Mnemonic peg systems are almost perfectly arbitrary so they provide a decent case study for how you form memories in the absence of any governing structure or natural chunking. It’s an “IQ-proof” task.
I don’t think it’s useful to try to adopt mnemonic pegs without any chunking. I personally started having pegs from 0 to 9 and 00 to 99. I filled them with images of woman that I put into 11 categories with 10 people and sorted every pile by the alphabet.
After thinking about it I realized that the system I’m using doesn’t have zero structure, but it has less than, say, multiplication tables.
I use the phonetic two digit Person-Action-Object system. So 23 for example corresponds to “Nemo nomming (a) gnome.” (n=2 and m=3). 48 is “Raph raving (at a) ref.” (r=4, f/v=8). 56 is “Luigi leashing a leach.” (5=l, 6=sh/j/ch). This allows you to chunk 234856 as the vivid image “Nemo raving at a leach.”
I’m still not quick enough with the system to say whether it’s really useful. Part of the purpose of the exercise is to force myself to memorize something difficult just for the sake of getting a sense of what it is to memorize something, since I’ve avoided that activity for my entire life.
At the moment I do have people and soon I will have cards for all from 0 to 99. I don’t yet have actions or objects. How did you come up with lists for actions and objects?
I don’t think it’s useful to try to adopt mnemonic pegs without any chunking. I personally started having pegs from 0 to 9 and 00 to 99. I filled them with images of woman that I put into 11 categories with 10 people and sorted every pile by the alphabet.
After thinking about it I realized that the system I’m using doesn’t have zero structure, but it has less than, say, multiplication tables.
I use the phonetic two digit Person-Action-Object system. So 23 for example corresponds to “Nemo nomming (a) gnome.” (n=2 and m=3). 48 is “Raph raving (at a) ref.” (r=4, f/v=8). 56 is “Luigi leashing a leach.” (5=l, 6=sh/j/ch). This allows you to chunk 234856 as the vivid image “Nemo raving at a leach.”
I’m still not quick enough with the system to say whether it’s really useful. Part of the purpose of the exercise is to force myself to memorize something difficult just for the sake of getting a sense of what it is to memorize something, since I’ve avoided that activity for my entire life.
At the moment I do have people and soon I will have cards for all from 0 to 99. I don’t yet have actions or objects. How did you come up with lists for actions and objects?
I started with this list and customized it with names that had meaning for me.
This page ( http://mt.artofmemory.com/wiki/Person-Action-Object_(PAO)_System ) has a lot of links that could give you other ideas.