alexpgp | A Lifehacker post... (Reply)

A comment made at Lifehacker.com:

I found "The Memory Book" by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas to be an excellent starting point to become familiar with a variety of memorization techniques for remembering lists, people's names, numbers of various kinds, and so on. It was a real eye-opener for me, back when I was in college.

Although I have never sought to be the kind of person who'd want to memorize the names and faces of everyone attending, say, a conference reception, or the first thousand digits of pi, I have been able to successfully adapt some of these techniques into my day-to-day life.

The two techniques I used most involve substituting sounds for numbers and creating words with those sounds.

In my variant of the system (the basic principle of which is described in nearly every book on memory techniques, so I'll be brief), the sibilant "S" sound stands for zero, "L" stands for one, "N" for two, "M" for three, and other letters represent other numbers.

Paying attention only to sounds in the system, you can use words to represent numbers. "Moon" can represent "32"; "Lemon" can represent "132." A "male mummy nail" represents the sequence "313321." You remember the numbers by retaining images of the corresponding words.

Obviously, this system can be used to memorize any sequence of numbers (especially phone numbers, one such number, represented by the key images of a "rat" on a "mop picker" machine has stayed with me for decades).

The second technique is an extension of the first. By creating a "standard" list of words to correspond with the cardinal numbers (starting with, say, "house," "hill," "hen," and "ham" to represent the numbers zero through three), you can create a mental filing cabinet with however many places you need. This lets you remember lists ofthings.

There will be those who will say that this all sounds like too much trouble, and that the game's not worth the candle. Maybe so, but the same can be said for learning a foreign language or how to play a musical instrument: there's a certain investment in learning one has to make in order to play the game.

Cheers...