Early days as a mnemonist

Although the subject of memory has come up throughout my life, I've never really properly dipped my toes into the waters. To in effect make the effort and really work out what is going on with this mnemonic thing and see if it works. It works but it also fails, the failures though I put down to my own understanding. It's early days and like a muscle being used it has to be exercised, the more I exercise it the better it gets. Except of course for my left arm and should which really are screwed up while I await an appointment with an MRI machine, courtesy of the NHS.  There are times when creating mnemonic images are difficult, when I do get an image then it is necessary to glue the thing together because it is a paired associate task.  For example, I learnt in one exercise that the capital of the Bahamas was Nassau.  The image I set in my mind was of lots of little bananas dropping out of a nose and it worked.  However, in trying to think of a mnemonic for the capital of Fiji which is Suva, I kept thinking of a fig on a tree and of it dropping onto a Sofa.  However, when testing myself there was contamination with another item.  In recall I came up with Sofia, which is the capital of Bulgaria.  The image of a fig falling on a sofa was not working, and meant I needed to unlearn this and use an alternative, but it's not quite working.  I just changed the image and now try to think of a fig falling ontop of the head of someone called Sue who was saying the word "go" and in French go is the word "va."  It's still not working and I need to scrap the image and start again.

There is no doubt now as I  practice exercises from a book by Dominic O'Brien the important ingredient is effort and continuous practice. Mnemonics I've found are composed of multiple techniques and each set of techniques is used to help remember a different subject. Be in numbers, faces or capital cities.  They do in instances overlap each other however they are not always easy.  Patience and a quite room helps, as does good concentration. It is early days, very early and it's been several evenings trying to conjure up personalities for a deck of cards.  This is another of my ongoing exercises to try and achieve, i.e. learning the order of a deck of cards, the goal being once able, to try and do it under a minute.  The world record is 21 seconds, which is mind blowingly fast. 

I have tried to explain to others these feats are not by super human beings they are the use of methods which are thousands of years old, but it may appear the individual is very smart.  My memory is a rusty tool because my imagination has not had such demands on it before and now it is getting a bit of work out.  It's good. What is good though is getting it right and reinforcing this over and over again.  I also have at hand some useless facts which have stuck in my head from the earlier part of O'Brien's book, such as an ant having 5 noses, Australia 7 states and recently the capital of Estonia being Tallinn, which I have tried to make as the image of a stone ear being thrown at the tall doors of an inn.  There sure are some weird images floating around in my head right now that's for sure.