You Can Learn to Remember: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life pdfdrive com

the memory house
EXERCISE THIRTEEN
This exercise is the basis for memorizing 10 grocery items by depositing them
along a journey around the home. You can adapt it for other items.
1. Visualize the inside of your home. Imagine walking around its rooms from its
main entrance to the kitchen, the lounge, the dining room, and so on, finishing in
your bedroom.
2. Establish 10 stages around the house at which you could place items that you
wish to remember: the mirror in the entrance hall, the sink in the kitchen, the
bedside table, and so on. Visualize the stages in the order in which you come
across them.

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3. Mentally walk around your home, placing each of the following items in the
correct order: cheese, milk, oranges, ice cream, cereal, bananas, bread,
broccoli, fish, tomatoes. Be imaginative – the cheese is draped like a coat over
the hall chair, the milk is running out of the taps in the kitchen sink, a tomato
forms the base of your bedside lamp.
4. Wait for an hour or so, and then imagine retracing your steps. As you come to
each stage, the item that you placed there should come to mind. When you go to
the grocery store, recall the mental journey around your house and don’t forget a
single item!
the dominic system
T
he difficulty with trying to remember numbers is that they have little
significance outside their own abstract world. To overcome this, I developed the
DOMINIC (Decipherment Of Mnemonically Inter preted Numbers Into
Characters) system as a way of linking numbers to the stimulating and far more
memorable world outside.
At the heart of the DOMINIC system is your imagination, which is used to
develop a way of “seeing” numbers as images (it can provide an alternative or a
complement to the number-shape system described on pp.
110–11
). By far the
most successful images for this purpose are those of people, because they are
flexible, mobile and reactive – elements that the DOMINIC system uses to aid
recall.
So how does the system work? First, I think of numbers that have automatic
associations with people (for me, at least). For example, 07 becomes James
Bond (whose agent number is 007), 10 becomes Dudley Moore (star of the film
10), and 39 becomes the “memory man” (from John Buchan’s novel The Thirty-
Nine Steps). However, for those numbers without immediate associations it is
necessary to build mental stepping stones linking number to image, and this is
done through a 10-letter alphabet. To each of the 10 digits (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
9) ascribe a letter; for 1 you might use A, the first letter of the alphabet, with B
for 2 and C for 3, and so on. However, it is often better to mix logical
connections with creative ones: zero might be linked to the letter O, purely
because of its shape, and 6 to the letter S (because “six” has two s sounds).
The next step is to group numbers into pairs, which are then used to create
the initials of people. For the single digits between 0 and 9, this means placing a
zero before them (01, 02, 03 and so on). 00 represents zero itself. Thereafter,

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obviously, the numbers up to and including 99 have two digits. So, 66 might
become S(ylvester) S(tallone) and 12 A(nne) B(oleyn). The choice of people
needs to be as diverse as possible. It is not necessary to be able to form a fully
realized mental picture of each person, but it is important to be able to associate
them with their own characteristic action or prop: Stallone with a machine gun,
Anne Boleyn with decapitation. Out of this a vocabulary begins to emerge,
which you will then need to expand to cover all the numbers from zero to 99.
This may at first seem a daunting task, but if you set yourself a target of creating
personas for 20 numbers a week, it is surprising how quickly you can become
fluent in this new language. The key is to ensure that the associations are
obvious.
Therefore, to remember a medical-insurance number (say, 071237) think of
a location, such as your local surgery. Break the number up into pairs and assign
letters (and in turn characters and actions) according to your interpretation of the
DOMINIC system: 07 is James Bond/racing a car, 12 becomes A(nne)
B(oleyn)/decapitation, 37 becomes C(laudia) S(chiffer)/on the catwalk. Then put
a mini-story together, using a system of person-action-person-action. Thus,
071237 becomes a scene in the surgery in which James Bond (person)
decapitates (action) Claudia Schiffer (person). If you have a single digit left after
pairing the numbers (say, if the number in this example had been 0712374),
combine the DOMINIC system with the number-shape system.