
Making Memories: Memorizing Phone Numbers - pmoriarty
http://joeltagert.blogspot.com/2014/01/making-memories-memorizing-phone-numbers.html
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emilga
I've never tried the PAO system, due to the startup costs of pre-memorizing
100 person-action-objects.

But a simpler alternative which requires less work up front is the Major
System (sometimes called the Phonetic system) [0].

The way it works it by assigning each digit a sound-value (or family of
sounds). To remember a number, you then convert the digits to the letter-
sounds, and fill in vowels that don't have a digit value to create words.

E.g. to remember Boltzmann's constant, I do this:

1.38 x 10^-23

1 has the letter value "t" or "d". So I use the word "tea" ("e" and "a" have
no digit value), to remember the digit 1.

The 38 is converted to "m" and "v", which becomes "movie".

23 becomes "n" and "m", or "nemo", the fish from Finding Nemo.

Putting it all together it becomes: Ludvig [1] walking on bolts (= Ludwig
Boltzmann), and in his right hand he's holding a old VHS _movie_ on top of
which balances a cup of hot _tea_. In his left hand he holds a frozen (to
indicate the negative sign in the exponent) Nemo.

To make it memorable you can make this scene as vivid as possible: Ludvig is a
cautious character who sniffles a lot; walking on bolts would hurt and make it
difficult to balance the cup of tea on top of the movie; the frozen fish would
be cold and slippery in the hand; the tea would smell nice; etc.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system)
[1]
[https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/525793520662380544/w9GJ...](https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/525793520662380544/w9GJj317.jpeg)
A character in an iconic Norwegian film.

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tux1968
I remember phone numbers and long digits of numbers by their position on a
number pad. Don't know why this is easier for me, but remembering the pattern
my finger would trace tapping in a sequence of digits just pops in my memory
with ease. So I have to mentally retrace the pattern to figure out what the
actual digits are.

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ken
I'm fascinated by memory, yet I've never been able to make any progress with
any of these memory systems that involve artificial indirection.

I don't think in a spoken language, so if I have to memorize a word it ends up
being the concept, and I pull it out as a cluster of synonyms, and then I also
need an out-of-band way to memorize which of the synonyms it is. I really
don't know how actors memorize lines.

I also can't visualize a complex artificial scene all at once. That's lots of
extra things to memorize before I can get to the thing I want to memorize, and
figuring out a way to remember these zany scenes is harder than just
memorizing the numbers themselves! Numbers are easy. There's no possible
synonyms for "8".

For phone numbers, 95% of my contact list has the same area code, so they're
really only 7 digits. That's the same as a license plate, and I pick those up
just by looking at them a few times without really trying. I'm not disparaging
anyone who can make this system work -- I'm impressed! It just seems like a
lot more work than necessary, if the goal is merely to memorize 10 or 20 phone
numbers.

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Fnoord
Caveat: requires usage of English language. Useful if you (mostly) think in
English. Otherwise, if English is not your native language nor your primary
language then I expect this application to be problematic. Has anyone falling
under such circumstances tried it?

Also, too bad (for the application) that the need to remember phone numbers is
no longer high.

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kelnos
I was hoping this was going to be a lighthearted piece on how it's funny how
we don't remember phone numbers anymore.

It turned out to be very weird. Why would you need a system for remembering
phone numbers? Before cell phones, I easily had dozens of phone numbers in my
head: family, friends, even things like the local pizza shop. Everyone I knew
had similar recall. We didn't _try_ at this; it just came out of simple
repetition.

If you want to memorize phone numbers, write them down on a small piece of
paper and stick it in your wallet. When you need to call them, consult the
list, and enter the numbers manually, not by rote, but while actually thinking
about the numbers as you enter them. Assuming you call them enough, you'll
have the numbers down within a few weeks, a month at the outside. If you
don't, then perhaps you don't really need to memorize them in the first place?

These days I know two relevant phone numbers: my own and my sister's (and only
because hers is similar to one of my prior phone numbers). I also remember the
home phone number for where I lived until I was six years old, and a few other
old ones. Oh, and I remember my (fixed, publicly-addressable) IP address from
my freshman year of college (20 years ago). I kinda wish I could evict those
old numbers and make room for something else.

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simonebrunozzi
I had an amazing memory when I was a kid (now I have good memory, but less
than exceptional). As an example, I knew by memory ~300 phone numbers. To this
day, 30 years later, I still remember 60-70 of these.

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jdmcnugent
The book "Moonwalking with Einstein" was my first introduction to memorization
techniques. I had no idea these techniques existed, much less there were
competitions for them. I drove my wife crazy trying to impress her with
memorizing pi to 100 digits and memorizing a deck of cards. She was not
impressed...I moved on to the next hobby.

