Memorizing phone numbers
phong.bearblog.dev
phong.bearblog.dev
It's funny how the brain works. I don't even remember my girlfriend or my mother's number, but I can recognize it when I see it.
Nicer ambulances, faster response times, and better looking drivers.
The bizarre things that our brains choose to remember. It must be that catchy jingle.
On the phone number thingy, I use the rhyme-ish way of remembering it by saying it aloud, and then using it on the phones and I remember quite a few phone numbers. Besides the numbers of my immediate family, I can dial my sister, a few friends from school and some of our neighbors (most of the number do not seem to exist anymore) back home on the keypad from muscle memory.
I try to teach my kids to remember some numbers and I try and test them once a while. They do think, I’m an irritant.
During School days, amongst friends, our tactics of remember historical dates were to prepend phone number patterns and associating them to the events/person etc. My wife is usually surprised when I recite phone number of recent visits to clinics, places, etc. This one are usually ephemeral and I usually forget them after a while. I like to pretend play Sherlock and look around things, remember them when visiting new places. :-)
This is much much more useful! I don't recognize a phone number of random person 6 month ago.
(Catastrophic loss aside, but that's not the same. It goes from pristine to gone in an instant.)
You open a file from decades ago and it's rendered exactly the same as something from this morning. There's no indication of staleness.
There's no natural pruning or decay. The whole thing begets endless hoarding.
In physical systems there's a natural friction, and it takes time/space/Energy to keep stuff. With digital it's the reverse.
My contacts list is 99% crap, half of it from decades ago.
90% is people I met once (e.g. to buy/sell something), then never again.
I've been wondering if every digital bit of info should have an expiration date. At which point it asks "is this still relevant?" and if not, self destructs.
Or at least renders old stuff as progressively more gross, inviting me to clean / remove it.
Laugh it up, but it just might happen to you one day.
How does this work? Is everyone supposed to have a designated attorney throughout their life? I feel like I must've missed some memo growing up.
You don't need to pay them every month...just have them do estate documents and touch base with them once or twice a year so they remember who you are. You'll get their cell number.
Important to call your attorney instead of family because you might only get N number of calls before the jail cuts you off, even if nobody answers. Your family might be asleep or have lost their phone or whatever, but if you call your attorney they'll make sure to get ahold of somebody that can bail you out. (IIRC your attorney cannot bail you out themselves)
I almost never pick up the phone. If someone wants to reach me they will send me some (insert tech) message or leave me a voice message. If it is an emergency they should not be calling me in the first place - rarely in place to respond to the emergency.
I do keep family and friends' numbers in my contact lists and have a phone numbers in my wallet to contact when they find my body.
I like the technique of not having the name saved in the phone but having the number, then when caller ID comes in I see the number more often.
The problem at hand is that he is afraid he is going to lose all his data.
Presumably, we're talking about the short time-frame of a few hours between the act of losing the phone, and needing to contact somebody. The kind of situation where you ask somebody to borrow their phone.
And at the rate I'm going, I doubt if I'll memorize more than 3 phone numbers in the coming 18 years.
When I got my first Android phone in 2010 or whatever, I skipped setting up a phone book because I wanted a secure solution for syncing contacts instead of uploading plaintext names to Google (how quaint of a threat model). I still haven't gotten around to it. The biggest inconvenience is when I want to text/call someone I haven't spoken two in a year or two, don't know their exact number, and I've got to scroll way down the list until I see it.
Then there are the funny coincidences like my usual Fedex Freight guy's phone number is one digit off from a friend's. That one really threw me the first time.
personally I do something like 0 egg 1 pen 2 swan 3 butt 4 sailboat .. etc.. and then make a little story for the number using the interaction of those things. This is not for long term memorisations, but just for recall in the mid term.
and then use these to make simple stories like .. 13250 .. pen poked into the butt of a swan who yells grumpily and throws an egg..
Lately I'm working on memorizing a couple emergency numbers in case i here arrested at a protest without my phone
When I was in high school I knew dozens of phone numbers. Today not so much (though I still remember the number we had at the house where I grew up, and a few others that were for my good friends).
One of my earliest memories is of my mother drilling my brother and I on our telephone number. She did a good job. I'll never forget it: AMherst 3-7004.
The secret? "Just try remembering a little harder."
I went from being totally crap at keeping track of conversations, to significantly above average, by just forcing myself to try and remember a little harder, every time I forgot what we were talking about.
(I don't know about other types of memory, but one proved Surprisingly Trainable.)
If you don’t memorize numbers and call your family from your usual phone (via saved contacts), they’ll answer because they recognize the number.
But if your phone breaks and you have to call from another phone, memorizing their number won’t help much—since most people don’t answer calls from unknown numbers.
So then you text or leave a voicemail?
ps - definitely teach your kids your number.
I think there is in general lot less memorization going on in our lives.
Especially when it came to the classics and the fundamental knowledge.
Yet these days, not even our machines, on whom we rely to teach us things, are exposed to more than a single training epoch!
The phone wasn't a household staple for pretty much the whole of humanity. It's really only been about a single generation (well, maybe 2 generations at this point) that the telephone to which you had to remember phone numbers was an important thing. Even in the early 1900's you would pick up the phone and an operator would answer and you had to ask them to connect you to a specific place/person.
And given that there 21 year olds alive today who never had a land-line (or even cable television) in their house or have even seen a dial phone, across the world, and that's only increased, it's not that surprising that we don't choose to actively remember phone numbers anymore .. it's just not "built in" to our core abilities yet because it was never something we needed to do on any type of evolutionary or generational scale.
I don't necessarily disagree that, on a whole, many people rely on technology so much that it has made them blind to the world around them (like so many who can't even read the map on their phone without blue lines telling them where to go). But I do think that not remembering every single phone number isn't something to really be concerned with at the human level .. not to say we shouldn't be teaching the importance of remembering certain numbers for emergency purposes though.