Comments on DominicSystem

(discussion moved here from DominicSystem)

Has anyone tried using the Dominic System to memorise circa 10,000 items? --RonHaleEvans

I think that the description of the mnemonics used 'dry run' above does not describe the same system as that used by Dominic O'Brien himself (although it is a perfectly reasonable mnemonic that would probably work pretty well). Dominic O'Brien describes the use of his system for various types of information (numbers, playing cards, etc.), and the key features that run through the system are, in my interpretation:

• The pegs are locations
• The images used are people (or, in more complex cases, people plus actions) So for example, to remember playing cards, the pegs used are 52 steps on a journey, and the card is remembered by associating a person with each step.

In the descriptions in his books, what Dominic does *not* generally do is to use his 100 people as his pegs. So if he is remembering 100 items, he associates each item to a location on his journey (usually using a person), rather than association each item to the people on his list of 100 people, as seems to be the case in the 'dry run' above. This has a number of advantages, in particular that it is relatively easy to make up new journeys to memorise new information.

When using locations, rather than people or objects as pegs, the number of pegs you can use becomes virtually limitless, as you are only limited by the number of familiar locations you know and have visited. For much information, such as foreign language vocabulary or general 'question and answer' style facts, there is no need to learn sequences of locations in order as the order of the items are not important - you can dump the images in any appropriate location you can think of. I've learned well over 10,000 pieces of information using locations like this.

ThufirHawat

I'm interested to hear if Ron's Hotel Dominic hack is working for anyone as a substitute for a journey (incrementing room to room rather than walking point to point on a journey). The spatial aspect of a remembered-real-place journey is missing, which seems to be a key factor in the journey system working so well.

I'm trying to find if the Hotel Dominic idea can be used to memorize verb meanings and basic conjugations from The Big Yellow Book of German Verbs. As Thufir notes, sequence is irrelevant concerning foreign language vocabulary, so may be overkill. But tabular book data mapped into tabular brain data is just too tantalizing to leave untested!

MikeJames?

Anyone want to explain why 7 is linked with G? The others all make a reasonable amount of sense -- first five numbers to first five letters, six to s, eight to "eightch", nine to n, 0 to O -- but I can't think of any reasonable link of 7 to G. --jmcc

JMCC-

7 is linked to G because G is the 7th letter of the alphabet. It's the same reason that 8 is linked to H.

Ivan- Actually, at the time Dominic O'Brien wrote about his method, or began using it, he associated it because of the G7 economic powers. Now they're G8, of course. It's in his "Amazing Memory Box/Kit"

ScottCram

Ged Lambe I have been investigating the use of the Dominic System for a while now and find it much ewasier to use them SEM/Major system. I wanted to share a tip, that may strike people as obvious, about remebering the people for the Dominic System. It can be frustrating, when you are trying to get into it, not being able to remeber a particular character.

An alternative to a printed sheet is to use a large location to place the cast in. For exmaple I work in a hospital and I have placed 10 people in each large room of the hospital as I travel form the front door. This would work for any large building and helps to start you using the techniques. Hope this is of help to people.

Ged

When learning the Dominic system initially I very strictly used the rules given above to turn a number into a set of initials and then into a character with those initials. Because of the difficulty in linking some numbers to a person I was happy with (ie memorable), I was forced to relax these rules and had a dozen or so 'exceptions'. In hindsight, I am very glad I did this. Indeed I recently reread 'How To Develop A Perfect Memory' by the great man himself and notice that he only suggests using this code as a fallback. ie when a number doesn't actually suggest someone immediately. He gives some examples: 07 as James Bond, 10 is Dudley Moore (star of the film 10), 01 is his Mum (first person he came into contact with). Others could be 86 as Maxwell Smart, 66 the devil (as in 666) etc.

You should probably de-empasise the translation table used in the explaination above, and rather empasize turning numbers straight into people/actions where ever possible.

RussellP?

Continuing on from what I said above, I believe that you should be able to come up with 40-50 numbers that immediately suggest a person/action. The others of course could be derived from the standard number/letter encoding. Another possibility, particularly for those with a memory for dates is to interpret each number as a year, and associate an important person with that year. eg 63 = JF Kennedy (assassination), 69 = Neil Armstrong (moonlanding), 45 = Churchill (end of WWII), 15 = Napoleon (defeated at Waterloo in 1815), 36 = Mums year of birth etc. If you already have these dates in your head then it is much easier and natural to do this than learning an arbitary encoding. At the very least it skips the intermediate step of translating the numbers into initials.

RussellP?

For my list, I stuck to the naming convention for the most part. I found it much easier to memorize the entire list by putting the list itself in a memory journey. I committed to spending 20-30 minutes every day (usually in 5 minute intervals) to creating the list.

After finishing up my list and committing it to a memory journey, I was able to memorize PI to 120 digits within about two hours as my first test.

I used a number of resources to come up with my list:

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

The Free Dictionary - Wikipedia Encyclopedia http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/

Fact Monster - Biographies http://www.factmonster.com/ipka/A0855207.html

IMDB Biographies http://us.imdb.com/Sections/Biographies/Index/A

I also referred to a few sample lists I found (outside of this site):

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~roy/magictalk-wisdom/discussions/dominic.html

http://www.memorise.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=627&sid=da0250444b4f05af2ee51294841c2435

http://www.minezone.org/wiki/MVance/DominicSystem

BF (5/25/07)

Dimensional Dominic System

Question: has anybody tried adding dimensions to the Dominic System? I've tried using the Dominic System to memorize digits of pi and other long sequences of numbers with some success but I've found that since many of the digits repeat many of the images and actions are used more than once and it causes some confusion. Is it feasible to have more than one image/action associated with a number? For instance, my 32 is CB, Charlie Brown kicking a football. What if I also associated 32 with Charles Barclay slam-dunking a basketball? In that case I could use two images and two actions for the same number. What if we used 3 image/actions per number? Am I wasting my time here? Does the current system work well enough for most purposes? Any thoughts are appreciated.

-- RonHaleEvans 2009-07-05 19:41 UTC

Note that I didn't write the last comment, which is unsigned. The signature was added when I copied this discussion thread from the DominicSystem page.

-- RonHaleEvans 2009-07-05 19:46 UTC

Add your comment here.

-- RonHaleEvans 2009-07-05 20:09 UTC

Domonic doesn't use this system to memorise words btw. Search for Domonic O'Brien vocabulary.

-- adam 2009-08-20 21:36 UTC