These competitions have created a sort of mental arms race, where competitors create new and improved mnemonic imagery techniques that allow them to memorize more and faster. One of the core mnemonic weapons in any competitor’s arsenal is known as the person-action-object (PAO) system, and we’re going to use a simplified version of it to attach mnemonic images to our words. PAO relies upon a simple premise: the three basic ingredients of a story are a person (Arnold Schwarzenegger), an action (explodes), and an object (a dog).
