In the last exercise you turned ten pairs of numbers into characters. As I mentioned on page 92, to use the Dominic System quickly, it’s best to have converted all 100 possible pairs – and I don’t deny that this takes a significant degree of commitment. Learning the entire cast of 100 characters and their associated actions, features and props so that you connect a pair of numbers to a character almost instantly – it’s like becoming fluent in a new language – is hugely time-consuming. However, once you’ve learned this new language, not only can it be put to practical use on a day-to-day basis, but the learning process itself will exercise your brain, improve your levels of concentration and sharpen your memory.
There are ten disciplines at the World Memory Championships. In various guises they involve memorizing numbers, binary digits, playing cards, names and faces, dates, words, and images (see box, opposite, for a full breakdown). One of the most taxing heats is the one-hour Spoken Number round. In this, competitors are required to memorize as many numbers as possible in one hour, which they then must recall in the correct sequence. When I first entered the Championships, I used the method I’ve just taught you – placing one person (two digits) on each stage of my journey. This system enabled me to memorize 1,000 digits in one hour – and I used it to win the first few Championships. However, as more people took up the sport of memory, not only did the sheer number of competitors increase year after year, but so did their calibre. I realized that I would need to improve on the efficiency of the Dominic System if I were to keep my competitive edge.
The World Memory Championships, which first appeared in 1991, was the brainchild of Tony Buzan (the inventor of Mind Maps®) and Raymond Keene OBE, a chess grandmaster. They believed that people need to exercise their minds in just the same way that they exercise their bodies, and – just as we compete internationally at physical sport – what better way to advance this purpose than to have an international competition that pits the world’s greatest mental athletes against one another. I’ve been involved in the Championships since the beginning as both a competitor and an organizer. In the latter capacity, I have helped to refine the ten rounds that make up the competition, so that they are fair for everyone who competes. The rounds of the Championships are:
Abstract Images • Binary Numbers • One-hour Numbers • Names and Faces • Speed Numbers • Historic and Future Dates • One-hour Cards • Random Words • Spoken Number • Speed Cards
I enjoy all the disciplines, but my favourite is the One-hour Cards because it’s a real test of stamina – memorizing 24 decks in an hour really puts me through my paces! The Spoken Number is probably the most gruelling, as it’s “sudden death”. Although I might attempt to recall 300 digits at the rate of one per second, if haste makes me forget, say, the third digit, my score is just two – which makes this round a test of my nerve, my concentration, and my ability to close my mind to distractions.
So how could I do this? Clearly, I had to squeeze more numbers into each single stage of the journey. If I could somehow double the number of digits at each stage, I would also potentially double the number of single digits I could memorize in an hour. The wonderful thing was that I had the solution to this problem already embedded within the system I was using.
Remember how each character has an action, feature or prop to give him or her some personality? I realized that if I coded the first pair of numbers in the sequence as a character and the second pair as only a prop, feature or action, I could combine the character of the first pair with the prop, feature or action of the second pair, then place that combination of character and, say, action at the first stage of the journey. Then, the third pair (the fifth and sixth numbers) would again be coded as a character and the fourth pair (the seventh and eighth numbers) as a prop and that combination would be placed at the second stage in the journey; and so on. The result was that I would have linked each stage of the journey to four numbers in the sequence.
For example, if I wanted to memorize the number 15562053, I would need to use only two stages in my journey. The first pair of digits (15) gives me AE, or Albert Einstein. The second pair gives me ES, or Edward Scissorhands. So, to memorize the first four digits of this sequence, at the first stop on my journey I imagine Albert Einstein cutting hair – the hair-cutting is Edward Scissorhands’ action. Edward doesn’t himself appear – instead, Albert Einstein becomes the surrogate for the action that, in the original system, embedded him in my mind. The third pair of digits (20) gives me BO, which for me is Barack Obama (this is one character I’ve recently updated). The final pair (53) becomes EC, or Eric Clapton, whose action is playing guitar. So, to memorize these four digits, I imagine Barack Obama playing guitar and I place that image at the second stage in my journey. (As a matter of interest, if you reversed the two pairs of digits to give 5320, you’d have Eric Clapton waving a US flag. The system obviously works with any permutation of numbers.)
These characters plus their surrogate props, features or actions are what I call complex images. They are, effectively, interchangeable pieces of a mental jigsaw puzzle, which can be mixed and matched in 10,000 different ways to enable me to memorize vast sequences of numbers in the shortest time possible.
I believe the effort that I put into devising this system kept me ahead of the rest of the competition in the early days – I don’t believe that any of my initial rivals had found a system that enabled them so efficiently to memorize four digits at once. Now, however, the story is quite different – competitors these days are becoming more and more adept at number memorization, which means that I’m always looking to make improvements to my system. If nothing else, this certainly keeps me on my toes!