Naked Science Memory Course - Copyright Michael Curtis 2007
Representing the dates of the year with images
This article overviews a system for representing each date of the year with an image. You can imagine the image for 5th May in a scene which actually happened on the 5th May, and thus have a mnemonic for remembering a date.
There are many ways of representing dates such as "January 1st" or "March 5th" and I have settled on the following method because there is a small clue to the image if you examine the month of the date.
Any date in January should have an image which begins with 'J'.
Any date in February should have an image which begins with 'B'.
My plan is to find, online, images of 366 people for each day of the year. If the person's name is John or Jane then, because of the 'J' in the first name, the person must represent a date in January.
Here is a list of letters of first names. eg. October people would have names beginning with 'C'.
January J
February B
March M
April P
May T
June R
July L
August A
September S
October C
November N
December D
An action for a year
In this course, there is a lesson about using actions to represent numbers. If a person does a particular action then you can interpret the action as being a particular number. If you have an action which means 08 then, if the person who represents November 26th does that action while at the cinema watching 'Quantum Of Solace' then that marks the date and year (08) when the memoriser went to see the film. This idea may make more sense to you after you read the 'actions' article.
An image for a month
If you can think of 12 images to represent the 12 months of 2008 then you could imagine the November image at the cinema where 'Quantum Of Solace' is being watched. That would be a mnemonic way of remembering in which month and year that you went to see the film.
If you like the idea of diarising your life like this then it makes sense to actually write a companion diary so that you have a hard copy of information to revise whenever your memory slips.
Alphanumeric dates
The letter pairs system has AB be represented by an image of an abbot. That 'B' is the 2nd letter of the alphabet; the 'A' character can represent the month of August. So the abbot image could be used to mean 'August 2nd'. If A=1st, B=2nd, C=3rd of the month, then I would suggest continuing up to T=20th. For '21st', I would use the A0-Z9 hieroglyph system A1 is 21st August, A2 is 22nd August, and so on up to A9 is 29th August. A0 is 30th August, and AU is 31st August. Similarly, N0 is 30th November, DU is 31st December. B7 is 27th of February. BE is 5th February.
Football Players as days of the year
If you like football then you might enjoy the following system for having an image for each day of the year:
Choose 31 teams to represent days within the month. eg. Team 14 would be the 14th of a month.
Choose 12 players from each team to represent months. eg. If Arsenal player 1 is January and Arsenal itself is the 1st then (Bacary Sagna) represents the 1st of January.
