Just started the book Memory Craft, and from the first the author talks about the Visual Alphabet system and the Bestiaries for the name memoization. She memorized 264 beast names from the Medival books and even created some of her own to link them with the names of People.
My question is that are these 2 methods Productive??
Because I find it that memorizing that many beast names and shapes of the Alphabets is somewhat counterproductive…
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I thought the initial idea was to create your own memory alphabet, and she used animal names. Medieval people had bestiaries which they could refer to, to get ideas. Romberch published shape alphabets, which you could get ideas from.
Then you could expand you memory alphabet to more animal names for more categories, for names?
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I had an A-Z alphabet list that, like my 1-100 list, used people.
After reading her book last year I made an animal list A-Z and I use it all the time. It’s simple and useful. I dropped the one with the people. Though I still think of Madonna as M.
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Worked fine for me. I used a visual alphabet to memorize the “Memory Craft” book itself. It stuck pretty well.
I came up with my own animal associations and didn’t actually draw them the way she did, because I have the drawing abilities of a potato. It still worked for me.
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Hi Tony,
The Visual Alphabet would be optimal for the letters of the Periodic Table or Acrostics or initials of a person’s title (Ex. Dr. RN Msr.)
I don’t really use it at all besides for those things
Stefos
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So, you associated a letter with each chapter? Or did you did it more detail than that?
More detail than that - a letter “animal” associated with each idea or section presented in the chapter. So, for example, one of the ideas in the book was using beads to encode Shakespeare’s plays - so in my memory, the Lion was wrapped up in beaded necklaces, reciting Shakespeare.
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Do you reuse the same pegs for different lists?
The bestiary is a very old technique, but you don’t have to use it in any particular way.
A = Apple
B = Biscuit
C = etc. can be a much faster way to build your first Alphabet list.
Note that the gematria is really just this plus numbers, possibly one of the deeper origins of the
00-99 PAO technique.
I can appreciate that this stuff seems counter-productive.
But if you want to master your memory, having these systems is a huge helper and should be a non-issue. It’s a memory exercise that gets you to greater memory challenges that will themselves challenge your memory further.
I’d just suggest making it simpler on yourself in the beginning. Then add some multi-sensory elements so it’s not just a generic apple, but something like an Apple computer flashing as it spins through the air in the hand of someone like Alex Trebek.
And if you really want to do for gold, develop a double alphabet list:
AA
AB
AC
AD
Etc…
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