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- Hacker News
- I find myself rhyming the number in my head in a specific way that’s a little goofy but memorable. Just image how radio announcers say phone numbers and you have an idea.
More remembering the rhythm than the digits.
by _factor - I choose from a range of lockers that are years I was single. Who did I date that year?
I also set the combination to all zeroes, to scramble my combination after locking. Easier getting in and out with fixed muscle memory, and easy to confirm this is my locker. No one else does this.
by Syzygies - Related: the mnemonic major system. Similar thing with consonants [1], somewhat time tested.
But probably not for aphantasts, at least I struggled. Much more with memory palaces.
by kbrkbr - That’s so cool! I do this with colours - every number has a colour so I remember me imagining seeing the colour combination of a number. Like 438 is green, yellow, purpleby isodev
- I'd do that in reverse. More likely to remember 438 and so can use that to remember the colours!by hshdhdhehd
- 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 - Why not just put a name tag on your luggage?by mattlondon
- On a side note, the NATO alphabet is quite normalised in the Netherlands - most telephone operators will default to it when providing you information and likewise there is an expectation on you to use it when providing spelling sensitive information such as emails.by necklesspen
- An anecdote: I easily remember short-ish (pins, phone numbers) number combinations, learn completely new alphabets of new languages easily enough, just like their words, but I struggle to learn the NATO alphabet: the words have no meaning and I don't perceive them as atomic enough like a letter or number is, so it mostly looks like a large amount of random noise to me, like having to learn pi to 100 digits.by rf15
- Once upon a time I read the joking phrase "M as in Mancy" and now it is the only thing I can ever think of when trying to spell out the letter M.
Perhaps I have now infected one of you. I am sorry.
by chias - The NATO alphabet is an uncanny intersection of being highly memorable and having carefully engineered properties across several dimensions. Whoever designed it did a brilliant job.
It is sticky as hell and surprisingly useful. I do assume that people who know it are ex-military but that isn’t entirely reliable in the US. A lot of other people picked it up, in part because it is so easy to learn by osmosis.
- 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 - This. I could never recall the numbers, yet i always find the right one, just by a feeling for where it is.by jorisnoo
- 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 do very similar, but one = bun, 9 = wine.by austinjp
- how can you rhyme 1 with bone?by goopypoop
- I like this a lot better because you don’t have to visualize the way a number looks to remember the association, you say the word in your mind and just mentally say the number that rhymes. Seems faster to get the hang ofby r0m4n0
- And any rhyme would do so you can make it make more sense.
123 -> bone shoe tree
But also Run blue bee (imagine a blue bee running with legs!)
by hshdhdhehd - 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 - Yup. It's also a weird omission for this article to seemingly claim credit for this "one minute memory trick" without a single mention of the actual method - the peg system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_peg_system
We learned this mnemonic in primary school for compressing sequences of thing (including numbers) into a single highly unusual mental image.
by vunderba