Comment by achow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by achow | Hacker News Reader

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<Context - I consider my self somewhat challenged when it comes to remembering numbers.>

I personally found ‘mind palace’ technique very helpful.

It allowed me to remember a financial instrument details which involves 32 numbers without any pattern. Whenever I have to use this instrument I have to input random 6 numbers out of those 32. Before I discovered this technique I had to pull out the hardcopy of the instrument every time for reference, now no more.

Also, it need not be ‘palace’ or a structure. I use mental map of a roadway which I’m intimately familiar with to place the 32 numbers on the various landmark on the way. Whenever needed I mentally ’drive through’ the roadway to retrieve the numbers.

Somewhere I read that it works so well because as a human species we have ability to remember geo spatial things much better than abstract things like numbers. I would guess that it has to do with our hunter-gatherer days when we were primarily dealing with spatial concepts; brain is hard wired to store those information much better than things like numbers.

How do you add the numbers on landmarks? Do you just have a road sign with 42 miles to x, or a building with 8 windows?

Also when you are starting with a new number, do all the landmarks need to be unique, or can you re-use the same building but with a different number of windows etc. Or are the items all the same, just in a different order?

> How do you add the numbers on landmarks? Do you just have a road sign with 42 miles to x, or a building with 8 windows?

It could be anything, what you said would work beautifully if it has occurred spontaneously to you. The key thing is it has to be very very natural to you but may not make any sense at all to others.

Example, one of the building I have assigned the number 78 as it is an old building and my father's age is around that.

> do all the landmarks need to be unique

Again it is a very personal decision. For me currently it is one pair of number per landmark as I did not want to 'overload' my system. But if I think about it now, maybe after sometime when I'm comfortable with my current system I can assign another number to the same landmark... But I'm not going to risk it now :-).

If you really want to try it out, start with one thing now and see how it goes before doing for others.

Btw, I discovered this when reading 'Moonwalking with Einstein' (referenced by another commentator here). This book was in reading list of Bill Gates couple of years back.

To illustrate my earlier point, the title of the book does not make any sense at all, but that series of words is used by somebody in the book to remember certain things.

I am a little surprised no one answered this.

The field of memory training has a system (called the major system) for converting arbitrary numbers into words by assigning distinct sounds to the 9 digits - 0 is s, 1 is t(d), 2 is n and so on.

For example, 95 would be p + l sound - say a pillow. Try to visualize a giant pillow (have something exaggerated and preferably silly) on that spot.

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