In meditation many people use mantras.
Mantras are sequences of specific sounds that need to be pronounced correctly, and for the right amount of time. No use saying "um" if you should be saying "om". And you need to repeat many times, so it is easy to lose track.
But keeping track is important as you want to chant the mantras a specific number of times.
Every day I do two sessions where I hum 108 sets of the mantra A-U-M. Each set takes about 20 to 30 seconds from inhalation to the end of the mantra. To keep track of this people normally use a necklace with 108 beads or seeds, then push towards them a bead for each mantra chanted and keep track this way but the other day I tried to use mnemonic methods. Just to see if it could be done without interfering too much mentally.
This is what I did:
For each time I chanted my mantra I imagined t ...
You may think that is just as easy imaging the number itself for each round, but this has never worked for me. Also because thinking about numbers and letters engages a part of the mind one does not want to engage when meditating. However, simply imagining these objects for half of a second while preparing for the inhalation secured the image in my memory for the next 30 seconds without any effort.
The Major System is like this: Each number from zero to nine gets assigned a phonetic sound. Then, you create a word, using these sounds, for each number from one to one hundred. The system even extends to one thousand. Each number has an object, representing the number. Number 12 is "tin" - like in a tin of caviar. Number 21 is "net" like in fishing net, or a tennis court net. 92 is "pan" like in frying pan, or “bun” as in the things you eat.
What I tried to do was to just visualize...literally, just imagining before my inner eye, the object in question. And it worked as mentioned. But it didn’t stop there...because this was not really my revelation. This was:
You see, when I starting going through all numbers from 1 to 100 I noticed that whenever I imagined the objects I also typically imagined this object to be placed in a particular place. A locus, as it is called in Memory Palace terminology. This happened involuntarily in most cases.
This happened again and again and I realized that I had stumbled on something. Previously, when using The Major system I had simply used objects from memory or imagination. Some objects from my personal experience, others more generically as I integrated the objects into my mnemonic scenes, but doing this exercise now I realized that one could easily assign a specific place to each and every one of The Major System numbers, and this would mean that just by going through the numbers like this you could easily create a gigantic memory palace with 100 sequenced rooms!
I just did this, and even if I use many locations from my memory, to the point where one might think I'd run out of places, I managed to get a new location for at least 70 of the numbers on the first go through, which means this is easy for most people.
Thanks to the objects being numbers we have a sequence, just like in a memory palace. You could imagine a house with ten floors, and with ten rooms on each floor. The numbers 1 to 10 cover floor number one, and you use the locations that you organically thought about/instinctively thought about/or ultimately decided on, as rooms.
My Major System-object for number 1 is "tie". And the location that pops up in my mind when I imagine a tie, is a tie store in a particular shopping mall in the city I grew up in. Tie Rack, it was called, and it was like a kiosk instead of a store, which was new at the time. But another thing I saw was that this particular location was one I had never used for memory places. Which meant I could use the whole shopping mall as a reference for the number one instead of just using the tie store. This meant that even if it had been 20 years since I entered that store I managed to find ten pegs of shops I remembered, people, and landmarks.
If you can find ten pegs on each of the 100 Major System locations you would have a giant memory palace of 1000 rooms!
Examples: Number 15 is a towel, for example. I imagine a particular towel of the Brazilian flag that I had when lying on the rocky beach of Nice, France. I thought "towel", thought about that particular towel immediately, and then the location gave itself! The same applied for 70 of the rest of the numbers, they just appeared before me without needing to think. I am not using the beach in Nice, or the Old City, which is in connection with it, which means that I can dedicate this location to everything related to number 15 from The Major System.
Just a note about how to use this:If you assigned rooms 1 to 10 to the first floor, 2 to 20 to floor 2, etc, you could create nice systems of knowledge. Each floor could be a subject, or even a book. If you study, say, ten books at college right now, with this system you could easily memorize 100 keywords per floor, which means a full book. But in case you wonder, yes, it is possible to even extend the mnemonic possibilities in this case as you can create small chains of keywords that you connect to each peg in the room. If each room is a chapter, then each peg could be a sub-chapter and each oeg could contain a chain of, say, ten keywords as in a paragraph!
Read more in the comment section. Let’s discuss this!
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Sjur is the author of "How to Build a Memory Palace", and the discussion continues here. Including some bonus material that was left out of the book. This (Locals.com) is both a way to support an independent creator, but also to get your hands on ...
Post coming up today on exactly how to extend The Major System...check back a little later.
As mentioned in a few earlier posts I've recently had the idea of extending the Major System.
The Major System is one of the first systems of mnemonic we learn when starting. And it's a brilliant system as it can turn numbers into words, which in turn can be words that are easily visualizable so that we can use them to represent the keywords we wish to remember.
But the second use of The Major system has gone largely unused. And it has to do with using it as a memory palace with its pegs.
In The Major System, each number from one to one hundred is an object that is easily visualized. Each number represents a consonant/phoneme, and words are made accordingly.
By linking one of these numbers to an object representing a keyword you want to remember, you've created a mini memory palace.
The "room" is the number. By linking it (in a mnemonic visualization) to the object representing the number, you've created a mnemonic structure that is easy to recall. By learning all objects from one to one...
