How to Develop a Perfect Memory (15 page)

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Authors: Dominic O'Brien

Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Self Help, #memory, #mnemonics

BOOK: How to Develop a Perfect Memory

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MUSIC

Music teachers are responsible for a whole host of mnemonics, born out of despair, I suspect, as they try to bang home the basics of musical theory to unwilling pupils.

Here is a selection of the most common ones used to remember the notes on a musical stave. Spaces (A, C, E, G):
All Cows Eat Grass.
Lines (E, G, B, D, F):
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.
Sharps (F, C, G, D, A, E, B):
Fighting Charlie Goes Down And Ends Battles.
Flats (B, E, A, D, G, C, F):
British European Airways Deny Gentlemen Carrying Frogs.

SNOOKER

Here is a simple way to remember which way you must set the green, brown and yellow balls on a snooker table:
God Bless You.
And for those who can't remember in which order you are meant to pot them (yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, black):
You Go Brown Before Potting Black.

MATHEMATICS

Mathematicians, like music teachers, seem to relish devising mnemonics.

Bless My Dear Aunt Sally!
Believe it or not, this tells you the order of operations for complex mathematical equations (Brackets, multiply, divide, add, subtract). There is an alternative, thought up, I suspect, by oppressed pupils.
'Ban Masters!' Demand All Schoolchildren.

There are a number of ways to remember the first few digits of pi

(3.14159265358979). In the following examples, the number of letters in each word denotes the corresponding digit.

How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters

involving quantum mechanics.

Now I know a super utterance to assist maths.

How I wish I could enumerate pi easily, since all these (censored)

mnemonics prevent recalling any of pi's sequence more simply.

The same method is used for remembering the square route of 2 (1.414):
I
Wish I knew (the route of 2).

A maths teacher named Oliver Lough devised this mnemonic to help his

pupils with trigonometry:
Sir Oliver's Horse Came Ambling Home To

Oliver's Aunt.
Read as SOH CAH TOA, it gives you the following:

Sin = Opposite (over) Hypotoneuse

Cosine = Adjacent (over) Hypotoneuse

Tangent = Opposite (over) Adjacent.

And this pronouncement from a physician takes us, once again, back to sex:
Virgins Are Rare.
It's a reminder that Volts = Amps x Resistance.

RHYMES

Rhymes and poems provide us with some of the oldest mnemonics. Most

people know the first few lines of the following rhyme, but perhaps not all of it:

Thirty days hath September

April, June and November

All the rest have thirty-one

Excepting February alone

Which has twenty-eight days clear

And twenty-nine in each leap year.

This short ditty was devised to lessen the risk of embarrassing developments at the pub:

Beer on Whisky very risky

Whisky on beer, never fear!

History teachers have come up with their fair share of rhymes to remember important dates:

Columbus sailed the ocean blue

In fourteen hundred and ninety two.

The Spanish Armada met its fate

In fifteen hundred and eighty eight.

The fate of Henry VIII's six wives (Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleeves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr) is remembered by the following two lines:

Divorced, beheaded, died,

Divorced, beheaded, survived.

But I wish someone would think up a way of remembering the names of each wife, rather than just their grisly ends. One of the most famous mnemonic poems of all provides an ingenious way to remember the kings and queens of England since 1066:

Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee

Harry, Dick, John, Harry three

One, two, three Neds, Richard two

Harry four, five, six, then who?

Edward four, five, Dick the bad

Harry's twain and Ned the lad

Mary, Bessie, James the Vain

Charlie, Charlie, James again

William and Mary, Anna Gloria

Four Georges, William and Victoria

Edward the Seventh next, and then

George the Fifth in 1910

Edward the Eighth soon abdicated

And so a George was reinstated

After Lizzie two (who's still alive)

Comes Charlie Three and Willie Five.

Rhymes have also played their part at sea. This one is good for anyone worried about collisions:

If to your starboard Red appear

It is your duty to keep clear

Green to Green or Red to Red

In perfect safety go ahead.

And here is an easy way to remember Port and Starboard:

No red port left.

I will finish with a limerick used by lawyers to remember, in Latin, that the law doesn't take small things into consideration.

There was a young man called Rex

Who had a small organ of sex

When charged with exposure

He said with composure

De minimis non curat Lex.

HOW TO

MEMORIZE A PACK

OF PLAYING CARDS

MY LOVE OF CARDS

Cards are where it all started for me. Ever since I was a child, I have been fascinated with games — patience, poker, pelmanism, bridge. When I was

learning to count, I used to say 'eight, nine, ten, jack, queen, king'. And if I ever saw a card trick. I took great delight in solving it, whether it was a feat of mathematics or sleight of hand.

My love of cards took a dramatic change of direction in 1987. In fact, my whole life changed direction. You certainly wouldn't be reading this book now if I hadn't tuned in to see Creighton Carvello, a psychiatric nurse from Middlesbrough, pull a devastating memory feat on live TV. Carvello managed to recall a pack of 52 playing cards in exact order, having studied them for just 2 minutes and 59 seconds. It was a new world record. I was flabbergasted. My mind immediately set to work, desperately trying to fathom how he had done it.

What I found most incredible was his evident ability to memorize the cards in sequence. He had the cards dealt out, one on top of the other, and looked at each card just once. I knew from this that he did not possess a photographic, or eidetic, memory. Baffled but intrigued, I retired to a quiet room, armed with a pack of cards, and pondered the seemingly imponderable. I was certain

Carvello's secret lay in the sequence of cards. I had also heard something about using a story as an aide-memoire.

THE BREAKTHROUGH

As I sat in my room, my mind wandered back to a recent business trip. I had been obliged to stay in Khartoum for five weeks, doing nothing very much.

Most of my time was spent at the Sudan Club, a place for British expats, and I could still visualize in detail the exact layout of the place.

Searching for a way to remember the pack in front of me, I started to

imagine the court cards - jacks, queens, kings - sunning themselves in

deckchairs around the club pool, chatting to one another. I could picture a jack holding a spade in his hands, a queen dripping in diamonds. Gradually, these images began to remind me of people I knew.

I could soon picture up to ten characters around the pool, but it was getting confusing. So they began to spread out around Khartoum, places I had visited, shops, street corners, hotels. This was when I first started to develop the journey method, the prototype of what you learnt in Chapter 2. Little did I know that I was invoking the spirit of Simonides, the Greek poet who is

attributed with inventing the art of memory, back in the sixth century BC. (For more on the classical method, see Chapter 26.)

I quickly devised a route that went around the club and out into the streets of Khartoum. The court cards were easy, but others proved more difficult. I remember thinking at the time that it seemed an almost impossible (not to say thankless) task trying to remember all the symbols and link them together in under 2 minutes 59 seconds. But I have a stubborn streak, and I had set my sights on beating Carvello's record.

After a couple of days, I could memorize my first pack of cards in 26 minutes, with eleven errors. It was an important landmark, despite being way off the record. From then on, nothing else mattered; the next three months were an object lesson in accelerated learning. An evolution was taking place. All day, every day, late into the night, I dealt myself card after card, pack after pack. I noted down times to the nearest second, analysed errors, substituted symbols and altered journeys.

The 8 of diamonds proved particularly difficult to remember. Its symbol

changed from a feeling of peace to a cloud, to white doves, to a hot-air balloon and finally to Richard Branson (who flies them). In the end, all the symbols became people. Cards had become animated, like numbers would soon after

them.

After three months of intensive study, I felt I had a new brain; my memory was in a respectable state, much like the body feels after regular exercise. Not only could I memorize one pack in less than three minutes, six packs shuffled together had become a doddle.

Since then I have gained entries into the Guinness Book of Records for 6, 20, 25, and 35 decks (1,820); on every occasion they were all shuffled

together and I looked at each card only once. My record for one pack of cards is currently 55.62 seconds.

In this chapter I will show you how easy it is to memorize a pack of cards.

If you were diligent about learning the numbers in chapter 4, and are now carrying around a 100 people representing 00 to 99, you have already done over three quarters of the work. Your first pack will probably take you half an hour. With a little practice and dedication, you should be able to get your time down to 10 and then 5 minutes. If you are able to do it in less than 3 minutes, you should seriously consider entering a memory competition.

ANIMATING THE CARDS

You must first assign a person to every card between ace and 10 (court cards will come later). Cards are essentially numbers; the easiest way to bring them to life is to translate them into pairs of letters, a technique you have already learnt.

Use the DOMINIC SYSTEM to provide you with the first letter. Taking ace

to be 1, you have the letter A; 2 becomes B, 3 becomes C, and so on.

The suit provides you with the second letter. All club cards, for example, are represented by a C. Diamonds are represented by a D, spades by an S, hearts by an H.

The 2 of hearts thus becomes BH, the 5 of clubs becomes EC. Referring

back to our list of people in Chapter 4, you know that the 2 of hearts is Benny Hill, (2 = B; hearts = H; BH = Benny Hill) and the 5 of clubs is Eric Clapton (5 = E; clubs = C; EC = Eric Clapton).

Here is a table to show you how to get the letters for cards from ace to 10: CARD

CLUBS

DIAMONDS SPADES

HEART

1 (ace)

0 (ten)

Copy this list and write down the corresponding person alongside each card. I am not asking you to think up any new people; you should already have all the characters suggested by the letters listed above.

It is important to remember that the letters are merely stepping stones to get you to your person. After a while, you will find yourself making the leap without using the letters. When I see the 6 of diamonds, I don't see the letters SD; I don't even perceive the card as the 6 of diamonds; I automatically have an image of Sharron Davies, the swimmer, wearing a rubber ring.

When a good pianist sight-reads a piece of music, there is no time to convert the notes into letters, he or she just knows which keys the fingers have to play.

Similarly, with typing, talking, reading, driving a car, it becomes automatic with practice.

You must always recall the person's unique action and prop (Sharron Davies is wearing a rubber ring). Charlie Chaplin is flexing a cane; Eddie 'the Eagle'

on a pair of skis; Eric Clapton is playing his guitar. I can't stress enough how important these associated actions are; they help to anchor the person to his or her surroundings (location).

COURT CARDS

There is no need to translate the court cards into letters, as they are already people. Once again, let them trigger off associations with people you know, or with public figures. I have listed below some suggestions to help you, but come up with your own as well.

Personally, I associate clubs with aggression, diamonds with wealth, spades with brunettes, and hearts with sex symbols.

CARD

PERSON

ACTION

Jack of clubs

Jack the Ripper

Ripping

Queen of clubs

Margaret Thatcher

Swinging handbag

King of clubs

Saddam Hussein