You may have already found yourself in the unfortunate situation of having to prepare oral exams quickly, whether you have started studying too late, whether you want to release a new irresistible season in your favorite TV series, or for a thousand other reasons.
The periods of intensive study are tremendously stressful because often we are afraid of not succeeding, we lose hope and you do get anxious to be examined.
All this is negatively reflected on our brains, which, under pressure, end up becoming less productive and extremely irritable. Ultimately, it does not matter how much we have studied because we will always feel insecure about ourselves.
As we often repeated there are no “spells” to be able to prepare 7 exams in one night. However, we can use mnemonic techniques that can really give us a big help. Today we talk about one in particular, the loci technique.
Let’s begin!
Prepare the exams quickly using the loci technique
The loci technique (places), also known as “Travel Method”, is a storage system that, by leveraging visual images, allows you to easily organize and find information. An ancient system, but extremely effective today. It appeared for the first time in the treatises of Greek and Roman rhetoric: Retorique at Herennium, De orator, and Oral Institution, has since been used by actors, businessmen and politicians, as well as by many students in crisis.
What is the technique of the loci? It’s simpler than you might think. In essence, you can store lists, texts, and whole speeches simply by associating them with images in the places we know best.
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For example, you could store a series of images that you encounter on the way to go to lessons: trees, palaces, shops, and associate information to each of these elements. The association creates a new image, easily “recoverable” in our memory, re-following the initial journey.
The more we will be familiar with the journey we choose, the more we will be able to memorize and expose the concepts better during the oral exam. Some of the memory world champions have used this technique to store thousands of series in just under half an hour. Sensational no?
But let’s make a practical example.
Examples of loci technique
Let’s take a list of words to memorize …
- Dog
- Ball
- Apple
- Phone
- Book
At this point we hypothesize the journey to our family, the one that takes us from the bedroom to the university …
- Bathroom
- Kitchen
- Atrium of the palace
- Bus stop
- University
We associate, for example, the dog in the bathroom, the ball at the kitchen and so on. The more associations are strong and they create an emotion, the easier it is to memorize them. Obviously here we have done a very trivial case, but progressing with degrees and with constant exercise can achieve excellent results.
