1. The Dominic System
The Dominic System is a MemoryTechnique that made its designer, Dominic O'Brien, World Memory Champion (he can memorise the order of a full deck of playing cards in less than a minute). Some people who find the MajorSystem too dry and restrictive find they can stick with the Dominic System.
1.1. Basics
The Dominic System uses an easy-to-remember number-to-letter conversion and the initials of memorable people, as well as "journeys" that are like MemoryPalaces. The number-to-letter correspondences run as follows:
| Digit | Letter |
| 1 | A |
| 2 | B |
| 3 | C |
| 4 | D |
| 5 | E |
| 6 | S |
| 7 | G |
| 8 | H |
| 9 | N |
| 0 | O |
The numbers 00 to 99 are remembered via famous people and actions characteristic of them. For example, the number 15 becomes AE. AE might be represented by Albert Einstein, with Einstein's characteristic action writing on a blackboard. Similarly, 80 = HO = Santa Claus, laughing and holding his belly (HO HO HO!).
Four-digit numbers can be remembered by combining the person for the first two digits with the action for the second two digits. Thus, 8015 = HOAE = Santa Claus with Albert Einstein's action = Santa Claus writing on a blackboard.
Five-digit numbers are memorised by adding a symbol from the NumberShapeSystem to the image, so that 80152 might be represented by Santa writing on a blackboard with a swan (2) tucked under one arm.
Longer sequences of numbers (e.g., PiMemorisation), or sequences of any kind, can be memorised by "chunking" them and committing them to the stages of a "journey". Journeys are the same as MemoryPalaces for most purposes, although O'Brien seems to prefer outdoor scenes, which may be why he calls them "journeys". Journeys can be indoor as well, however; one's first journey is often a tour of one's house or apartment.
1.2. Advantages
The Dominic System is a combination of the innovative (easier mnemonic alphabet, using people because people are easier to remember than inanimate objects, etc.), and the tried-and-true (MemoryPalaces, which go back to classical times). It has a couple of advantages over the MajorSystem and its derivatives:
-
The 1=A, 2=B, 3=C, etc. Dominic System is easier to learn than the Major System's more arbitrary 1=T/D/TH, 2=N, 3=M, etc., and therefore possibly faster to use. There is circumstantial evidence that the Dominic System is superior; Dominic O'Brien became World Memory Champion using his system, a title that includes competitions for speed in memorisation.
-
There is no extra "scaffolding" on top of the MajorSystem, as there is with SemCubed; the characteristic actions are combined with the famous people in an easy, natural, integrated way, so if you can memorise 100 items with the Dominic System (00-99), you can memorise 10,000 (0000-9999).
1.3. Dry run
As a first test of the Dominic System, Ron Hale-Evans used it to memorise the titles of the ![[WWW]](/wiki/mentat/img/moin-www.png){kind=small}
Famous Forty, the "canonical" books set in the Land of Oz. For example, book 23 is Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz. 23 corresponds to BC in the Dominic System, for which his person/action pair was Thor, the character from the comic strip B.C., riding his stone unicycle. Thus, the image used to remember this book was Jack Pumpkinhead riding a stone unicycle.
Subtracting interruptions, memorising the titles of the Famous Forty took about 45 minutes, therefore approximately a title a minute. A minute is about as long as it takes Dominic to memorise an entire shuffled deck of cards, so this beginner has some room for improvement.
Speaking of Oz, one might also create a journey or MemoryPalace based on the palace at the center of the Emerald City.
1.4. Comparison with SemCubed
It would be interesting to compare SemCubed and the Dominic System for memorising large volumes of information in a double-blind experiment, but little enough work has been done on the MajorSystem, let alone more recent developments. Meanwhile, here's how one might memorise the ?PeriodicTable example given on the SemCubed page, but in the Dominic System rather than SemCubed.
From the SemCubed page:
-
First of all a section of the matrix needs to be allocated to this set of data, say the locations 8001 to 8105 with 8001 being used to memorise facts about Hydrogen (atomic number 1) such as the atomic weight (1.008), the year of its discovery (1766) and its chemical symbol (H). Continuing in this way through to element Unnipentium with atomic number of 105 being placed in the matrix at location 8105.
The 8000 row of SEM cubed is the rainbow category and the range of 8000 to 8099 is the colour red so the hooks in this range should emphasise be combinations of the colour red with the the Major System images. In this way the hook for hydrogen at 8001 is 'Red Day'. Use your imagination here but I prefer to imagine the start of a new day with a huge red sun rising over the horizon, emphasise the 'redness' of the sun. I then realise that it is in fact a large hydrogen balloon not the sun. This provides my link to hydrogen.
Let's assume we want to slot the ?PeriodicTable into 8001-8105 in the Dominic System as well. Starting with Hydrogen: 80, as we have already seen, is Santa Claus. 01 might be the guy on the front of the Quaker Oats package, offering a bowl of oatmeal. (01 = OA = oats.) Thus, 8001 is represented by Santa Claus offering you a bowl of oatmeal. To link in Hydrogen, imagine that the oatmeal is bubbling, and little bubbles of hydrogen gas are escaping from it and bursting into flame, or that Santa is offering you a bowl of oatmeal while leaning out of the Hindenburg. Either way, it is easy to link in the information about atomic weight, chemical symbol, date of discovery, and so on. For example, you might remember that the chemical symbol is 'H' by placing a metallic 'H' on Santa's forehead, as appears on the forehead of the "holographic" character Rimmer in the TV series Red Dwarf. The metallic 'H' reflects the flames from the exploding hydrogen bubbles.
1.5. Resources
For anyone who is interested in creating their own personalised version of the Dominic System, here is a blank template in ASCII text format with the numbers 00 through 99 and the corresponding letters, ready to be filled out with well-known people. Print it out at full size and carry it around, filling in people as you think of them. When you have all your names, type them into the file, delete unnecessary whitespace, and print the file out for drill and reference. It should fit onto a single piece of paper when printed 4-up (or 2-up, double-sided).
A file containing the mnemonic pegs used by Ron Hale-Evans is also available, including a version of the Dominic System. Use this only as an example, since many of the names in the list are idiosyncratic. Some of them refer to friends and family, and these have simply been removed in the public version and replaced with the word "PERSONAL".
An excellent reference for the Dominic System is How To Develop A Perfect Memory, Dominic O'Brien, Headline Book Publishing, 1994, ISBN 0-7472-4517-7. Unfortunately, this book is out of print, and the last copy spotted (in 2004) cost about US$150.00. ''How To Develop A Perfect Memory'' is available as a downloadable e-book from Lybrary.com, however. Those who enjoy this book may enjoy Dominic O'Brien's other books, as well as books by ?Tony Buzan.
A website to find acronyms: http://www.acronymfinder.com/, very useful to create ones own personalised version of the Dominic System.
1.6. Discussion
Has anyone tried using the Dominic System to memorise circa 10,000 items? --Ron Hale-Evans
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.
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"
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)
CategoryHomepage
Sebastian
=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.
