Hey All
I’m new on here from UK. However had some experience with popular old course. Which I don’t know what happened. But re-starting on that. Around lesson three. I’ve been avoiding doing using the same alphanumeric code for numbers. Don’t know whether to create a new number system or use my previous ones? Appreciate any feedback thanks 
Happy to find your awesome forum.
Welcome to the site!
I’m not familiar with the pmemory system, but there are some discussions about it here:
and a tag: gms
I’m not sure if the system for converting numbers into images matters that much, as long as you can remember the associations.
More resources:
Other popular systems include the Major System (consonant-consonant or consonant-consonant-consonant) and the Ben System (consonant-vowel-consonant).
There’s also the Shaper System and Dominic System.
I really appreciate you sharing. Thank you Josh
I believe @Josh is correct that the system doesn’t matter provided you can readily recall your own image assignments.
Some of us are helped more by particular systems, however.
When I started, I could not really “see” images in my mind (nor do I particularly want to now that I can… too slow while memorizing).
The Major was very useful in this context because it seemed to me that it has the least-arbitrary underpinning. The exact placement of the most popular arrangement for the consonants doesn’t even seem arbitrary when you sound them out in your mouth. Given its deeper history in the katapayadi, there might even be a somewhat epigenetic reason for how the patterns emerged as they have.
In any case, once you learn the Major, you can use logic rather than images as you learn your first 00-99 system. Knowing that 1 is d or t limits the number of possible words you would choose for 11, so logically (in English it’s almost certainly going to be a toad or someone named Todd or Dot, etc.)
So part of it is puzzle-solving while learning the system, which active recall and cloze test studies show can boost recall for the “player” who brings personal volition.
I would not dramatically say the Major is “better,” but if you look at the volume of activity around it and how it has been built upon, the law of large numbers also makes the Major very interesting compared to other approaches.
I was thinking that if someone already has images and can make the associations, there might not be any reason to switch.
The pmemory assignments don’t seem easy to pick up in English at least (“0=M, 1=N, 2=THZ, etc”). I wouldn’t recommend using those assignments if just starting, but if someone already knows the system, I don’t know if it’s worth redoing.
If someone doesn’t already have images, then it’s hard to go wrong with the major system.
It could be that pmemory was using a different mother tongue as the foundation. I know that a Russian-speaking friend of mine uses:
0 - н, л, х
1 - р, к
2 - д, г
3 - т, ж
4 - ч, ц
5 - п, б
6 - ш, щ
7 - с, з
8 - в, ф
9 - м
You can adapt the lessons before memorizing. The lessons gives examples, replace those images with yours and move on.
As for the visualization, for anyone who wants to try this method, yes, you need a good visualization.
The system uses placement of images upon images.
Even placement of various images upon an image… without any story or movement. The instructions tell you to move your point of view for the images, seeing them from different angles, but not the movement of the images independently.
For example to combine a hammer and an airplane, you shouldn’t imagine the hammer moving and hitting the airplane…
It tells you to imagine the hammer embedded in the airplane, fixed… and then if you want, move the combined image in your imagination.
Is there a specific benefit this restriction is supposed to provide?
Practicing constraints like these are obviously of valuable and Bruno-esque at their core (to name just one mnemonist), but it does not follow in my mind that one “shouldn’t” imagine the alternatives.
It’s the way the method works. There’s the link method, right? The association by sound, etc… (these methods are also used in pmemory to select an image to represent what you want to memorize), once you have those images you use the method of combining the images with that other fixed method.
It’s not a restriction but how the method works, based on connecting images, In the case of having two images to connect maybe there’s no benefits… but to connect 3 to 10 images (recommended 5) to a base image, of course they have to be fixed, not moving…
it’s basically a method of loci, after all… but the loci are contained in an image.
if one wants to imagine a statue with a monkey dancing in its ear, a bull charging in the nose (of the statue), etc… it’s possible but not necessary, since a fixed image works and you can go trough them quicker methinks.
Oh, also… now that I realize 
The images should be fixed and not interacting with the “background” (in this case I call background to the base image) because actually it’s a part or section of it… if the base image it’s a chair for example, images can be placed on the back, on the seat, on a leg (of the chair) etc…
Sounds like a strict interpretation of Bruno to me. But in my memory, he was more concerned with effectiveness than speed. Especially given the recursive, intensive and extensive nature of infinity laid out in some of his works. In other words, it’s “always already” connected by the gluons.
I was talking about that method, those “shoulds” is how it’s worded in their papers.
For me, one is free to do what one wants.
Now, about effectiveness, this is indeed for effectiveness and long term.
For competitions, training and fast memorization, is impossible to use it.
And I didn’t know why you keep mentioning Bruno, I realize now, they called this method “GMS” (Giordano Memorization System) as well… but like title just says “pmemory” wasn’t connecting it.
As for how faithful is to the ways of Bruno, no idea.
I looked at a pmemory document someone sent me years ago. I don’t know how much of the course it covered or how essential it was to the program. If memory serves, they had certainly interpreted some aspects of Bruno in what I looked at.
However, Bruno is interpretable and I feel that it’s a bit misguided to think that he was offering a “system.” This is not always that clear in Bruno, but is much clearer in the books by his purportedly most close student, Alexander Dicsone. At least in my reading of Discone, there’s a mixture of astonishment and mockery of students who don’t “get” that you’re not supposed to copy/paste Bruno’s descriptions or process.
Bruno himself has an edgy tone here and there, and he basically says as a kind of Zen challenge to wake one up to the personal nature of using the tools that “if you think there’s a better way, go ahead and show me.” It’s like Dark Yoda, given how much proto-information science Bruno has in his writings (especially in On the Composition of Images.
But he’s also gentler in places and explains that paraconsistent nature of mnemonics which are guided by the nature/“evolutionary” pressures language itself places upon their functioning. In another Zen-like challenge, he says that anyone who thinks as long as hard about it as he has well come to the exact same conclusions. This is proto-science at its finest and one of the reasons we remember him, not just in memory, but also astronomy. He certainly had errors, but scientific thinking and intellectual charity in the face of evidence wasn’t one of them.
Anyhow, Dicsone is just as funny as Bruno, but not quite so Zen or charitable. I’m not entirely sure how it is evidenced that he was Bruno’s direct student, but that’s what some texts say. In any case, it seems to me that Dicsone understood Bruno more than most, but there’s polysemy enough for use to make many Bruno’s.
In fact, when I spoke with Bruno translator John Michael Greer, and asked him about how I might avoid creating my own Bruno in the way that others have (i.e. an objective take), he simply said, “You can’t.” I’m still trying though and it is a huge challenge due to the wide corridors of polysemy his combined mnemonic texts create.
I haven’t read anything by Bruno, so I have nothing to add to that.
But, I think that the pmemory guys had to put a name to their thing and they made a homage to him.
And that’s why they used the first name, if it was something more serious they would have used his last name maybe. 
Also, it was Russian guy the original creator, in 1990. Then in 2006 another Russian guy (I think) did the English version, and added the named pmemory (it was the name of the website, the p if for phenomenal)
Here I found a… description of the system in a public site.
By the way, did you @metivier, saw the PM I sent 29 days ago? There’s no need to reply or anything. just checking.
I did see it, thanks. I’ll send a quick reply.
Interesting read Anthony but my PAO #11 Object in Major System is none of the ones you’ve listed.
#11 = PAO
#11 = Person (Tina Turner)
#11 = Action (Tattooing)
#11 = Object (You go figure) LOL!
I’m not sure which list you’re referring to, but Tina Turner is great in a Double Alphabet. Nice one!
My 11 is the Warner Brother’s toad (Michigan J. Frog). Since he’s often pictured coming out of a lunchbox and then singing and dancing, he is person, action and object all at once. I look for opportunities to compress like this with each 00-99 figure because divvying them up is just too much work when pop culture has already implanted so many rich figures into my mind that fulfill all three conditions (and usually more).