P/S/A: Given the time it takes to learn it, the mnemonic major system is ridiculously powerful. You can learn it in a weekend, and it will give you a 100 slot mnemonic peg list in your head, that will work as a random access array for absolutely any arbitrary items you can somehow map into numbers 00..99.
What you do: 1. Learn the consonant sounds for the numerals 0 to 9. 2. Come up with a list of 100 different mnemonic items that are concrete objects, like ‘oar’, ‘match’ and ‘bell’ that match phonetically with numbers 0 to 99 (‘oar’ is 4, ‘match’ is 36, ‘bell’ is 95). 3. Learn this list by heart, this will take you the weekend.
You can now memorize items by creating association images to the mnemonic items, and recall lists of items by going through your mnemonic items in order and remembering the association image for each item. Eg. when trying to recall a grocery list you memorized earlier, when you come to item 4, you remember that the mnemonic item is ‘oar’, remember coming up with an image of rowing a boat on a lake of milk, so the 4th thing to buy was milk.
There are obvious limits, raw memorization won’t help much with actually understanding things, you need to keep coming up with absurd concrete association images for the things you memorize, and the memorized items will fade after a while or when you reuse the pegs. But given that the system can be fully picked up in a couple of days, it’s still pretty good.
P/S/A: Given the time it takes to learn it, the mnemonic major system is ridiculously powerful. You can learn it in a weekend, and it will give you a 100 slot mnemonic peg list in your head, that will work as a random access array for absolutely any arbitrary items you can somehow map into numbers 00..99.
What you do: 1. Learn the consonant sounds for the numerals 0 to 9. 2. Come up with a list of 100 different mnemonic items that are concrete objects, like ‘oar’, ‘match’ and ‘bell’ that match phonetically with numbers 0 to 99 (‘oar’ is 4, ‘match’ is 36, ‘bell’ is 95). 3. Learn this list by heart, this will take you the weekend.
You can now memorize items by creating association images to the mnemonic items, and recall lists of items by going through your mnemonic items in order and remembering the association image for each item. Eg. when trying to recall a grocery list you memorized earlier, when you come to item 4, you remember that the mnemonic item is ‘oar’, remember coming up with an image of rowing a boat on a lake of milk, so the 4th thing to buy was milk.
There are obvious limits, raw memorization won’t help much with actually understanding things, you need to keep coming up with absurd concrete association images for the things you memorize, and the memorized items will fade after a while or when you reuse the pegs. But given that the system can be fully picked up in a couple of days, it’s still pretty good.