Testing Aquinas's Weird Memory Hack w/ Dr. Kevin Vost

Ever wonder how Aquinas and other Church Fathers learned so much of the Scripture from memory? Imagine you could have the same sweeping and integrated knowledge of the Bible!

Dr. Vost walks me through the ancient memory technique described by Aquinas and others.

🔴 LINKS





🔴 SOCIAL

We get a small kick back from affiliate links.

[auntbulldog]

When I was a Catechist I taught my students out of Dr Vost book! It works!

[jwilsonhandmadeknives]

Interesting concept, although I’d have gotten more out of it had the guest began by explaining the exercise before jumping into it. I think it’s more important to present a concept than it is to be enamored with the cleverness of it.

[nherring]

Really interesting! Will have to go back and listen to the whole podcast.

[fragwagon]

Dropping a comment for you Matt, so they're not all spam bots

[spmaud]

I learned about the Memory Palace from Hannibal Lecter and used it to successfully study for two BAR exams.

[PatMcAnn]

It worked for me and I wasn't even trying! I'd like to see him do the virtues.

[stephencotter]

"A gun rack?! A gun rack?! Sh'yeah. I don't even own 'a' gun, let alone many guns, that would necessitate an entire rack."
Party on Wayne

[MissPopuri]

I wonder how well this works for memorizing the Fruits of the Holy Spirit or the Seven Deadly Sins.

[jacklauder]

If it’s a severed head, I’m going to be very upset.

[erikw]

An idea to make number 8 stand out more: the image you see in the mirror is a bear wearing your clothes. That bear is a false witness 😂

[courtneyaarnaud]

Totally have horrible memory. This is so cool.

[die_schlechtere_Milch]

where in the corpus is this method attested as one used by st thomas? did he write about it?
btw, it was obvious that it's the ten commandments

[Arcticroberto]

Bruh doesn't even have a gun rack.

[wormhole]

what... this is just an inefficient way to store memory in the brain for me tbh.

[Rojofro]

So it's a trick they teach in elementary school, and they aren't even the first 10 commandments. Also, how do you consider your self a catholic and not know the commandments? They are pretty much everywhere in catholic churchs.

[stephencuskley]

I've had a terrible memory my whole life and it's been very frustrating to me. I did a lot of research to try to improve my memory and found that all the systems around today are basically the same as this. The problem is that if you have virtually no visual imagination (like me) this doesn't work at all. I even tried going to a hypnotist who advertised that he could improve your memory, but he started by saying "Close your eyes and imagine that you're standing in a forest next to a beautiful babbling brook." Problem is, I couldn't imagine that. All black. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Research shows that you can't actually improve your memory, you can only use tricks like this, but if you can't imagine visually, or visualize poorly, you're out of luck. For the large majority of people this isn't a problem, but I'm on that end of the normal distribution curve with the small number of people have lousy visual imaginations, so I can't use this. And some people have great memories without even having to use this method, but even they can "improve" their memories if they have decent visualization skills and use this method. I actually have an IQ of 133, but when it comes to the visual problems like "which figure matches the first figure when it's flipped upside down and right to left" I'm hopeless. My only recourse is repetition, and it takes me forever.