Page 178 - Use Your Memory

USE YOUR MEMORY
If, for example, the first card called out were the 7 of diamonds,
you would associate the word deck with the first word of your
Major System, which is tea. You might imagine the entire deck of a
boat being covered with swirling tea leaves, or you might even
imagine the Boston Tea Party, making sure that in your associa-
tion you smelled, saw, heard, tasted and touched as much as you
could. If the next card called were the ace of hearts, you would
associate the word for this card - hat - with the second word of
your Major System: Noah. You might imagine Noah standing on
the ark, wearing a gigantic rain-hat onto which the Flood is
pouring and splashing in the most tremendous volume. You could
actually imagine yourself as Noah, feeling the chill of the water
and hearing the splashing, etc. If the next card called were the
queen of spades, you would associate the word for that card -
Satan - with your third Major System word: Ma. You might
imagine your mother in a titanic struggle with Satan in the burning
fires of hell, using as much motion, rhythm, colour and sensuality
as possible. Throughout the memorisation of a pack of cards using
the Major System as the pegs on which to hang the fifty-two items,
you can see that you are clearly using both the logical, analytical,
sequential and numerical left side of your brain, and the imagina-
tive, colourful, rhythmical and sensual right side of your brain.
From these few examples, I hope you can see how easy it can be to
memorise an entire pack of cards in whatever order they happen to
be presented to you. It is a most impressive feat to be able to
perform in front of your friends.
Your facility for remembering cards can be taken a step further.
It is possible to have someone randomly read you the names of all
the cards in the pack, leaving out any six or seven. Without much
hesitation, you can name these cards. There are two ways of doing
this. The first is to use a technique similar to that explained in
chapter 5. Whenever a card is called out, you associate the Image
Word for that card within a larger concept, such as the block of ice
previously mentioned. When all the cards have been presented,
you simply run down the list of card Memory Words, noting those
words that are not connected with the larger Memory Concept. If
the 4 of clubs had been called, you might have pictured a car
sliding across the huge cube of ice or being trapped within it. You
could hardly forget this image, but if the 4 of clubs had not been
called, you would immediately remember that you had nothing to
remember.
The other system for this kind of feat is to mutate, or change, in
some way the card Memory Image Word if that card is called. For
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