songs that we don’t want to remember, but they get ‘stuck in our heads’ anyway. Simply put, some things are easy to remember, while others are not.

Mnemonics, or art of memory, is the study of deliberate memorization and recall. Despite the fact that the very notion of learning is based on the storage of knowledge, we are never taught how to file knowledge away in our minds. Most learning experiences leave memory to chance, and consequently, much of the labor we devote to learning ends up lost. And like any document or tool that cannot be found, that knowledge is effectively lost, unusable, virtually non-existent. If we do not want our labor to learn to be wasted, we need to ‘artfully’ encode our academic knowledge in a way that tracks those easy-to-remember things.

Art of memory is an ancient practice, but it recent years it has been validated and advanced by a variety of disciplines- especially neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence and philosophy. In this club, we will practice the full spectrum of mnemonic techniques to store and retrieve anything. By using mnemonics, new knowledge can be acquired in single exposures and last for a lifetime. The best thing about mnemonics, however, is that they are incredibly fun to use and invent. This is why it is a growing competitive sport.

Our program is organized around carefully selected texts that are packed with useful knowledge. Using fun mnemonic strategies, we put these books in our heads. Then, for the sport of it, we demonstrate our mastery of the material by identifying not only the information in the book, but also the precise location where it can be found. This meticulously researched and developed program is brand new. Nothing like it has ever been taught. Join the club to see what everyone’s been missing. See below for specifics on upcoming club topics.