Monday, December 13, 2010

Systems are doing it for themselves

Here's an interesting fact about me: I'm actually not all that good at memorising things. I can memorise cards and binary digits better than anyone else because I invented a cool system for doing so more efficiently, and have been using this system since 2003. On the other hand, the 'numbers' element of the Ben System (I'm officially calling it that now - people have stopped using the name so much, and I realise that I like it after all) is exactly the same as, if not worse than, the systems used by other people.

So I need to expand it. Turning four digits into one image is the way to go, I've known that for a long time but been nervous of trying to do it, thinking that it'd be too much. But now I'm pretty sure it has to be done, so I'm going to give it a try.

Consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel is too restrictive, so my current thinking is that each image will have a two-part name, the first part starting with one consonant-vowel combination, and the second with another. Thinking up all the images is going to be tricky; committing them to long-term memory is going to be even trickier. But I think it's within the bounds of possibility. I'll let you know how I get on.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

A German competitor claimed, that Simon Reinhart does that already, but he did not memorize the images in advance but makes them up on the fly.

Ralf Jung said...

I've always called your memory methods BS.

Idea said...

The BP System?

Anonymous said...

Wow! You're actually going for the 4th power! I have a friend who has a five part system like this: The first two digits are a verb and the last three are an object. Only they're really memorable verbs.
E.g. 93105 = A dancing wardrobe
Sometimes they don't pair so well.
E.g. 46xxx means it's melting whereas 533 is a lake made out of cadbury's cream egg filling.
He calls you the Usain Bolt of memorising. But I think you're too versatile for that title :)

Anonymous said...

In Brainboard.eu we are preparing
a 10.000 system, too. :)

Anonymous said...

Kinda hijacking a bit, but I think you could become quite good at solving the Rubik's cube blinfolded. Only 20 pieces to memorize :)