How GAMT™ Started

I've always had a terrible memory. This is how I worked around it.

I'm Karthikeyan Srinivasan. I'm an anaesthetist, and I've spent my entire career figuring out how to remember things — because my brain simply doesn't do it naturally. GAMT™ is the technique I built for myself. It worked so well that I thought others might find it useful too.

The Problem

I understood concepts fine. Always did. But memorizing facts? Completely hopeless. When I was about 12, I told our family doctor I could never become a doctor because I couldn't remember anything. He laughed it off. I wasn't joking.

More about this

I grew up in Sirumugai, a small village in Tamil Nadu. School was the typical South Indian experience — lots of homework, lots of exams. I worked hard and did well enough, but I was always aware that my classmates could remember things I couldn't. I'd read something, understand it perfectly, and then forget the details within days.

Through school, I compensated by just revising things over and over — sometimes six or seven times before an exam. It was exhausting, but it worked. The problem was that this approach had a ceiling, and I was about to hit it.

What Changed

Medical school broke my old system. The volume of information was impossible to revise six times over. My classmates could read Harrison's Textbook of Medicine once and recall it for exams. I couldn't. So I started drawing.

How it evolved

I got into Madras Medical College — one of the best in Tamil Nadu. But the amount of information exploded. There was no way to just revise everything repeatedly anymore. I tried mnemonics, memory palaces, peg systems — they worked for small bits of information, but not at the scale I needed.

Then I started drawing simple diagrams. Not fancy ones — just quick sketches that captured how things connected. Something about seeing the information spatially made it stick in a way that reading never did. Over a few years, this evolved into a proper system. That system became GAMT™.

My early GAMTs from 2003. You can see the technique evolving — the first one is crowded, the later ones are clearer:

GAMT for immunoglobulins

Immunoglobulins (2003)

GAMT for cholesterol synthesis

Cholesterol Synthesis (2003)

GAMT for vaccination

Vaccination (2009)

Did It Actually Work?

Yes. I passed every major medical exam on my first attempt — including ones with 40%+ failure rates among qualified doctors. I scored 99th percentile on all three scored USMLE steps. Not because I suddenly got a better memory. Because GAMT™ made the memory part less important.

Triple 99th
Percentile Score
USMLE — All 3 Steps
Full list of exams

Here's what GAMT™ helped me get through — all first attempt:

  • FCARCSI — Irish anaesthesia fellowship (primary + final)
  • FRCA — UK anaesthesia fellowship (primary + final)
  • USMLE — All 4 steps, 99th percentile on Steps 1, 2 CK, and 3
  • MRCPI — Irish medical membership (a different specialty entirely)
  • PhD — University College Cork (2015)

I'm not listing these to brag. I'm listing them because the person who took those exams is the same person who, at 12, was convinced he could never be a doctor. The only thing that changed was the technique.

A more recent GAMT™ — the technique has come a long way from those 2003 sketches:

GAMT for glycolysis

Glycolysis

The Moment It Clicked

In 2010, the morning before my final FCARCSI viva, I opened my laptop and revised my GAMT™ notes for the entire fellowship syllabus. It took two hours. Everything I'd learned from years of reading multiple textbooks — all of it, in one place, reviewable in two hours. That's when I thought: other people should have this.

"Without this technique, I genuinely couldn't have done what I did. I know that sounds like a big claim, but it's just the truth."

What happened next

Honestly, nothing happened for about a decade. Life got busy — clinical work, research, family. It wasn't until much later that I started thinking seriously about turning GAMT™ into something other people could use. The technique I'd developed on paper and pen eventually moved to digital (my wife helped scan thousands of pages), and from there it became the platform you see today.

If someone had told 12-year-old me in Sirumugai that all of this would happen, I wouldn't have believed a word of it.

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