Rememeber Me?

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I've been quiet. What have I been doing all week? Well....

Twenty years ago I learned how to memorise the sequence of a deck of cards.

Most likely you also know the method, and most likely you also can't actually do it - we just know how. But just in case you don't, well....

There's basically two tricks for memorising things - strategically timetabled revision, and mnemonics.

The former means you learn something, then remind yourself of it (say) five minutes later, then an hour after that, then the next day, the next week, next month, next six months and next year - or something similar. There's an entire study system based on identifying your personal 'best first interval' (usually about five minutes) and your personal 'interval multiplier' (usually about 1.7). It's good for learning stuff you don't have to recall in sequence.

For sequenced information - lists, presentations, tables etc. - there's mnemonics. Which is basically to have a list of things already rote-memorised, which you then link to things you want to remember. The links usually last about a day, unless you reinforce them with revision.

So lets say you got a list of ten 'pegs' or 'slots', which are colourful, memorable pictures of things which look a bit like the figures one to ten. Here's the one I use:

1 - A rocket in space
2 - A quacking duck
3 - Wobbling jellies
4 - A creaking swivel chair
5 - A bloodstained meathook
6 - A bomb with a lit fuse
7 - A cliff seen from a helicopter
8 - An hourglass with trickling sand
9 - A balloon on a stick
10 - Laurel and Hardy

And lets say our list of items to be linked to these are a shopping list - cheese, chocolate biscuits, a tin opener etc.

How can you connect a rocket with cheese? How about a space rocket crashing through an asteroid made of cheese, and getting stuck halfway through with a squelchy noise? The cheese is lurid yellow and full of holes, like in Tom & Jerry cartoons, and the rocket is a futuristic sleek white affair with red highlights. Colourful, noisy, comic, absurd - in other words, memorable.

For the biscuits...how about a duck finding a packet of biscuits and loudly crunching them up? Or a refined, aristocratic duck in a tuxedo using its beak to dunk a biscuit in a china cup of earl grey?

And the tin opener? How about a tin opener made of wobbling red jelly?

Now without looking, what were the three shopping items? Or rather what were the three 'triggers', 'pegs' or 'slots'? Rocket...cheese. Duck...chocolate biscuits. Jelly...tin opener. And you can do them in reverse order too.

Okay, it's a party trick - and one for extremely dull parties. You can apply a similar method to memorising the sequence of a deck of cards, but the world record for doing so is twenty two seconds, so you probably can't use it to break the bank at Monte Carlo. Some poker players do use it though, to remember what cards have been played and which ones might be in other player's hands.

One variation uses parts of your own body. Another involves taking an imaginary walk around a house you know well, using objects on tables and walls to link to. It's called the Loci method (Latin for 'place') and it's a visual variation - visual methods are faster to make and recall associations, but verbal methods are more reliable.

The most common of the 'advanced' verbal methods is called the Major system. It involves taking numbers starting at zero, and translating their numerals into consonant sounds (not letters), making a list of words which have those consonants, and using this list as your 'pegs'.

Here's the conversion system:

0 - S as in Set, Z in Zero
1 - T in Take, D in Dare, TH in Think, TH in This
2 - N in November
3 - M in Mine
4 - R in River
5 - L in Lettuce
6 - SH in Sham, S in Pleasure, CH in Church, J in Judge
7 - K in Kite, G in Go
8 - F in Flame, V in Vertigo
9 - P in Pump, B in Ball

So your first ten words might be:

0 - Sea
1 - Door
2 - Knee
3 - Mail
4 - Ray
5 - Lair
6 - Jar
7 - Key
8 - Fur
9 - Pear

W, Y and H sounds aren't used. You can extend the list by adding new numbers, and if you forget a word, you can always make a new one from the number which generates it.

The best 'memorable' words tend to be nouns - specifically concrete, familiar, countable nouns. So 'Daisy' for '10' is better than "Hertz" or "Odious" because it's more easily visualisable.

I once memorised a two hour lecture as forty five bullet points using this system - and afterwards read them back to a nice young man in an utterly failed attempt to chat him up. Perhaps if it hadn't been two hours on 'Why Pokemon is Propaganda for Satan' I'd have had better luck - or kept up practicing.

But sometimes it's difficult to find good words. If only there were a list of dictionary words arranged by their Major System codes, so you could easily find ones that works for you.

And that's what I've been doing all week. Making one. Here.

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