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. Figure 1-2 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.
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 already have everything you need to memorize the 10,000 rooms of the hotel. Room 8001 in the Hotel Dominic would be represented by whatever combination of person and action you have designated for HOOA. Four-digit numbers are easily memorized with the Dominic System, so all you need to do is associate hydrogen with the Dominic mnemonic for this number.2
Here's an example of how to memorize the first element in the periodic table, hydrogen.
As mentioned in the previous section, place hydrogen in Room
8001 of the Hotel Dominic (in other words, Floor 80, Room 01). The
number 80, as mentioned in "Use
the Dominic System" [Hack #6], is represented by Santa Claus (80
= HO, which reminds us of Santa's HO, HO, HO).
In my personal list, 01 is that guy on the oatmeal box (01 =
OA = oats),
and his characteristic action is offering a bowl of oatmeal. Thus,
8001 is represented by Santa Claus offering me a bowl of oatmeal.
To link hydrogen to the picture, I imagine that the oatmeal is bubbling, and little bubbles of hydrogen gas are escaping from it and bursting into flame. It's then easy to remember other information about the element, such as its chemical symbol, H. I visualize a shiny H on Santa's forehead, as on the forehead of the "holographic" character Rimmer in the TV series Red Dwarf. I imagine that the shiny H reflects the flames from the exploding hydrogen bubbles, making it vivid and easier to remember.
Other features of the character, the character's action, and the room could be used to store other information about hydrogen, such as its atomic weight (1.008) and the year it was discovered (1766), both of which are four-digit numbers and also easily encoded with the Dominic System.
It's not as easy as playing foosball or watching a DVD, and experience shows that you'll need to refresh your memory periodically. However, "Dominate Your Memory" [Hack #8] provides a script to print up chunks of your personal memory hotel for easy review, and if you're studying for your chemistry exam or going on Jeopardy!, a mnemonic technique like the Hotel Dominic beats rote drill techniques and makes them cry.
Tip
You can use the Hotel Dominic to memorize lists shorter than 100 items, too. For instance, you can tuck the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which has 30 articles) into rooms 8171–8200 and still leave plenty of room for new chemical elements to be discovered.
Periodic Table Navigator. WebElements. http://www.webelements.com/webelements/elements/text/periodic-table.
This is similar to the way you would use Tony Buzan's SEM3 ( Self-Enhancing Master Memory Matrix) system to memorize the periodic table. In fact, the Hotel Dominic is an attempt to do with the Dominic System what Buzan has done with the Major System [Hack #5] in SEM3: http://www.ludism.org/mentat/SemCubed. However, the Hotel Dominic is nonproprietary and arguably easier to use.
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