Editing Mnemonic major system (section)

==Indexing sequences==
Mnemonics often center around learning a complete sequence where all objects in that sequence that come before the one you are trying to recall must be recalled first.  For instance, when using the mnemonic "Richard of York gave battle in vain" to learn the colours of the rainbow, (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) to remember what colour comes after indigo, one would have to recall the whole sequence. For a short sequence this may be trivial; for longer lists, it can become complicated and error-prone.

A good example would be in recalling the 53rd element of the [[periodic table]].  It might be possible to construct and learn a string of 53 or more items, each of which links to an element and then to recall them one by one sequentially. But it would be a great deal easier to directly associate element 53 with, for example, a lime (a suitable mnemonic for 53) recalling some prior imagining of a mishap where lime juice gets into one's eye - "eye" sounding like "I", the symbol for ''[[Iodine]]''. This allows [[random access]] directly to the item, without the need for recalling any previous items.

To remember element 54 one might then recall an image for 54, for instance a friend called "Laura" (54), in the lotus position looking very Zen-like as a mnemonic that element 54 is ''[[Xenon]]''.

This is an example of combining the Major System with the [[mnemonic peg system|peg system]].