Mapped into abstraction

I'm embarking on a campaign of getting to grips with abstract images. The memory competition discipline, you know, I'm not turning into a modern artist. Although that would be cool.

No, what I'm doing is finally putting aside my dislike of the whole event and trying to work out a good system. So I'm going through the quite tedious process of identifying all the different background patterns - I think there are about a hundred of them, although I've never examined them in detail - and associating each one with one of my images. Then I think I'm going to memorise the images by reading them DOWN the columns, rather than across the rows. I don't know if that'll work, but in theory it should make recall easier, because I'll be able to pick one of five options for each image at each point on the journey. I might be able to just go through all the images once, and if that does turn out to be possible, 250 images in 15 minutes should be very easy.

I wonder if that's the system Gunther uses? I'm still going to call it the Ben-Images-System anyway, if it works. BIS for short. Like the extremely cool pop group.