Actions

With a linked list story, where you learn a sequence of images through a story, often there are actions taking place in the story. Actions demonstrate a sequence of event A causes event B - so they are an efficient way to build up a sequential story of images.

Earlier, I used a list of people to represent the 2-digit numbers from 00-99. In a story, these people may perform actions. If we also have a list of 100 actions to represent 00 to 99 then one of those people performing one of those actions would tell the story of two digits followed by another two digits: a 4-digit number.

Or, if 26 actions each represent a letter of the alphabet then one of those people performing an action is like two digits followed by a letter of the alphabet. If the action for 'A' is 'throwing an apple at someone/something' then, if person 01 (Adam Sandler) throws an apple at someone/something then it is like the code 01A; whatever is the target of the apple is the next part of the code.

Why use actions?

This is not an easy question to answer. In theory, actions sound like a useful tool. For instance, if I want to remember the score between Liverpool and Chelsea then I could represent the two sides as two players from each team. One of those players performs an action on the other player. What if the score is 3-1? Action 31 is a fire-ball. If the Liverpool player fire-balls the Chelsea player then it is like saying that Liverpool won the game 3-1. And, on the face of it, that looks like an efficient way to store information visually. However, if many matches end 3-1 then there is a lot of use of the fire-balls action, and then it is less of a unique stand-alone image to picture player 1 fire-balling player 2.

So, actions are most useful when the story they tell is not frequently similar to the story of other memorised information.

A birthday is a reasonable use for actions. If the 31st (in the list below, the action which means 31 is 'fire-ball-ing') of May (month 5) is a friend's birthday then you could picture him/her fire-balling an image which means 5 (such as the mnemonist from the 'numbers in images' article). Hopefully, not too many friends' birthdays need memorising and so not too many stories will have visual similarities.

Later in the course, I consider a library of over 100 actions and the possibilities for memory feats which it presents.

Phone Numbers

I developed a way to memorise phone numbers by using some standard actions. I call it the PhONE system. It requires that you know images to represent 3-digit numbers and 2-digit numbers. A friend's number is memorised by pretending that the friend is phobic of something, odious of something, negative about something, and ecstatic about something - (Ph)obia, (O)dious, (N)egative and (E)cstatic spell 'phone'!

So the person is imagined being afraid of the image for a 3-digit number (see the earlier article of 'Calendar History Math system' for a possible list of such images); that provides the first three digits of the phone number.

For the next three digits, the person is imagined being odious of [hating] another image [the next 3 digits]; then the person is sad about the next three digits and ecstatic about the final two digits.

You would revise the list of emotions and then be able to recall the person's phone number chunk-by-chunk.

How to represent 2-digit numbers with actions

There is no fixed way to represent 2-digit numbers with actions. In this article, just one system is covered.

How to represent 2-digit numbers with the 100 syllable system

Like the 100 syllables from the aricle about '4-digit value images', this is a list of 100 actions based on that same list of 100 syllables: