PAO, Part Two: Making a PAO

How to use person, action, and objects to make an image for encoding numbers

PAO stands for person, action, and object. Using the major system, we can encode a two digit number as a person, a two digit number as an action, and a two digit number as an object.

For example, 000000 has 00 followed by 00 followed by 00. In the major system, a 0 is an “s” or a “z” sound.

For the person, I use either the first letter of the first name and the first letter of the last name. For 00 my person is Sylvester Stallone. The S begins both his last and his first name.

For the action I use the word “saws”. Because both “a” and “w” do not correlate to a number in the major system system they can be used in between the two “s” phenomes to get a word which means 00.

For the object I uses Swiss cheese. Really, it’s just Swiss, which is almost the same as “saws” and means 00.

So, my PAO for 000000 is Sylvester Stallone saws a slice of Swiss cheese.

To help me remember I make images of these ideas in an AI image generator called Midjourney. Here’s what Midjourney thought this would looke like:

For 010101 I have Snoop Dog oozed soda. Here’s what Midjourney came up with:

And for 10 I have Tony Stark hits a tissue box. Here’s the image for that:

The idea is that you generate images for all numbers 00-99 and then you can make PAOs for any possible combination of six digit number. I’ve kept it simple here. For example, what would the number 100100 be? Well, “10” is Tony Stark, “01” is oozed, and “00” is Swiss cheese. So to remember that, I’d imagine Tony Stark oozed Swiss cheese. Midjourney thinks that looks like this:

Obviously, not perfect, but pretty dang good for remembering the number.

Next, I’ll show you how to build a memory palace to store these images and how to link them together with story.