The peg system

Each number gets a word that rhymes with it. These are the pegs in Photographic Memory:

Say them aloud a few times, then see each one: a bun, a shoe, a tree. The rhyme brings back the word, and the word brings back the picture. When you can run through them without thinking, they are ready to use.

1. Take the first item and the first peg, and make one image of the two together. Make it big, strange, moving.
2. Do the same with the next item and the next peg.
3. To recall, say the number, see the peg, and look at what you left on it.

Say you want to remember the animals of a wildlife reserve, in the order you will meet them: penguin, llama, tiger, bear, eagle.

• One, bun: a penguin squashed inside a giant hamburger bun.
• Two, shoe: a llama trying to squeeze its hoof into a shoe.
• Three, tree: a tiger asleep in the branches of a tree.
• Four, door: a bear blocking your front door.
• Five, hive: an eagle stealing honey from a hive.

Which animal comes fourth? Four, door: the bear. You didn’t have to go through the first three. That is what the peg system adds to a simple chain of images.

The rhymes are only one set. Photographic Memory also builds pegs on the alphabet, in two ways:

• Sound-alike letters. B sounds like bee, so B becomes a bee.
• Concrete words. A word that starts with each letter: A apple, B bass, C cord, D drum.

With 26 letters you have 26 pegs, and you can mix them with other techniques as your lists grow.

• It helps you remember a list in order. In a classic experiment, people who used the rhyme “one is a bun” as a hook remembered ten-word lists better than people who had learned the same rhyme without using it (Bugelski and colleagues, 1968). Knowing the pegs is not enough: you have to make the images.
• It is among the best for order. When Henry Roediger compared four mnemonics in 1980, the memory palace and the peg system were the most effective for recalling words in their right order (Roediger, 1980).
• The long-term advantage is less clear. In a 2000 study, people taught the peg system or the memory palace remembered no more after a delay than untrained people who had spontaneously used imagery or grouped the words themselves (Wang and Thomas, 2000).

So the pegs are an excellent filing system for the days you need a list. To keep it for weeks, you still have to come back to it (Retrieval and spacing).

It works best for lists you need in a fixed order or at a given position: the points of a speech, the steps of a procedure, ten things to do this week. The rhyming pegs run out fast, so for long lists use the memory palace, where you can add as many stops as you like (The memory palace). And like every mnemonic, it helps you hold information, not understand it.

Write down ten things you need to do this week and hang them on the pegs, from one to ten. Tomorrow, without looking, say them back in order, then try number seven, number three, number nine.

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