For a couple years now I have been working on my own, doing any of the things I can do. I have been lucky enough to never, in my entire life, have needed to search for a job; it just comes; sometimes it comes so much that I have to reject. I get math and language classes, voice works, calligraphy, translations, proofreading, and some other things. I get some educational projects. One of those made me visit La Guajira four times this year. Designing a questionary for that project, I read a column by Moisés Wasserman with the title La palabra nos hace humanos (Word makes us human), in which he tells about several efforts to find the origin of language, because, according to many very serious people, that is what distinguishes us from the other animals.
I disagree. I am convinced that what makes us different is something else, something that many very serious people would perhaps deem dull, but which is very, very serious: imagination. Every act that is eminently human is a product of imagination: literature, art, technology, science, games, language, everything. What does not come from imagination (eating, sleeping, pooping, fornicating in missionary position) is common to all animals. Mi conviction is so big that I take the idea to the extreme. I design imaginary devices (characters, objects, spaces, stories) for everything: to interpret the world, to control my emotions, to alter my perception, to organise my ideas and my itineraries, to prevent getting lost in malls. To memorise.
Since last year I have a strong fondness of mnemonic systems. This goes beyond simple tricks to memorise specific data, like the famous "pure virgins never really tire" for the ideal gas law, or SohCahToa for trigonometric ratios. These are complex techniques that allow to memorise enormous sets of interrelated data. The word complex, as always, states only that they are composed of many elements; they are constructions that are actually very easy to learn and apply. You just need two things: practise and, above all, imagination.
I had designed some simple memorisation tricks before, which I will explain in a moment, and I have always been fond of memorising poetry, but last year I casually encountered several sources on the topic which broadened my possibilities: some videos by Ramón Campayo, an article in Esperanto on a magazine, and a biography of Giordano Bruno, who came out to be an old expert about it. And this year I found also an article by Martin Gardner that mentioned it. (Doesn't it happen to you that you are reading or doing different things and then they suddenly, unexpectedly, share a topic that seems to stalk you? It happened to me with epistemology of science, christian theology, this...)
* A simple example: if you want to memorise a short list, relate its elements with those of a known list, like the Harry Potter books, the colours of pool balls or your fifteen uncles and aunts, if you have them and know their relative ages. Then you create images that relate those lists in order. I use, among others, a modified and extended version of the colours of the Cuisenaire rods, those wooden pieces with which kids learn arithmetic. The correspondence is in the following table:
With this system I memorised the comissions of the Colombian Senate: the fifth, for example, is about environment, and I simply imagine a natural landscape filled with yellow plants in a room inside the Capitol. From time to time I use it for quick lists; I also used to keep at hand the order of the fourteen eight-thousanders. One could complain that having similar colours could make it difficult, so another thing that I take care of memorising very well are the names of colours. This code is also part of the system I built to memorise the Dewey Decimal Classification System, in which I asign an animal and a place to each digit as well.
I am not a musician, but I memorised easily the classic musical modes with a system I invented for them. On one hand, each mode is a sequence of tones (T) and semitones (S); on the other hand, vowels are classified as open (a, e, o) and closed (i, u). The correspondence is direct: tone with open vowel, semitone with closed vowel, and then I just make up words and with them images. First, I enter a space: a music room, with several instruments and a row of doors at right; behind each door there is a danger, and keywords associated with the danger and the way to evade it while suspenseful music sounds reveal the sequence. For example, the door for the phrygian mode leads me to an industrial freezer (obviously) where a pirate lord wants to kill me until I show him a wineyard. I get rid of the consonants and get iaeoiea, that is, STTTSTT. I made up this example in English for this version of the article. A full list in Spanish can be seen in my Instagram account (with a small mistake in the decoding of the ionic mode).
This example helps understand the mechanics of any complex mnemonic system. If you want to memorise a list or raw data, like numbers, musical intervals, dots and dashes or one of those super safe passwords made up with random characters, you must first code them in a way that allows you to transform them into something imaginable. A fundamental aspect of these techniques, which seems contradictory, is that the more detailed an image is, the easier it is to remember. If there is a background narrative, there is more information to recall, but it will be imprinted more strongly. (Really. I made a whole epic story, with mythology, paleonthology, medicine, environmental sciences, biology and all, just to memorise the atomic number of livermorium, and it worked perfectly.)
As a way to keep the attention and interest of my students (and I have new students almost every week, so this never expires), I show them some things I store in my memory. Sometimes it's the atomic numbers of chemical elements, which I memorised in a couple days when I was starting with this, but what amazes them the most are two things: many digits of the decimal expansion of some irrational numbers, and the calling codes of all countries in the world. I also know capital cities, flags, coats of arms and currencies, most of them by brute force. And with the same system I use for calling codes I memorise populations, surfaces and highest points above sea level. With a little variation I plan to store the GS1 prefix codes, which will allow me to know the country of origin of any product by looking at its barcode.
There it goes. The strategy that many memory champions use to store numbers, and which I adapted from the one used by Ramón Campayo, consists again in transforming raw information into words and then those into images and stories. Just as the system for musical modes had the consonants fill the spaces, in this case the stuffing are the vowels. Each digit corresponds to some consonant phonemes, as follows:
Technical note: each phoneme, represented by its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet and neutralised for English, is accompanied by an example word which includes it as its only pure consonant.
0: /ɾ/ (ray), /h/ (hay)
1: /t/ (oat), /d/
(day), /
2: /n/ (no), the ending /iŋg/ (wing)
3: /m/ (aim)
4: /k/ (oak)
5: /l/ (law)
6: /s/ (saw),
/z/ (ooze), /
7: /p/ (pee),
/f/ (fee)
8: /tʃ/ (ouch),
/ɡ/ (gay), /dʒ/ (age)
9: /b/ (bee), /v/ (vow)
As an example, here go some calling codes, randomly chosen from an online country randomiser. As I know by brute force the location of every country in the globe, the first thing I do is to imagine the map, and the image develops in the corresponding place. Anyway, each image has something related to the country.
- Papua New Guinea: +675. In a casino there (the roulette has the flag on it), a dealer is making a shuffle. This one comes easy with a cross-reference, for the keywords I have for Papua New Guinea's surface are casino and chakra.
- Luxembourg: +352. Grand Duke Henri cuts a melon for his children; when it opens, it shows the flag of Luxembourg.
- Iran: +98. Picture the flag. A white sea in the middle has a beach on each side (a red one and a green one), towards which it fades in geometrical shapes.
- Denmark: +45. The famous statue of the Little Mermaid is a fake: it's made of coal.
With this I immediately retain phone numbers, account numbers, ID numbers (showing to someone that you have their personal data in your memory is very funny), and I am full of scientific data like values of universal constants, conversion factors and astronomic measures.
A last system I will show for now is the one I use to increase my vocabulary in German. I have been learning that language for a while and my grammar seems to be better than I myself believe, but I lack a lot of words. What I do is to memorise nouns. The space is a cave (the calling code for Germany is +49); masculine nouns are linked with earth, neuter ones with water and feminine ones with fire. For example, I can remember that knife is Messer and of neuter gender by imagining someone inside the cave splashing water with a knife and making a mess.
I know some other classic systems, like the famous memory palace, and there are many others I don't know. But more important than those which already exist are those which are yet to be invented; the ideal mechanics, I think, is that each persone create their own codes and with them their own images; after all, each person has different knowledge form which to code, and different experiences (or fetishes) from which to imagine. For many people, like medical doctors, archivers or actors, it's something extremely useful. Also, mental exercise is always good against illnesses (am I really that old that I speak about these things?). Plus it's very funny. Make sure to try it with something.
I will soon talk about other tricks, some of them surprisingly simple, and I will bring them with warm up exercises and all. For now, sleep well, and dream of cold drunk pirates.
REFERENCES
- WHITE, Michael. Giordano Bruno: el hereje impenitente. Javier Vergara Editor. Barcelona, 2002. Translation from English by Albert Solé.
- Ramón Campayo's videos are not available anymore; they were a limited free offer to promote a course offered by the platform Lectura Ágil.
- It would no t be easy to find the article in Esperanto; I opened it randomly form one of several El Popola Ĉinio magazines taht I have home. If I happen to find it I'll put the reference.
- GARDNER, Martin. "Los trucos de los calculistas ultrarrápidos", in Carnaval matemático. Alianza Editorial, S. A. Madrid, 1983. Translation from English by Andrés Muñoz Machado.
- Some other texts and videos found on internet.
