You create a mnemonic story as a way to memorise information. At a peg loci location, you might imagine a farmer throwing a banana at a dinosaur; and that would mean something to you (this is just an example - I have no idea what it might mean to you!).
When you come to recall the facts, you imagine your peg location and hopefully you recall the farmer doing an action to the dinosaur. The action is as important as the objects because it probably means something and it helps to bind the overall story together into something memorable.
Maybe there is a system of 12 actions where each action represents a month of the year (April); so maybe the farmer means the 10th and the dinosaur means 2002AD; and the overall story means the date: the 10th April 2002.
So the actions, as well as the imagined objects, can contribute to the knowledge being stored in the imaginary story taking place at the peg location.
I built quite a big list of actions which I present at the links below. It is a list of 1001 actions and, in most cases, the action relates to a word from the Shorthand system article (a bit further along in this course).
The 1001 subset list of shorthand vocabulary will take time to learn; so there is the added incentive of simultaneously learning an actions memory system as well. About a quarter of the actions do not relate to their associated Shorthand word. After item 000, the next 200 or so Shorthand words relate to words in Chinese called 'radicals' which have their own numbered order; once you get past item 216, there tends to be an alphabetical order to the Shorthand codes.
I like the idea that a student would know a memory system of over 1000 common words; and then, when learning a foreign language, these already known images would be imagined in stories where the spelling or sound of the foreign word is somehow visualised.
Moreover, for some reason, I like studying languages or linguistics. I am intrigued by the question of which minimum vocabulary people could use to be understood; and that has had some effect on the Shorthand system which I developed.
I was also motivated by the idea that I could store 100 English words as images at peg locations and then sequentially recall 100 words of a page.
I think that 'Actions' are 'hard to sell' when encouraging a student to spend time on it. It is of great use to someone who is trying to remember numbers bigger than 3 digits because the person in the story can be a number, the action can be a 3 digit number, and the object of the action can be a number as well. (The idea of there being a person, an action and an object is attributed to Dominic O'Brien.)
1258754, seen as 12 587 54 can be pictured as person 12 doing action 587 to person 54.
Actions are also useful for speed memorisation games because the imaginary mnemonic story requires no thinking time to be spent on deciding what story takes place at a peg location: the action is a necessary part of the story since it represents one of the items being memorised.
Eg. The person representing the Queen of Hearts does an action representing the 2 of Clubs to a person representing the Jack of Diamonds.
I think that actions can also be used for memorising vocabulary; for example, 'fromage' means cheese. What if you could imagine a person (who represents 2 letters of the alphabet [FR]) doing an action [OM] (which represents 2 letters of the alphabet) on an image of cheese; effectively, 4 letters of the spelling of 'fromage' would be represented by the story. I don't mean that this gives you instant use of the foreign word in conversational French; I mean that you have a prompt in exam conditions or as a set of revision notes that you can mentally visit.
Actions as letter pairs
I think that actions are excellent as spelling prompts; and that is the main reason why I would want to use them. One way of seeing the digits as spelling prompts would be to interpret them like I explian in the 'Coloured Actions and Male 1000 Spelling Prompts' article; but actions can also be used as an AA-ZZ system; or actually an AA-ZZ system that also treats the following as if they are letters: Ch,Sh and Th.
An AA-ZZ system of actions can be made by saying that all letter A letter pairs begin at a particular number position in the 1000 action system;
So at action 001, let's say that it equates to "AA" spelling prompt; and 002 can be "AB" spelling prompt.
So, action 026 would be AZ, action 027 is ACh, action 028 is ASh and action 029 is ATh; then we move on to 031 as Ba, 032 as BB, 033 as BC, etc.; then we move on to 061 as CA, 062 as CB, 063 as CC. This approach leads to a left side letter pair of A to Z and including Ch, Sh, Th; and a right side letter that is A-Z and including Ch, Sh, Th. That is 29 x 29 spelling prompts; although often two consonants together are unlikely to be part of a spelling of a real word. Eg. In Englidh, "KK" is not the first two leeters of any normal words.
Actions versus Loci
Actions allow a lot of data to occur at just one loci location. So you do not use up your limited supply of scenes quickly. But here is another way to store the same data: by storing parts of it at different loci places:
Maybe two imaginary scenes can be used in sequence to represent a long chunk of information.
Maybe at peg location 1, you could memorise an image that just means "Date Of Birth"; then
At peg location 2, you continue to provide the date of birth as a visual story occurring at location 2.
So the meaning of the story at location 2 is guided by visiting the story at location 1, first.
Memorising an action's number
How would I know which action action 345 is? Do I have to rote learn it?
Do I need to learn the actions in sequence; and rote learn what action 300 is; and then count 45 actions from there?
This has always felt unsatisfactory. One solution is to have a 1000 place system where I can know the number of the location easily; and then recall what action takes place at that location; but wouldn't I rather have those 1000 places for memorising exam facts rather than dedicating them to learning the 1000 actions?
There is an article about cartoon humanoid animals in this course; and I decided to use them as a way to associate ordinal position for actions; I could use 500 of the 520 animals as a way to represent 000 to 499; and they would be quite easy to count through since each animal has a sequence of 10 examples of that animal.
If the direction of the action is from left to right (animal doer on the left acts upon a recipient on the right) then I can think of the 500 animals as representing 000 to 499; but if the animal doing the action is on the right (action from right to left) then those same 500 animals represent 500 to 999.
I used to think that the recipient of the action would be cartoon women from the Woman 1000 article even though their outfit volour and outfit is a clue as to their three digit ordinal numbers; but then I thought about a poplar tree that I walked past and I wondered howthe POPLA of its spelling might be represented in a mnemonic story: I have cartoonb characters who represent letter pairs such as the 'PO' of 'Poplar' [see the AA to ZZ Heroes article]. The PO character could do an action to a poplar tree and that would represent the "PL" of POPLA; and then, if I colour fill the action then that is a way to represent the "A" at the end of 'POPLA'. However, that requires me to be comfortable with knowing that an action corresponds with a two letter pair such as "PL". So I thought that the recipient of animal actions representing 001 to 900 should be a character from the 900 heroes/robots/aliens system. In that way, I can quickly recall that a particular action represents a particula 'AA to ZZ Heroes' character. The three digit numerical meaning of the animal is a way for me to remember the three digit number of the action - in case I have a memory task where a long number needs memorising: the action equates to a three digit number.
But what about the animal action when representing 000 and also 901 to 999? I thought that I could use every 10th Woman 1000 character. So Woman 000 would be the recipient of action 000; Woman 901 would represent Woman 010; action 910 would represent Woman 100;Action 999 would represent Woman 990. I think that it serves the purpose of allowing all 1000 actions to be practised; and it could be handy sometimes for jolting one's memory about a particular cartoon woman or cartoon women adjacent to a recallled cartoon woman.