Images for memorising syllables

In the previous lesson, you saw that a number can be visualised as a picture of a person.

The 100 people images were made available to you in that lesson but they also had a syllable written next to each of them.

Peter Kodsesu, at number 23 on that list, represents the syllable 'PE'.

Remember the earlier lesson where it was stated that 'P for Papa' is an image which could be used to represent 'P for Penicillin' ?

So, the image of a papal figure who always represents P, if visualised at a place in the BLOKES system, is just a prompt that the information begins with 'P'. eg. Penicillin.

Well, it would be better to store the prompt 'PE' because that is closer to fully spelling 'Penicillin' - so the image of Peter Kodsesu could be imagined at a BLOKES system place and thus prompt 'P.E...' so that 'P.e.n.i.c.i.l.l.i.n' is remembered.

At this point, we are moving from a 'low effort' memory system to a 'big effort' memory system. You have to put a lot of effort into a memory system in order memorise larger amounts of information. Let me introduce some ideas here which the course is intended to build upon...

My 'wish list' for a memory system is largely motivated by my interest in memorising text. However, I put a lot of effort into designing a system which could also be used to memorise other things. There may be a life situation where rapid memory is really useful. If I see a criminal's car registration plate then I would want to be able to memorise that. If I am told a reference number or telephone number then I might want to memorise that rapidly too.

Already, we have seen that one image can represent a number like 99. BUT do we really want to memorise 1000 images so that we can represent 3-digit numbers like 135 or 999 ? If you answer, "YES" then you have to figure out what kind of images will be used to represent 000 to 999 . And if you want to have an image to represent any 2-letter combination then that is a lot of work also. eg. An image for ZZ or an image for YX or an image for EE . We already looked at 'PEN' as a syllable. What about 'PENA' ? Beyond 000 to 999, what about 0000 to 9999 ? Surely, the more rich and varied we want the system to be, the more work it involves for us in finding good images to use and then learning and revising those images.

And a strategy for reducing the size of a memory sytem is to make an image represent not just letters but also numbers. If I have an image meaning the spelling 'P.E.N' then I can also break 'P..E..N' and use a system of turning letters into digits so that a 3-digit number is also represented by the image. The weakness of this, for me, as someone who wants to memorise a page of text, is that I will have trouble knowing during recall, if an image is a 3-digit number or a spelling. So do I actually create separate image libraries: one for numbers and one for spellings?

I could teach a beginner a list of 1000 images and say that each image is a number or a spelling; but, at a higher stage of the course, I could introduce a second system of 1000 images and tell the student that he has to forget the idea that an image represents either a number or a spelling and to use instead one system for numbers and one system for spellings. That 'unlearning', in itself, would be perhaps more of a hindrance than a help to the student.

I do not know if there is a 'right' answer to this 'simplification versus complexity' debate. For me, and the things which I want, I chose to go for a big system of images. Sometimes, I do the 'overlap' where I state that 'one thing stands for two things' but my memory system is still huge.