Build a Mental Filing Cabinet using the Major System method

Imagine you have a mental filing cabinet in your brain where you can store and recall information such as shopping lists. Or easily store and recall visual cues to help you deliver a speech or presentation more effectively. In fact, store any kind of information that you want to recall at your convenience in the blink of an eye.

Now imagine how much of an asset this kind of power would be for anyone who has it. That would be really amazing, wouldn’t it? So let’s build a Mental Filing Cabinet.

In this post, we’ll build on the previous post Achieve superior memory recall with the Major System to help you create a Mental Filing Cabinet.

Important Side Note: If you haven’t yet learnt the rules of the Major System from this previous post, please learn them and then come back here to continue.

Ok, if you’re familiar with the Major System, let’s move on.

How many folders (for simplicity, let’s call these slots from now on) can my Mental Filing Cabinet hold? Well, mine has 100 slots (1 to 100), but really there is no limit to this. I use my Mental Filing Cabinet everyday in some way. Sometimes I may only use a few of the slots, but it’s nice to have the capacity to use more should you require.

However many slots you do decide to build into your Mental Filing Cabinet, learn the relationships meticulously so you can convert them in your mind forward and backwards. i.e:

1 = Tea and Tea = 1
2 = Noah and Noah = 2
3 = May and May = 3
…etc.

As mentioned earlier, you should already have learnt the rules of the Major System explained in this previous post, and so have done the hard work already. It’s now a relatively simple task of building your Mental Filing Cabinet using your selected converted words for each number.

There’s a great tool by Gabe Cook to help with conversions. It creates all the words that can be used for a given number, so you can pick the word you prefer and use it for your slot.

The list below shows the first 20 slots of the 100 I use. These are my actual ‘real world’ word choices for my Mental Filing Cabinet. You can use the same words or choose your own should you prefer.

Slot	Converted Word

1	Tea
2	Noah
3	May
4	Ray
5	Law
6	Jaw
7	Key
8	Fee
9	Pea
10	Toes
11	Tot
12	Tan
13	Team
14	Tar
15	Tail
16	Teach
17	Tack
18	Toffee
19	Tap
20	News

You’ve done the work above. Right? Ok, how about we populate your Mental Filing Cabinet. For our first example, let’s use it to remember a list of items. The Mental Filing Cabinet you’ve created can be used again and again with unique items. As a general rule, newer items will overwrite older things you’ve remembered that are already in there, which is fine and how we want this to work.

Remember a list of items. What is an item? Anything you want it to be, from a product you require from the supermarket, to something more substantial like important projects or tasks that need priority attention.

Ok, for this example we’ll work with a shopping list of 10 items. Once you have the concept of how this works, you can memorise a list as large as your Mental Filing Cabinet allows.

Ready? Work out what you need from the supermarket/shop in your usual manner, but instead of writing them down, go through the Mental Filing Cabinet you created, and relate an item to each slot. I’ll give you an example below of how it works.

1. Tea – Eggs. See an egg (could be hard-boiled) bobbing about in your mug of tea. You’re trying to fish it out with a teaspoon.
2. Noah – Toilet Rolls. See 1000s of toilet rolls stocked up in Noahs Ark. One animal, a rhino, is head-butting it all and one roll gets stuck on its horn.
3. May – Flour. When I think of May, I think of a Maypole. See the ribbons in full movement, like a carousel. I tie one ribbon around a bag of flour. There’s a hole in the bag and white flour is tracing a circle around the Maypole.
4. Ray – Magazine. See an intense ray of light. A laser, moving across the title of the mag, burning the letters as it moves across the mag.
5. Law – Chocolate. See a policeman trying to break up a disturbance. He draws his baton, only to discover it’s made of chocolate, and the crowd laughs at him as it melts. One of them takes a bite from it.
6. Jaw – Roast Potatoes. You open your jaw as wide as possible and pop in a full roast potato. It’s far too hot and so you quickly spit it out.
7. Key – Bacon. Imagine you want to copy a key. Open the pack of bacon and place the key flat against it. Push down on the key to make an imprint.
8. Fee – Coffee. Imagine a shop where you pay for a product. In this instance, you visit a coffee shop, ask for a coffee and get a wad of banknotes out to pay the fee. Give a large tip for an extra large coffee. They place the coffee on the counter. It’s so huge you can’t carry it, but you will remember it.
9. Pea – Black Bin Liners. You look in your kitchen bin and realise you best take it out to the wheelie bin as it’s overflowing with peas. As you get the black bag closer to the wheelie, you notice a hole and lots of peas are rolling down your yard behind you.
10. Toes – Milk. You decide to relax and place your feet in a mini foot spa. Instead of warm water, you fill it with milk. When you switch on the spa, it creates milk droplets on the service of the water that look like mini pearls.

Important Side Note: Make associations – i.e. The item to remember with it’s corresponding slot – relatable, vivid, vibrant and as animated as possible in order to allow them to stick firmly in your memory.