Fellow man of the south?
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Just two more Dominic Numbers left! 93 and 94. Once that’s done, I’m finished, finished, FINISHED!
Tested some of the poetry in my head today, and found an interesting thing. I’d partially memorized a long poem before discovering memory training, so I’d used loci for some stanzas, but not others. When I recited the poem to myself today, the stanzas encoded with loci were there, but I missed two stanzas altogether. Both of these were rote-memorized with no loci.
Also tested the 12 Labors of Hercules, and the music I’d put them in was extremely helpful for recall - they were all there, fairly effortlessly.
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So enjoying reading your journey!
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Done, done, DONE with the Dominic numbers! I completely made up random things for 93 and 94, and I guess I’ll see if they stick or not, but I am done!
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Thanks for inspiring the journey in question! 
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Pondering what to do next now that the Dominic Numbers are done. I might do some reasonable number of digits of pi for practice, as soon as I figure out where to put it. Then, I want to do my bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.
Still working on Hamlet; getting toward the middle of Act 3. Now that I’m no longer spending a significant part of my daily walk pondering what two-digit numbers remind me of, the rest of the memorization may go faster.
For my next memorized book, I’d like to do the Odyssey and see how memorizing it compares to memorizing Hamlet, considering that it is an oral work rather than a written one. My hypothesis is that it will be easier to memorize, but I’m curious to see whether it actually will be.
My next practical project may be “unstupiding” my usernames and passwords. I forget those on a regular basis.
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Have you “performed” your partial Hamlet yet with anyone using different voices or other distinguishing features? Or have you thought of teaching it that way to anyone?
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The idea “makes my eyes, like stars, start from their spheres” and makes “my knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine.” I have the acting ability of a potato and I’m terrified of performing.
I may at some point retell the story to my kid, but I think she’s too young right now.
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I find the Dominic System really good for dates using PAO. Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1458. I use da Vinci for the P, 14 for the A - in this case putting on a Jane Austen style dress - and 58 for the O - in this case boxing gloves. So I now have the great Leonardo getting dressed in a delicate dress while wearing boxing gloves - a challenge even da Vinci might have failed.
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Great question. As for never performing… The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
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68 digits of pi memorized. The PAO system is wonderful. I’m finding that the music note to number correspondence is a very useful addition to PAO - it helps me link the six-digit groups together. I wonder how far I can get this way, with no memory palace. It probably won’t work for significant numbers of digits, but so far, it seems to be working quite well.
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@meepster I haven’t heard about using music notes and I just did what I thought to be a thorough summary of systems for memorizing digits. I’m assuming you use a 2-digit (100 memory image) system, letting you put 6 digits in each memory image. I found that memory palaces (method of loci type systems) were not as efficient as a story type system. How do you use music for traversing the memory images (groups)? You have some great creative ideas!
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What my brain appeared to want to naturally do was to create a “melody” with 1=C, 2=D, 3=E, and so on. So, 3.1415… = ECFCG…, which I can imagine pretty clearly in my head. What I found was that I was using the music to connect the six-digit groups together, and then using PAO to recall the six-digit groups themselves (but also, during recall, keeping the “melody” going as well as an extra memory aid).
I’m curious how this would compare to loci in my case. I am tempted to try another irrational number for comparison, but use loci to memorize it, and see for myself which method is better.
My daughter wanted to know what I was doing as I was playing with the phone app, and now she’s getting into pi memorization too. She knows 10 digits now.
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What’s the phone app?
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It’s just called “pi”.
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100 digits of pi memorized! I am definitely remembering it as a piece of music, with the PAO used as a supplementary memory aid. Wondering how far to go with this. I feel like I can easily keep going, and it does not feel difficult; I’m curious to find the point at which this will become difficult.
I added a few dates to the History Walk, and I’m keeping on with memorizing Hamlet. I’m finding all sorts of podcasts and supplementary material to learn more about the play, and this is all starting to feel like my Shakespeare class in high school. From which I do not remember very much.
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I found a great game for continuing to train my number memory - it’s called Recall. It just gives you increasingly long strings of numbers to keep in short-term memory and then recall. I’m using it to get faster with Dominic Number image generation. The ability to retain long numbers at a glance is a useful skill.
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Have you considered this website’s software
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I have, but I wish they had a mobile app version. I’m not at my computer very often.
109 digits of pi. The kid knows about 20. I taught her a simple linking method for memorizing, using images for each digit, and she had fun making up a story to encode the digits.
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Picked another poem to memorize, this one a bit longer than the prior ones. Since I need more loci for this one, I went over my “poetry” memory palace in a lot of detail, and realized I need to work on my memory-palace-maintenance skills. That might be the next memory training project to work on - come up with 3 or 4 detailed and clear memory palaces and very clear paths through them.
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