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Memory is a crucial human capability. Without memory, your mind is nothing but bare awareness. Memory orients us in time and space, enables us to recognize our loved ones, provides us with the knowledge that running in front of cars is dangerous, and gives us the raw materials we need to do everything else we do as humans—hence its primary place in this book.

In a sense, many people have abandoned memory, not only to reading and writing, but also to newer technologies such as search engines. However, I hope this chapter will show that developing your memory can enrich your life, whether you need to defend your doctoral thesis, appear on Jeopardy!, or just cope with daily hassles.

You need never forget your keys again. Always remember the top 10 things to bring when you leave your house.

Sure, thanks to the hacks in this chapter on memory, you'll be able to remember all the U.S. presidents and world capitals, but maybe you'll still forget your keys and your cell phone when you leave the house. What good are mnemonic tricks if you can't apply them to daily life?

You can make a practical difference in your preparedness for daily life and the efficiency with which you live it if you memorize a list of items without which you never leave the house. If you run through this checklist when leaving work, school, a restaurant, or a friend's house, you need never leave anything important behind wherever you go. You can also use this hack to get out of the house quickly in the morning, by ensuring that all of the items on the checklist are gathered in one place before you go to sleep.

For this hack, you'll need some kind of mnemonic skeleton that can contain about 10 items (or as many as are on your checklist). You can use a short journey [Hack #3], the 10 digits of the Dominic System [Hack #6], the number shape system [Hack #2], or anything else that you can remember effortlessly and when distracted. I use the first mnemonic system I ever learned, the

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You need never forget your keys again. Always remember the top 10 things to bring when you leave your house.

Sure, thanks to the hacks in this chapter on memory, you'll be able to remember all the U.S. presidents and world capitals, but maybe you'll still forget your keys and your cell phone when you leave the house. What good are mnemonic tricks if you can't apply them to daily life?

You can make a practical difference in your preparedness for daily life and the efficiency with which you live it if you memorize a list of items without which you never leave the house. If you run through this checklist when leaving work, school, a restaurant, or a friend's house, you need never leave anything important behind wherever you go. You can also use this hack to get out of the house quickly in the morning, by ensuring that all of the items on the checklist are gathered in one place before you go to sleep.

For this hack, you'll need some kind of mnemonic skeleton that can contain about 10 items (or as many as are on your checklist). You can use a short journey [Hack #3], the 10 digits of the Dominic System [Hack #6], the number shape system [Hack #2], or anything else that you can remember effortlessly and when distracted. I use the first mnemonic system I ever learned, the number rhyme system, which my father taught me when I was a boy: "One is gun; two is shoe; three is tree," and so on. Ergo, for the first item on my list, I create a vivid image that contains the item and a gun; I remember the second item by associating it with a shoe; and so on down the list.

Compile your checklist and write the items next to the mnemonic skeleton. Put your most important items first in the list so that you'll remember to grab those even if you are interrupted and can't run through your entire list.

As always, link the objects you want to remember to the places in the mnemonic skeleton using the most vivid images you can. Here is my actual list:

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Associate numbers with shapes and use the hunting and gathering faculties of your primitive ancestors to remember 21st-century data.

If you've learned how to remember 10 things to bring when you leave the house [Hack #1], you've already learned the number-rhyme system: associating numbers like 1 and 2 with words that rhyme with them, like gun and shoe, and using those associations as pegs on which to hang items you wish to remember.

The traditional number-shape system works in a similar way. Instead of visualizing images whose names rhyme with the names of numbers, however, you visualize shapes that look like the numerals in question. For example, the numeral 2 looks like a swan to many people, so you can use the image of a swan as a mnemonic peg.¹

lists 10 digits, along with some shapes you can use to remember them. The Shape column illustrates the italic words in the Words column, to show how the associations arose.

Table : Corresponding numbers, words, and shapes
Number	Words	Shape
0	Black hole, donut, tire
1	Candle, pencil
2	Swan
3	Butterfly, heart
4	Sailboat
5	Hook, pulley
6	Golf club, lasso, pipe
7	Axe, boomerang, scythe
8	Hourglass, snowman
9	Flag, tadpole

Feel free to pick and choose, or devise your own shapes. It's most important to be consistent so that when you want to remember what you associated with the number 6, you don't waste time trying to remember whether your mnemonic shape is a pipe, a lasso, a golf club, or something totally different.

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Making mental journeys (also known as "memory palaces") is a useful way to remember sequential information. If you have several familiar short journeys handy, you can be ready to remember whatever you need to, at any time. Here's how to start with the layout of your own house or apartment.

Practically every system of mnemonics relies on a series of pegs on which to hang information. For example, "Remember 10 Things to Bring" [Hack #1] associates the numbers 1 through 10 with rhyming objects (one = gun, two = shoe, three = tree, and so on) and then hangs the things to remember (such as medication, keys, and cell phone) on these mnemonic pegs by putting the peg objects and the things to remember in the same vivid mental picture.

An even older mnemonic technique—perhaps the oldest—uses places as memory pegs. By places, I mean ordinary, concrete places, such as the rooms of your house or apartment. If you mentally organize these places into a sequence that is the same every time, you will be able to walk through the places in your mind and retrieve the information you have stored there.¹

The Renaissance practitioners of the ancient ars memorativa (art of memory) referred to such journeys as memory palaces. Orators in classical times would prepare their speeches by stashing complex images that represented the things they wanted to talk about in the loci (places) of a remembered or imagined building, such as a palace. In fact, this practice is said to be the origin of today's expressions "in the first place," "in the second place," and so on.

When you create your mental images, make the impressions of the objects you want to remember as vivid as possible, to make the ideas you want to remember stick to the places of your journey. You can do this in many ways, such as by exaggerating them or using humor, sex, bright colors, motion, or anything else that holds your attention. (The word impression comes from yet another classical metaphor depicting memories as the marks left by a stylus on a wax tablet, the yellow legal pad of the day. When you make impressions on the wax tablet of your mind,

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Systematically place information in the corners and walls of rooms, and expand the capacity of your memory journeys up to tenfold.

"Make Lots of Little Journeys" [Hack #3] explains how to remember information by associating it with places along the way in an imaginary journey. (If you haven't read that hack, please read it now.) But each place on a memory journey contains other places: rooms typically have four walls, four corners, a floor, and a ceiling, for a total of 10 sublocations. In other words, if you have already memorized a journey through a building, you can now make your memory journey hold 10 times as many pieces of information.¹

Scott Hagwood, the U.S. Grandmaster of Memory, seems to have invented the nooks-and-crannies hack. He used it to break the world record for color-sequence memorization for the electronic game Simon. The previous record had been 14 sequences, but Scott was able to play an astonishing 31 sequences—all that the machine could offer. To do so, he used a memory journey and mentally stuffed the corners and walls of his places with items representing the colors he was trying to remember, such as a yellow sun or green bouncy balls.

Reconstructing Hagwood's system from his interviews is simple enough.^2,3 Hagwood's map for each room looks something like .

Figure 1-1: The nooks and crannies of Hagwood's memory journey

The map in assigns numbers to the following places:

Near-left corner
Left wall
Far-left corner
Far wall
Far-right corner
Right wall
Near-right corner
Near wall/entrance to room
Floor
Ceiling

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The Major System is the most commonly used set of mnemonics. This custom Major System will help you memorize lists of up to 100 items, as well as credit card PINs, phone numbers, and the other numeric trivia of daily life.

The Major System was introduced in the 17th century by Stanislaus Mink von Wennsshein and was improved in the 18th century by Dr. Richard Grey.¹ While the Major System is probably the most established mnemonic schema, I prefer the Dominic System [Hack #6], invented by Dominic O'Brien in the 20th century. Nevertheless, you might find that the Major System works well for you, and knowing something about it will contribute to your understanding of advanced mnemonic techniques.

The Major System uses peg words just like the number-rhyme system [Hack #1] and number-shape system [Hack #2]. Instead of associating numbers with peg words based on rhymes or shapes, however, it assigns each digit a basic consonantal sound and builds up peg words from combinations of those consonants. For example, the digit 3 is linked to the consonant M, and the digit 2 is linked to the consonant N, so our Major System list suggests moon for 32.

The consonant assignments are fairly arbitrary—Lewis Carroll came up with an alternate set [Hack #9] that's probably just as good—but shows a standard set of mnemonics you can use for these associations until they become second nature.

Table : Number/letter associations
Number	Letter	Association
0	S, Z, soft C	Z is the first letter of zero.
1	D, T, TH	The letters d and t have only one downward stroke.
2	N	The letter N has two downward strokes; it also looks like the numeral 2 rotated 90 degrees.
3	M	The letter M has three downstrokes; it also looks like the numeral 3 rotated 90 degrees.
4	R	The letter R is the last letter in four.
5	L	L is the Roman numeral for 50; also, a human hand with its thumb stuck out looks like an

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The Dominic System, invented by World Memory Champion Dominic O'Brien, is an easier alternative to the Major System of mnemonics found in most memory books.

Dominic O'Brien, World Memory Champion, can memorize the order of a full deck of playing cards in less than a minute. To help him achieve amazing memory feats like this, he created the Dominic System of mnemonics. Some people who find the Major System [Hack #5] espoused by most memory experts to be too dry and restrictive find they can stick with the Dominic System.

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 memory palaces [Hack #3]. As many mnemonic systems do, the Dominic System requires some bootstrapping for you to reach its full potential.

You will have to spend a little time and work to memorize the structure of the system, and that might seem a little tedious. Your work will be rewarded, however, because this basic work will enable you to harness the system's full power for yourself. It's a little like starting slow on the treadmill at the gym if you want to work up to taking long hikes in the mountains.

The number-to-letter correspondences run as follows:¹

Digit	Letter
1	A
2	B
3	C
4	D
5	E
6	S
7	G
8	H
9	N
0	O

You can remember the numbers 00 to 99 by linking them to famous people and actions that are characteristic of them. For example, the number 15 becomes AE. You might mentally connect the initials AE with Albert Einstein and assign writing on a blackboard as Einstein's characteristic action. Similarly, 80 = HO = Santa Claus, laughing and holding his belly (HO, HO, HO!). You can use my list² or O'Brien's list, but the system will work best if you use the associations that are already in your own mind.³

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Expand the basic Dominic System list of 100 to hold 10,000 items or more of information.

You might need to memorize a table or list with more than 100 elements, such as the periodic table of elements, but find that you can't do it with only the 100 numbered items of the Dominic System [Hack #6]. You could use a memory journey [Hack #3], but how are you going to remember that element 52 is tellurium without visiting the 51 previous rooms first?

This memory hack, which I call the Hotel Dominic (in honor of Dominic O'Brien, the inventor of the Dominic System of mnemonics upon which it's based), is both random access (like a CD, as opposed to a cassette tape) and indexed by number, making it ideal for remembering long, numbered lists and tables, or many smaller lists, or both: up to 10,000 basic items. Each basic item can, in effect, be elaborated with nooks and crannies [Hack #4], creating the potential for many more than 10,000 items.

You can think of the Hotel Dominic as a building with 100 floors, numbered from 00 to 99, each containing 100 rooms, also numbered from 00 to 99. In short, it's like a grid with 100 rows and 100 columns. The first room on Floor 95 would thus be numbered 9500. The next room along the hall would be 9501, then 9502, and so on. shows the first few rooms from the bottom floors of the Hotel Dominic, starting with the first floor, Floor 00. The hotel continues both up and to the right.

Figure 1-2: A few rooms in the Hotel Dominic

If you need to memorize a list with more than 100 numbered items, allocate an empty section of the matrix to that list. For example, to memorize the periodic table of elements, you could arbitrarily allocate rooms 8001 to 8116. Room 8001 would contain information about the first element, hydrogen, and 8116 would contain information about the element with the highest known atomic number, ununhexium (element 116).¹

If you have memorized the 100 people/action pegs of the Dominic System, you

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Use a Perl script to formulate items that match the 10,000 room numbers of the Hotel Dominic. Then, print the list as an aid for memorization and review.

"Visit the Hotel Dominic" [Hack #7] mentions a Perl script that will make memorizing large chunks of information with the Hotel Dominic method much easier and will also help you refresh your memory periodically. This hack contains that script.

With this new script, dominate, you will be able to print out as large a swath of the Hotel Dominic as you wish—hundreds or thousands of rooms—and mark it up with a pen or pencil, assigning each item you want to remember to a room. Then you will be able to review your marked-up version of the hotel at leisure and commit the items to memory.

Place the following Perl script in a text file called dominate:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

$in_file = $ARGV[0];
$domstart = $ARGV[1];
$domend = $ARGV[2];

if ($domstart > $domend)
{
    die "Start number not less than or equal to end number\\n";
}

open (IN_FILE, "< ./$in_file")
    or die "Couldn't open input file: $!\\n";

$index = 0;
while (defined ($line = <IN_FILE>)) 
{
    $line =~ /([^;]*)\\:([^;\\n]*)/g;
    $domarray[$index][0] = $1;
    $domarray[$index][1] = $2;
    $index++;
}

close IN_FILE;

for ($domnum = $domstart; $domnum < = $domend; $domnum++)
{
    $domstring = sprintf "%0004.0d", $domnum;
  print "$domstring: ";
    $domstring =~ /(\\d\\d)(\\d\\d)/g;
    print "$domarray[$1][0]\\,$domarray[$2][1]\\n\\n";
}

You will need to create your own datafile that contains your personal characters and actions that match the numbers in the Dominic System [Hack #6]. It must start with the character and action for 00 and continue through the character and action for 99. Each line must contain the character name, followed by a colon, then a space, and then the character's typical action. Colons must be used only to separate characters and actions; they cannot appear anywhere else in the file. If your text editor has a line number feature, you can use it to keep track of where you are in the file, such as line 1, which should contain the mnemonic for 00, or line 100, which should contain the mnemonic for 99.

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You can use a rhyming system of mnemonics by Lewis Carroll, author of the immortal "Alice" books and much nonsense poetry, to remember dates, phone numbers, and other numeric data.

In the 1870s, Lewis Carroll devised a mnemonic system for numbers that he called the Memoria Technica, after an earlier system. Carroll's system is little remembered by us postmoderns. Like today's more common Major System [Hack #5], it relies on converting numbers into consonants and filling them with vowels to make words; unlike the Major System, it uses rhyming couplets to help you remember the words that are created, instead of simply having you remember them "naked," and in this sense it is an advance on the former.

If you already know the Major System consonants, you could probably substitute them for Carroll's without too much trouble.

First, you need to memorize the number-to-consonant conversions shown in , which provides mnemonics for remembering the mnemonics.

Table : Number-to-consonant conversions
Number	First consonant	Second consonant	Mnemonic
1	B	C	First two consonants in alphabet
2	D	W	Duo; tWo
3	T	J	Tres (Spanish); see following note for an explanation for J
4	F	Q	Four; Quattuor (Latin)
5	L	V	L stands for 50; V stands for 5 (Roman numerals)
6	S	X	SiX
7	P	M	sePteM (Latin)
8	H	K	Huit (French); oKto (Greek)
9	N	G	NiNe; g looks like 9
0	Z	R	ZeRo

Carroll said his intent was to provide one common and one uncommon consonant for each number. He was a polyglot, so many of the metamnemonics involve number words in other languages; however, the only one that really doesn't make any sense is J for 3. Carroll said it was the only consonant left after he filled in the rest of the table.

The next step is to convert the numbers you are trying to remember to a word or words and to make them the last part of a rhyming couplet. Carroll gives the following example to remember 1492, the year Columbus first came to America.

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Turn that song stuck in your head into a powerful tool to help you remember what you learn! This hack works especially well if you have a list of things to memorize.

It's common for people to hear a particularly catchy tune and hum it in their head for hours, or sometimes days. While this phenomenon can be annoying, it can also be used as a great tool for memorizing information. Making up a song or poem about a topic can be an extremely effective way to remember dates, lists of items, events and stories, and many other things.

This hack works in three ways to stick information in your mind. First, hanging information on a melody or rhyme scheme that you already know helps piggyback new information on information that you've already acquired. Second, remembering the rhythm of a tune or one or two rhyming lines can help bootstrap your memory; bringing one to mind will often bring up the rest of the associated information. Third, the active process of fitting the information into the tune causes you to concentrate on the information and turn it over in your mind, which also helps it to stick there.

There are a few different types of learning songs, and some may work better than others, depending on your own mental makeup or the information you're trying to memorize.

A parody is a song written using an existing song's tune, often satirizing or making fun of something. The parody might or might not play on the theme of the original song, but the new words often follow a rhyme or phonetic scheme similar to the original lyrics. They are also generally written based on a popular song rather than a folk or traditional tune. Matching the information you're trying to memorize to a song you already know, by theme or some other association, can further help you to remember the information.

If you need to learn a story, such as an event in history, putting the story to music with a story song will help you remember it. This hack has been used by people around the world for thousands of years, of course. Story songs are often similar to parodies, but may be more freewheeling and nonsatirical, and will probably use an original tune or traditional/folk tune.

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Improve your short-term memory, your information processing, and your long-term memory by grouping the bits of data you come across into chunks.

Psychologist George A. Miller concluded in a classic 1956 experimental survey that human short-term memory can hold only seven items at a time, plus or minus two.¹Short-term memory bears the same relation to long-term memory in humans that RAM does to mass storage in a computer: short-term memory, which is temporary, is the gateway to human long-term memory, which is semi-permanent. Short-term memory is also where information that is currently being processed is stored (such as a phone number you're calling). Thus, it's important for not only short-term memory itself, but also long-term memory and information processing, to maximize the ability to use short-term memory.

Recent research suggests the magic number that short-term memory can hold might be somewhat lower than seven, at least for intellectually demanding tasks. Researchers at the University of Queensland found that 30 academics given a task of analyzing statistical interactions among variables—a task at which they were already expert—did not perform better than chance at analyzing interactions of five variables in timed tests. Also, they were not only worse at analyzing four-variable interactions than interactions involving three or two variables, but less confident of their answers as well.²

Whether the magic number is five or seven, people normally find it hard to remember more than a few small bits of information. If they recode the bits by clustering them into larger, more meaningful chunks, however, they can remember many more of the bits. In the next section, we will show that you can remember a large number of literal bits ( binary digits) by grouping them into more meaningful and comprehensible numeric chunks.

Here are 40 random binary digits. Examine them and spend as much time as you want memorizing them, then look away from this book and try to write them down. The only rule is that you may not convert them to another base, count them, restructure them, or use any other mnemonic trick to memorize them. You must memorize them by rote as you see them on the page. Are you ready? Go!

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Use what you can recall to help bootstrap your memory into remembering what you can't.

You are sitting with your friends, discussing the latest movie releases, when someone asks the name of a performer who starred in a recent film. Frustratingly, you can remember what she looks like, the fact that you saw her film from last year, and even that her name has three syllables and starts with an A, but the name just does not come to mind.

This experience, in which a memory seems to be "on the tip of the tongue," is exasperating if you're trying to remember a particular fact, but intriguing if you're interested in how memory works.

One of the most fascinating things about the tip-of-the-tongue state is that it demonstrates how sometimes we know that we know something, without actually being able to recall it. This is part of what psychologists call metacognition, which allows us to realize that we should keep trying even though our memories might be failing us at a particular moment. Much research has focused on metacognition and memory, because experiences like the tip-of-the-tongue state are relatively common in everyday life.

Studies have shown that tip-of-the-tongue states happen about once per week on average and get more common as we get older. Other research has focused on conditions that affect the likelihood of successful recall, suggesting some good techniques for overcoming tip-of-the-tongue when it occurs.

When people fall into a tip-of-the-tongue state, they commonly focus on the few relevant things that they can remember, hoping that the elusive fact will pop into their mind after the effort of increased concentration. A more successful technique is to try to recall as much information about the topic as possible, no matter how loosely it is related.

For example, in the situation described in the previous section, I might try to remember the plots and details of other movies I know the performer has been in, as well as what I was doing when I saw the original version of the film and who I was with. I could also try to remember what music was in the film, whether the actress has any brothers or sisters, and even which of my friends said she gave a good performance last time we talked about her.

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Although memory is a core human faculty, and developing it will reward you well, as a literate human you still need to process recorded information, whether books full of text or digital files full of audiovisual data. How can you cope with the hurricane of information that pounds your eyes and ears every day?

This chapter will show you how to capture the best of the informational flood quickly, whether it comes from outside or inside your skull. It also will show you how to sort that information, structure it, and ultimately discard it from your life when you no longer need it.

Good thoughts can come at any time. By recording them, you can bring them together and encourage your brain to give you more.

Interesting thoughts can come to you at any time. Perhaps you're getting groceries, in aisle A4, and suddenly you have an idea for a program you're writing. Or you're driving, and a point in an argument comes to you. Or you're in the shower, and you realize something about life.

But later, you simply forget. The very next day, you're tasked with writing that program, or giving your side in the argument, and you ask yourself, "Now what was it I was thinking?" Perhaps you are stuck living the same day over and over again. "Didn't I have a thought about a different way I could think and live?"

In this hack, you're going to collect your thoughts using a catch. This is not a simple diary; this is an advanced system for collecting every thought, from everywhere in your life, and bringing them together.

You will need some supplies:

A ream of ruled paper
A pen or pencil

Take a piece of paper, and prepare it like this. First, create three columns:

Subject: The Subject column should be the leftmost column and be about an inch wide. This is the place where you will write the general subject of the idea you have. For instance, if you think a lot about C++ and you have an idea that's basically about C++ (rather than, say, math or philosophy), put "C++" in this column. You want to pick your subjects so that they are big and can hold a lot of related thoughts.

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Good thoughts can come at any time. By recording them, you can bring them together and encourage your brain to give you more.

Interesting thoughts can come to you at any time. Perhaps you're getting groceries, in aisle A4, and suddenly you have an idea for a program you're writing. Or you're driving, and a point in an argument comes to you. Or you're in the shower, and you realize something about life.

But later, you simply forget. The very next day, you're tasked with writing that program, or giving your side in the argument, and you ask yourself, "Now what was it I was thinking?" Perhaps you are stuck living the same day over and over again. "Didn't I have a thought about a different way I could think and live?"

In this hack, you're going to collect your thoughts using a catch. This is not a simple diary; this is an advanced system for collecting every thought, from everywhere in your life, and bringing them together.

You will need some supplies:

A ream of ruled paper
A pen or pencil

Take a piece of paper, and prepare it like this. First, create three columns:

Subject: The Subject column should be the leftmost column and be about an inch wide. This is the place where you will write the general subject of the idea you have. For instance, if you think a lot about C++ and you have an idea that's basically about C++ (rather than, say, math or philosophy), put "C++" in this column. You want to pick your subjects so that they are big and can hold a lot of related thoughts.
Hint: The Hint column should also be about an inch wide and should sit next to the Subject column. This is where you will write a hint about how to place the idea within the subject. Perhaps it is a sub-subject—the name of a topic of interest within the subject—or a keyword that identifies a theme or context.

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Write smarter, not harder! The ASCII-based shorthand hack called Speedwords will not only enable you to write faster on paper without learning a special shorthand alphabet, but will also enable you to type faster in many word processors and text editors.

Dutton Speedwords is an artificial language [Hack #51] developed by Reginald Dutton in the early 1920s and improved over the following few decades. Dutton intended Speedwords both as an international auxiliary language like Esperanto, which could be written or spoken by people who did not speak the same native language, and as a shorthand system.

The advantage that Speedwords has over most other shorthand methods is that you do not need to learn a special alphabet to use it (as you would, for example, with the Gregg or Pitman shorthand methods). This feature not only makes Speedwords easy to learn, but also means that it can be typed, entered into PDAs with handwriting recognition systems, and generally used anywhere the Roman alphabet can be used. It's also great for quickly catching information [Hack #13].

This section contains a short Speedwords vocabulary, which should be enough to get you started.¹ The original Dutton Speedwords textbooks are long out of print, but there's plenty of material on the Web² if you want to go further.

One-letter Speedwords

If you just want to play around with Speedwords and give it a test drive, try learning the 27 single-character Speedwords in and use them for a few days. Learning this list will probably take only a few minutes, and you might be surprised how natural it is to work them into your ordinary note taking.

Table : One-letter Speedwords
Speedword	Meaning	Notes
&	And
a	To, toward, at
b	But
c	This, these	French ce
d	Of, from	French de
e	Am, are, (to) be, is	Latin est

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To absorb new information and to assimilate it quickly and effectively, use learning-style theories to understand your brain and what makes it function best.

If you have to drive somewhere new, how do you figure out how to get there? Perhaps you like to consult a web site and get a step-by-step list of driving directions that details each turn and street name. Maybe your dad prefers looking at a map and tracing out his route there. If you asked your friend, she'd tell you she likes to call someone and ask for directions, including landmarks and possible pitfalls she might encounter on the way. Maybe you've even had arguments about this, with each side claiming the only "good" way to be sure you get there, and secretly thinking that the other ways are for idiots.

This argument happens because each person has a different learning style. A learning style is a way of taking in and assimilating information, and different people's brains do this in different ways. So, each method of finding out how to get where you're going might be right for the person who favors it, and for him it might really be idiotic for that person to use a method that's less effective.

If you can tune in to the best way for your brain to learn, you can apply that knowledge intelligently to learn faster and retain more of what you learn. Knowing a little about learning styles will help you "speak your brain's language" so that it works better for you.

There are many, many theories about how people learn. This hack discusses two that have many supporters and that I've found to be useful. Furthermore, they mesh well so that you can combine them synergistically; one is about how the information's format affects the brain's ability to take it in, and the other has to do with how the brain assimilates new information.

The VARK system

Neil D. Fleming and Colleen Mills developed the VARK system to describe different ways people absorb information.¹ VARK stands for the four types of learning defined by the theory: visual, aural, reading/writing, and kinesthetic. Most people can take in information through all of these

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Collecting and connecting related ideas reveal patterns that stimulate new thought, as well as contradictions to be resolved.

Are your thoughts organized? Most of the time, people live in a river of thoughts and sensations, like the story line of a movie. Our thoughts arrive as events in a sequence.

But we can map out our thoughts on a plane. When we see them side by side, we can compare them with one another and organize them. Observing the whole picture, all at once, we make startling realizations and discover an order to our thoughts, a top-down understanding of them.¹

Alternatively, we find a disorder, and gain insight into tensions and confusions in our life. As soon as we see them clearly, though, our mind starts cranking away, working to resolve them—or, at the very least, to understand the subtlety behind the tension.

Mind mapping begins with collecting thoughts into a source list: a list of ideas you start out with and that you're going to map. It's useful to separate assembling your mind map from collecting your source ideas.

Creating the source list

Your source list can come from free writing, from a catch [Hack #13], or even from a chat transcript. What's necessary is to turn the source into a list.

Let's start with free writing. Think of a subject you think about a lot. Situate yourself in front of a keyboard, close your eyes, and then type out everything that comes to you about the subject. You can try to focus on one topic, or fan out to just about everything important to you. Whatever you think about will appear in the mind map.

When you are done, read what you wrote. Wherever you spot a complete and distinct idea, enumerate it. Enumerate ideas, not sentences. Three sentences on the same idea receive just one number. One sentence with three ideas in it receives three numbers.

Suppose you had written the following in stream-of-consciousness free writing:

I think a lot about programming. I keep wondering, what about block-level design patterns? I've noticed that people who are starting to program don't know how to hook from "I'm visiting every member of a two-dimensional array" to "I need two nested for loops." What can we do about that? I think we can make "Block Level Design Patterns." They're too elementary to be noted by the sophisticated Design Patterns community, but I think they would be useful nonetheless. We could show patterns of exception use, patterns of conditional loops, and things like how to articulate decisions into variables, and we could explain all the trade-offs involved in these things.

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Take a Hipster PDA, combine it with a pocket countdown timer called the MotivAider, and gain better control of your thoughts, emotions, and activities.

Science fiction writer Greg Egan explores the concept of the exoself in some of his novels. In Permutation City, he defines it as "sophisticated, but nonconscious, supervisory software which could reach into...brain and body and fine-tune any part of it as required."¹ In a later novel, Diaspora, he describes the exoself's outlook component: "software that could run inside your exoself and reinforce the qualities that you valued most, if and when you felt the need for such an anchor."²

Pretty exciting! I'd give a lot for a mental exoskeleton that I could program one day to make me less lazy the next day, and keep me from getting sucked into a cult or pyramid scheme the day after that. Needless to say, however, we lack the technology necessary to build a true exoself today. Of course, it's a lot easier to reprogram yourself when you've been uploaded into a computer, as in Egan's fiction.

This hack creates a simpler system for repatterning your thinking, by using a Hipster PDA (made from a deck of index cards) and a periodic alarm device such as the MotivAider. Compared to Egan's fictional exoself, it's almost embarrassingly primitive—but it's a start.

Here's how to design an exoself with today's materials. Note that the design is flexible. Many components have substitutes. If we ever develop real exoselves, they'll be more complex than today's most powerful computer, so feel free to elaborate on this extremely basic design.

Stack

Bind together a stack of index cards with a binder clip or rubber band. Merlin Mann of the 43 Folders productivity blog made this design popular as the "Hipster PDA,"³ but the stack is more structured than the loose bundle of notes that that term implies. Here are a couple things no good stack should be without:

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Cruft is clutter that bogs things down and gets in the way of getting things done. Idea clutter is mostly stuff that we could have gotten rid of to begin with. When you initiate an activity, determine a kill date for it at the same time.

Computer desktops overflow with icons. Inboxes are filled with ancient email. Real desktops overflow with paper: mail, magazines, printouts, notebooks filled with old notes and sums, waiting to be integrated someday (when we have the time) into some master Tower of Babel, stepping us into the stars.

Face it: it's mostly junk, even when we've tried to weed it out along the way. We imagine that we'll use it, and if we think we'll need even a small fraction of it one day, we think we'd better keep it. Some of us are deeply attached to old brilliance and are convinced that our mountains of ideas will be reviewed, collected, prioritized, turned into plans, and converted into fruitful action somehow. Or we worry that at some point we're going to need one of those little notes, and we're going to be sorry that we don't have it. Or perhaps we're worried that we're going to have good ideas for only a limited time, so we start to squirrel them away and hoard them. We spend so much time hoarding them—stacking them, sorting them, working around them, feeling bad about them—that we don't get to implement any of them.

Whether you're attached to your ideas or you're simply having problems with your clutter (a.k.a. cruft), here's a little trick that will quickly wipe out most of your future clutter. It's called pre-deleting, and it's simple. The only hard part is adjusting your mind into the state where you're willing to do it.

"But I don't want to destroy anything, ever!" Don't worry, we'll address that later in this hack. "But I've got a computer, and it can remember things forever!" We'll talk about that later also. "But it's got terabytes of—" Yes, yes, I know. We'll talk later.

Every time you create or receive something, decide right then how long you're likely to need it. If you're working on something for a couple of weeks, give it a

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Every human achievement is the result of an initial act of creativity. Stonehenge could not have been created without it, nor could the book you are holding. Even some kinds of logic, such as inductive reasoning, require leaps of creativity.

Creativity might appear to be a mystical force, but in fact, it's available to everyone, even people who claim they're not creative. As counterintuitive as it might seem, creativity can be hacked. Some of the hacks in this chapter go so far as to try to mechanize creativity. Whether they all succeed is something you'll have to judge yourself, but I hope you'll learn to boost your creativity regardless.

Your mind is like your computer's random-number generator: it needs a "seed" from the environment to break out of its routines. You have to put something into it to get something out!

Too often, brainstorming meetings take place in sterile, empty conference rooms with bare walls and nothing to look at anywhere else. They are almost like the industrial clean rooms where microchips are manufactured and not a speck of dust is allowed to gather. Is it any wonder that so many bad ideas come out of these rooms? The truth is that brains need "dust." Brainstorms, like rainstorms, need nuclei around which (b)raindrops can form. If you start with no ideas, you will end with no ideas.¹

Think of your mind as a desktop computer faced with the problem of generating a random number out of thin air. Such a computer cannot generate truly random numbers; it can only perform a series of rigid calculations. From the human point of view, randomness enters the computer only when it is programmed to consult its real-time clock for some real-world quantity, such as the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970. Given this unpredictable input, the PC can then go on to generate output that looks quite random—and even creative. In other words, the computer needs input from an outside source to break out of its rigid patterns.

Humans, too, can become stuck in creative ruts. Everyone has a certain set of interests, ranging from things about which they are mildly curious to those about which they're completely obsessed. Choreographer Twyla Tharp calls this our " creative DNA." Sometimes, this

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Your mind is like your computer's random-number generator: it needs a "seed" from the environment to break out of its routines. You have to put something into it to get something out!

Too often, brainstorming meetings take place in sterile, empty conference rooms with bare walls and nothing to look at anywhere else. They are almost like the industrial clean rooms where microchips are manufactured and not a speck of dust is allowed to gather. Is it any wonder that so many bad ideas come out of these rooms? The truth is that brains need "dust." Brainstorms, like rainstorms, need nuclei around which (b)raindrops can form. If you start with no ideas, you will end with no ideas.¹

Think of your mind as a desktop computer faced with the problem of generating a random number out of thin air. Such a computer cannot generate truly random numbers; it can only perform a series of rigid calculations. From the human point of view, randomness enters the computer only when it is programmed to consult its real-time clock for some real-world quantity, such as the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970. Given this unpredictable input, the PC can then go on to generate output that looks quite random—and even creative. In other words, the computer needs input from an outside source to break out of its rigid patterns.

Humans, too, can become stuck in creative ruts. Everyone has a certain set of interests, ranging from things about which they are mildly curious to those about which they're completely obsessed. Choreographer Twyla Tharp calls this our " creative DNA." Sometimes, this hardwiring leads to repetition in our creative output. At that point, we, too, need to seed our mental random-number generators with new data to kick us out of our ruts.

You can seed your own creative process with almost anything:

Read a street sign.
Read a street sign backward.
Turn on the radio or TV for 10 seconds. (Remember to turn it off! Don't accumulate negative momentum [Hack #65]!)

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Use a simple process to generate many complex ideas quickly from a limited pool of simple ideas.

The process of morphological forced connections is fairly old; the picture books for children that allow you to combine the head of a giraffe with the body of a hippo and the tail of a fish are one example. The process was formalized by Fritz Zwicky at Caltech in the 1960s¹ and was popularized in 1972 by Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall in their book The Universal Traveler.²

Most other books that discuss the technique seem to derive their discussion of it from The Universal Traveler and even use the same example: creating a new design for a ballpoint pen. We'll take a somewhat different approach.

The basic process for making forced connections, as outlined by Koberg and Bagnall, is simple and sound:

List possible features of the object you are trying to create, one feature per column. For example, the features might include color, size, and shape.
In the column under each feature variable, list as many values for that variable as you can. For example, under color you might list all the colors of the rainbow, as well as black, white, gold, and silver.
Finally, randomly combine the values in your table many times, using one value from each column. To continue our example, you would use one color, one size, and one shape each time.

Technically, steps 1 and 2 are morphological analysis, and step 3 is the morphological forced connections stage.

The result will be a randomly generated list of possibilities, none of which might be just what you're looking for, but most of which will probably be interesting. Feel free to fine-tune the results. For example, you might not like the suggestion "orange, tetrahedron, a meter on a side," but "orange, tetrahedron, half a meter on a side" might hit the spot.

Of course, you can force connections with a pen and paper, as recommended in

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Table of Contents

One-letter Speedwords

The VARK system

Creating the source list

Stack