Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0372: Can you add vowels to the mnemonic major system?

Episode Date: August 11, 2015

Will asks about using a version of the mnemonic major system that has vowels as well as consonants. I give my thoughts on this practice. BONUS: Here’s a quizzing set you can use to memorize the key words of this poem: Memorize strange meeting What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s […]

Master of Memory 372. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Will submitted a really interesting written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Will says, I've read that it's possible to assign numerical values to vowels to extend the basic major system instead of vowels being neutral. How is this used? Is it really an upgrade

to the major system? So, Will, the reason that the major system only uses consonants is that it's actually easier to come up with real words that actually work if you have the flexibility that only using consonants gives you. So you have each of the numbers assigned to a consonant, and then you just make up vowels in between in order to be able to turn them into real words. Now what I've done here is I've generated a random string, and we're going to try to memorize it here on the episode by coming up with examples that assign vowels to numbers, as well as consonants to numbers. So for what we're going to do for this expanded major system is, besides the fact that 1 is T, 0 is S, and so on, 1 could also be A, 2 could be A, 3 is a, 4 is e, 5 is e, 6 is i, 7 is o, 8 is u, 9 is u, and o is a. These are some pretty standard vowel sounds going between romance languages and English.

So all of these vowels are sounds that you've heard before in words. Now what we're going to do is first let's generate a number. So we have 0 5 3 2 5 1 8 1 6 9 7 9 3 6 2. That's a number I generated at random.org slash strings. I just said come up with a 15 digit string of numbers. Let's try the first thing. We'll alternate consonants with vowels. So 05 becomes SE, so C, and then 32 becomes MA, and then 51 becomes LA, and then 81 becomes FA, 69

is SHU, 79 is KU, and then 8-1 becomes fa. 6-9 is shu. 7-9 is ku. And 3-6-2 is min. Now it's going to take some imagination to turn these things into words. We have si, ma, la, fa, shu, ku, min. The vowels would have to be modified a little bit to turn those into words. Let's say ma. I would make that probably ma for mother or something like that. And then si, I guess you would make that a Spanish word. But this is really muddy. So we would have to modify pretty much all of these to turn them into words. Like min. What do you do with min?

That is so abstract if it's not a real word. Or maybe you could make it a word in a different language. But I don't really see how that's going to work. You have so many languages going on, and you have such a restricted system that doesn't let you turn these into real memorable images. Well, so what we did was we alternated consonants with vowels. Suppose we tried using the same system, but we used more consonants and fewer vowels. So we use consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant, vowel, consonant, and so on. Well, what we come up with there is seem, neat, fash, pop, min. Once again, we have some things that aren't really words, although we could imagine them as words. For example, the 979, pop, would probably turn into pop, which sounds more like 919, or perhaps something like 999.

But we would try to turn it into a similar word, and then we would lose the original vowel sound. That makes the whole system pretty muddy and hard to rely on. So let's go back to the original major system and its intended to be used. If we just use consonants and we just make up our own vowels which are flexible, we have this. S, L, M, N, L, T, F, T, SH, P, K, P, M, SH, N. If we try to turn them all into memorable objects that are easily pictured and easily stored in a palace, we have something like this. Whistle, menu, wallet, video, jeep, cube, honey. Wow, that's so much more memorable. I mean, all of those are physical objects. We've just, you know, using imagination and putting in some vowels in places where they just seem to fit,

we've turned everything into an actual physical object that can be stored in a memory palace. Cube is maybe the most abstract of all of these, but that's really not hard. We'll just imagine an ice cube, and it's not hard to remember that that's cube. So as far as I'm concerned, the verdict here is that more flexibility

seems to lend itself better to better images. When you're doing mnemonics, you really want to be able to turn what you're doing into something really concrete and usable, and little syllables like min and pulp don't really seem to turn into memorable images very well without being confused with other numbers. So Will, thanks so much for the question. I hope that kind of answers your question or gives you some more things to think about. Maybe there is a way to expand the major system to use vowels. I just don't really see much potential for it, at least the way that I kind of see it being used. For anyone listening, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours.

Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you again soon.