Josh Notes

UPDATE: My new memory blog is at Mnemotechnics.org. —Josh

I've been studying memory techniques for about six or seven months. It began when I started reading a book called Mind Performance Hacks by Ron Hale-Evans. I dabbled with a couple of the techniques mentioned in the book, and was so amazed at how effective they were, I started to read everything I could about memory, including many books and CDs by Dominic O'Brien, Yates' Art of Memory, Luria's Mind of a Mnemonist, Buzan, Hancock, and anything I can get my hands on.

How to Compress the Data?

At the moment I'm trying to figure out the most effective system possible for memorizing large amounts of data. I'm experimenting with the systems of the most successful mnemonists and then borrowing the aspects from each method that work best for me.

I've been using a slightly modified Dominic Method to encode numbers, but just started looking in to Ben Pridmore's System.

Ben Pridmore is the current World Memory Champion and he holds several world records including the memorization of:

• 1 pack of cards in 24.97 seconds
• 930 binary digits in 5 minutes
• 4140 binary digits in 30 minutes
• 364 playing cards in 10 minutes
• 1404 playing cards in an hour

Here is a video of Ben Pridmore as he breaks world record for memorizing a deck of cards -- the speed is incredible:

I started taking a close look at his system because it compresses an entire deck into only 9 loci as opposed to the 52 or 26 that I've been using. (I've also been trying to get it down to 18 loci per deck of cards by adding an object to each person-action set, but haven't quite gotten that down yet.)

I'm wondering is using the Ben System would shave off even just a little bit of time when memorizing cards. Or would it slow things down by creating such a huge library of images? (2,704 as opposed to my current 300)

My Worksheets

I've been experimenting with the Ben System, and am trying to build out a vocabulary of 2704 images to symbolize 1000 decimal digits as well as every possible combination of playing cards when grouped in twos (52x52). It looks something like this:

EDIT: My images are different than the ones below now because I changed the vowels around.

My Questions

There are still a few things I don't understand about his system:

• How are numbers between 1 and 99 encoded? The description I read only works for three digit numbers.
• How is zero encoded? How about zero zero?
• How are dates most effectively encoded? Two 2-digit numbers, or a 3-digit number and a 1-digit number?

If anyone has any tips or suggestions, please leave a comment below.

UPDATE: I found out that it's best to use 000 to 999 for competitions. For daily use where you might only have to memorize shorter numbers, you can add 110 extra images for 0 to 9 and 00 to 99. This is what I've decided to do.