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- I tend to visualize the position of the numbers on a phone's keypad. The sequence is then the travel to touch them in order. For some reason, I find easier to memorize that shape than the single digits.by teo_zero
- I've been Gematria since I am 6yo.
e.g. As a 48yo, I remember about 24 ATM PINs for many cards I had over the years, since they are all funny and memorable 4 letter names / words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria
I started it as a person told my father his phone number (6 digits as Gematria that translate to "a cloth in my mouth")
234-281 (בגד בפי)
by tzury - This makes me think of two things:
1. the NATO alphabet. (Alfa, bravo, charlie, delta…) It's surprisingly easy to memorize: it will only take you a few sittings of practice. And it's useful, for when you need to turn letters into words. And then people cutely wonder if you're ex-military.
2. I tie a small ribbon to my luggage. It could be anything: string, tinsel. If you're familiar with wine glass charms, same idea. It makes the bag identifiable from distance, so long as the charm is in line of sight. It does not, remarkably, stop strangers from grabbing the wrong bag, but it does get funny if they insist they recognize their bag when you ask them "you tied sparkly pink ribbon to your bag?"
by deathanatos - Personally, it's much easier for me to remember 246 (or any other number up to about 6 digits) than some mapping I pretend to care about.by mrwaffle
- Don't try and remember the number, just remember the location.
We're hardwired for spatial awareness.
by mattlondon - about 30 years ago I read the same thing, but I found that code much easier because it rhymed with the numbers:
1, bone; 2, shoe; 3, tree; 4, door; 5, hive; 6, sticks; 7, heaven; 8, gate; 9, line; 0, hero.
by petesergeant - I listened to the audiobook version of Dominic O'Brien's Quantum Memory Power years ago. He explains this system, along with several others, like memory palaces. The mnemonics he uses for numbering are:
1: candle, 2: swan, 3: handcuffs, 4: sailboat, 5: curtain hook, 6: elephant’s trunk, 7: boomerang, 8: snowman, 9: balloon and string, 10: stick and hoop
Combining it with the journey method helps remember longer sequences. The funny thing is that you might remember the number two by imagining a giant swan in the next room. When you don't need to remember it anymore, you imagine yourself throwing a grenade into the room and blowing up the swan. It really works!
Darren Brown's Tricks of the Mind is generally about his life history in becoming a mentalist, but it has a lot of fun tidbits about methods to get over traumatic memories, amp yourself up for things you don't want you to, defuse arguments/fights, and it was the first place I ever heard of memory palaces.
by snozolli - Talking about memorising numbers, one should definitely mention this well-known system which maps consonants to digits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system
With a system derived from that you can quite easily learn to memorise a shuffled pack of playing cards, by which I mean: someone shuffles the pack of 52 cards and deals them out in front of you, one card every couple of seconds. An hour later you are able to recite the sequence of cards forwards or backwards. (But you can't do random access! What you've done is associate each card with its neighbours, so you can step through them forwards or backwards, without necessarily knowing which direction is which.)
by bloak