Art of Memory

A tool to help practice memorization techniques such as using People Action Object (PAO) techniques.

Getting started

See the Environment Setup section of the contributing guide for setup. Then try executing aom.py:

./aom.py

There are different sub-commands or topics that can be covered. Each section should support a --explain option that helps the particular topic.

Person Place Object (PAO)

Support PAO quizzing. For this you will need to setup a .artofmemory.conf file in your home directory. Its contents only requires a [pao] section consisting of numbers -to-> pao label. Basically this can be any values that you wish to be quizzed upon.

Here is a starter example:

[pao]
23 = Michael Jordan, shooting, basketball
16 = Molly Ringwald, blowing candles, cake

Then try quizzing yourself:

./aom.py pao --explain --quiz

Number / Word Major System

Support for both identifying / processing words or numbers as well as quizzing yourself.

Quiz yourself with the system while explaining how the system works:

./aom.py --explain --quiz

Find a list of words that match the number 903 and 42:

./aom.py words 903 42

See how you might encode a message into numbers:

./aom.py words such great words

Number Summary

To get a large summary of numbers to words, use the words-summary command which defaults to generating words for numbers between 00 to 99. You can change the range via --min and/or --max arguments. Since nouns are easier to make an image of in your head, you can ask the results to be limited to only nouns via --nouns option.

./aom.py words-summary --nouns

You can even print the summary of words in an org-mode friendly output:

./aom.py words-summary --org-mode --nouns

If you do use the --nouns option, you need to pull down the NLTK wordnet database of words if not already:

python -c 'import nltk; nltk.download("wordnet")'

Missing word

Play a little game to see if you can keep track of which word is missing. There are a few pre-built categories such as the books of the Bible.

Try quizzing yourself to see which book of the Bible is missing:

./aom.py missing --bible

Or pass in your own choices:

./aom.py missing --bible apple orange pear cherry banana

Cards

For now this is a bit of a stub. Can only print out a random card for now.