Are We Having Fun Yet?

Last night's memory class was largely focused on numbers, continuing a handful of exercises were used to internalize the numbers-phonetics table to which we were introduced in last week's class.

And we had a test!

A single-page description of a house for sale was distributed. After a few minutes to read it through and memorize the details, we were asked 15 questions about details contained therein. I scored 14 out of 15, missing one of the easiest items: the name of the town in which the house is located. On the good side, I got every question about the layout of the property & house and all numbers related to rooms, room size, price and telephone numbers.

The last hour of the class was dedicated to building a method for memorizing a deck of cards. Cards are ordered by suit: clubs, hearts, spades and diamonds. This particular suit order alternates black & red suits and --we are assured by Prof caller_dayle-- is a standard order used by magicians and card sharks world-wide.

Anyway, take the first letter of each suit (which is a conveniently unique value), then a phoneme from our internalized numbers table to select a word which is viscerally memorable. For example, we use the "c" from "clubs" and the sound we associate with the number 4, "r," giving us the obvious word "car." The image of a car --perhaps your favourite previous car, your current car, your fantasy car, whatever is memorable-- is now associated with the card "4 of clubs."

We mapped out the entire deck this way, 52 unique images for 52 cards and each set of images customized uniquely to be meaningful to the person in question.

To specifically memorize which cards have been viewed at a particular instant, one recalls the image associated with the card then visualize the image being destroyed in some horrific way, using the emotional connection to enforce the memorization process. For example, in my memory image inventory, the card "3 of hearts" is an image of a ham; to memorize the card once I see it being drawn by the dealer, I envision the ham being ravaged by a pack of hungry wolves.

This will all take practice. I haven't picked up a deck of cards in decades so I'm not sure it will have practical value but I'm in this for the mental discipline & training rather than improving my skills as a wanna-be card shark.

Last night's memory improvement lesson came in three parts, the first two relatively simple and the third very expansive.

1. When attempting to memorize abstract items or concepts, it can be helpful to morph the idea into something more tangible & memorable. For example, suppose you had to remember the city of Montréal. Memorizing the idea of a particular city might be difficulty if you've never been there and know nothing about it. Instead, morph the idea of Montréal into similar words like "Mount Royal," perhaps imagining a mountain with a crown. If you can remember a mountain with the ridiculous image of a crown on it, you can remember Montréal.

2. Last week's class was about memorizing an ordered list of items. If the list is short enough (say, 10 items or less), it might be useful to use parts of your body as an index list, working head to toe. Associate the first time on the list with, say, your hair, the second with your nose or ears, the third with your mouth, etc., again using some silly or exaggerated imagery to retain the link. To remember the list, simply skip to the appropriate limb or segment, then recall the target item.

3. This is the real meat of this week's lesson: remembering long lists of numbers. And it's not the easiest thing to do.

The first test was to memorize a 20 digit number written on the blackboard: 91852719521639092112. I could remember it entirely without this week's lesson, but I'm admittedly a freak that way.

Here's the method:
i) Each digit has a sound association based on this look-up table:
0 = s or z
1 = t or d
2 = n
3 = m
4 = r
5 = l
6 = j, sh or ch
7 = k
8 = f or v
9 = p or b

ii) From the larger number, use the phonetic system above to assemble words which, hopefully, can be assembled into a phrase or sentence which would be vastly more memorable.

iii) To reconstruct the original number, decode the sounds of the words, then assemble the digits.

Care must be taken with the selection of words: they must contain no accidental insertions of s, z, t, d, etc., lest our decoding then accidentally includes extra digits. We're also concerned only with how a word sounds, not how it is spelled: the word "salmon" for example has an "l" but it is silent so we get 132, not 1532 from the decoding.

The sample 20 digit number above can be encoded as "a beautiful naked blond jumps up and down," a phrase more easily remembered than the original number.

What this course is quickly teaching me isn't necessarily how I can improve my memory but how much my regular imagination really sucks. Assembling whole words out of the consonant sounds is brutally difficult for me, while kent4str seems to do it by accident (the bitch).

Practice, practice, practice...

This was the second of six classes taught by caller_dayle. This session was about memorizing numbered lists as opposed to last week's linked list.

How do we do this? For the in-class example, we memorized a list of 25 items by linking each item to ordered items we already know.
1. Select a list of five items which you know well and know in a specific order (eg. birth order of siblings). Create five such memorable indices in a memorable order for a total of 25 items. These are the index lists.
2. For each index item, use some imaginative association to link the index to the item you need to memorize.
3. To recall a particular target item, all you need to do is select the index item within each index list, then use the association to recall the target.

For example, my five lists of five items are:
1. siblings: Wayne, me, Irene, Donna, Terri
2. Mom's siblings: Mom, Gail, Lee, Kathy, Craig
3. Square dance levels: Mainstream, Plus, Advanced-1, Advanced-2, Challenge-1
4. Office Applications: Remedy, Outlook, Internet Explorer, cmd window, SSH
5. rooms in my childhood house: kitchen, living room, bedrooms #1, #2 & #3
I could just as easily used lists of five Roman caesars, Tudor monarchs or Canadian prime ministers. It doesn't matter which list of five is used so long as it is memorable to you.

What's target item #17? It would be second item of the fourth list; in my case, it would be the item I associated with Outlook in my index list. What's target #3? I recall item 3 of my first list (Irene), then follow my association to the target.

The list of 25 target items, from memory:
clock, rubber band, pyramid, blouse, keyboard, finger nail, pole, macaroni, restaurant, beetle, fountain, lamp, outlet, spoon, mirror, night stand, hamster, baseball, business card, zipper, teacher, calendar, suitcase, grandma, pie.

Being a geek, I was wondering if I could come up with a list of 16 items so I could use hexadecimal instead of lists of five. Maybe I'll just write square dance choreo instead.

This week's homework assignment: devise a list of 10 items in specific order from 10 rooms we know well in a specific order for a total of 100 items.

Tonight was our first class with caller_dayle's "Improve Your Memory" course offered via Howard County Community College. There were seven people signed up although one was a no-show. Still, we have Loren, Crystal, Marta, Nuryan (sp?), kent4str and myself.

Tonight's session was about memorizing lists of items by imagining some form of strange but memorable linkage between each pairing. As long as we could then remember the first item, we could use any combination of exaggerated numbers, exaggerated proportions, emotionally-jarring connections or whatever to remember the next item. Repeat between items #2 and #3, then between #3 and #4, until the list is memorized.

After a group examination of a list of 21 items using a series of associations proffered by caller_dayle, we then had to memorize a new list of 30 items on our own. These were (from memory): dog, orange, airplane, man, paper, steak, stop sign, cliff, gun, tv, bomb, wall, hair, candle, piano, stairs, heart, boss, doctor, ambulance, school, tooth, handle, rain, umbrella, cactus, cigarette, knife, soda and stage.

In all, it's lots of fun but I'm having to keep my more competitive instincts restrained. :-)

Looking forward to next week's class!

I've just signed up for caller_dayle's memory course, originally mentioned here:

Improve Your Memory
Would you like to be able to remember facts, figures, faces and names with little effort? Do you find yourself forgetting things you used to easily remember? This course will show you simple, easy and fun methods to improve your memory, increase your creativity, and get straight A's. By the end of this lively and relaxed course, you will be able to remember one 25-digit number, 20 names of people you just met, the order of 1/2 a deck of cards, and a grocery list of 50 items.

If nothing else, I can heckle from the back of the class.

Alas, it means I'll be booked for six consecutive Mondays so I'll miss dancing with justetthon a couple of times. I may drop out of the class though if John Marshall manages to get a C2 class together on Mondays.

So many educational opportunities, so little time so few brain cells!

Edit: kent4str has signed up too.