A secret to never forgetting numbers | Hacker News Reader

A secret to never forgetting numbers

ninjasandrobots.com

55 pointsnate59 comments

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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 of

how can you rhyme 1 with bone?

Might just start saying bone like one and one like bone.

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!)

I do very similar, but one = bun, 9 = wine.

Don't try and remember the number, just remember the location.

We're hardwired for spatial awareness.

This. I could never recall the numbers, yet i always find the right one, just by a feeling for where it is.

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.

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?"

Why not just put a name tag on your luggage?

While effective, a tag is not efficient. Namely it misses two properties: "quickly" and "at a distance".

I have a (knock-off) Moomin character as my tag: now it is again quickly recognisable at a distance.

I have that too, of course! Can't read the name tag from across the baggage claim though, but sparkly ribbon + case design you can, and you can be 100% confident that that's your bag a stranger just grabbed.

My solution was quicker and faster: buy luggage that is not black.

It now is recognizable at 100 yds against a pile of luggage. OK, a minority of luggage is also non-black, but there's a range of colors. Mine is a medium blue, and so false positives are about 1%, and false negatives are nil.

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.

I forced myself to learn the NATO alphabet recently by using some online flashcards. Nothing complex, just shows the letter and I have to recall the word, then click to see if I got it right. Didn't take very long to get it down, and I go through them every few days to verify recall.

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.

I know it from amateur radio, emergency services, and maritime communications, it's "officially" the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, shorthanded by some as the NATO Alphabet.

Others may know it by virtue of being fans of, or simply exposed to the Bloodhound Gang.

( FWiW I'm neither in nor from middle North America )

Was really helpfull when making international phone call to services like IRS or sometime good providers. Trying to spell out my french name and long adress or some order number with my strong accent was such a pain until then ^^

> Whoever designed it did a brilliant job.

It was an iterative process. Various words have been replaced over time, as problems became obvious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

RobWords made a video about it a few weeks ago! https://youtu.be/UAT-eOzeY4M

It's nigh-universal in the travel industry.

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.

This was originated (or at least popularized) in an episode of Archer from season 1. It remains maybe my favorite 5 minutes of comedy ever out to screen. It's just so tight!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=dNYMQpcqscA

I once had a customer say, ”G as in dog”. Yes.

In my head I also maintain what I call the "adversarial NATO alphabet", which is sadly incomplete, but contains stuff like, "C, as in sea"; "Q, as in cue"; "T, as in tea", "I, as in eye".

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.

Same in UK - I usually use it when giving my postcode to people.

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)

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.

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, purple

I'd do that in reverse. More likely to remember 438 and so can use that to remember the colours!

That’s so cool! It’s funny how memory works, I’m very visual in my mind when I need to remember facts it’s usually through some kind of scene or memory castle-like setup. Sometimes, I can remember the page or place where something is written so I “read” it in my mind in order to reproduce the fact.

Yeah for me 3D memory is good. Can remember layout of everywhere I lived even if I dont recall the address. But dont ask me what colour the bricks were.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system

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.

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.

I just write em down. This trick works amazingly well.

i'd say take a quick snap with your phone, although that's not ideal in a locker room.

I've also mapped words to numbers.

1 = "one"

2 = "two"

Etc....It works for me

i have a better way, try to remember a number instead of story, way easier

[stub for offtopicness]

(ok everyone, we took the naked man out of the title, let's talk about something more interesting now)

At the gym I use the same locker or near it every time

You must possess incredible mental fortitude not to get PTSD from all those terrible naked men.

I always use the lockers in a specific part of the locker room and since we’re meant to bring our own padlocks I just look for mine. No need to memorise anything.

Which btw made me realise cheap padlocks all open with the same key - imagine my surprise when I opened a locker that had the same padlock as mine with my key and found that the stuff inside was not mine. Mine was a couple lockers next to it!

> And I like my space free of other naked people.

How sad. I wonder what the deep problem is. Religious, cultural, something more serious.

Imagine not being able to go to a sauna, or shower in public, because of a fear of people.

How does a preference become fear?

I am not afraid of other naked people, but I have had it once too many that certain people in e.g. a hotel sauna (for context, this was in some boutique hotel in Southern Germany) do not respect personal space, and the whole sauna naked thing becomes performative and annoying.

Once the nut-sack of a 160kg weighing Bavarian man makes a near hit with your chin as the man tries to climb over you to the bench at the back... anyway.

I found this with a significant amount of the naked sauna goers t.b.h. the claim of additional health benefits has been thrown at me, which is such obvious bullshit, it merely emphasizes the performativeness of it all.

Absolutely not trying to minimise your experience, but I found it really funny somehow how different (and still same) human life truly is depending on where you were born and how you have lived.

I've never had a 160 kg Bavarian nutsack in front of my face, but I've regularly gotten my face full of ass or nether regions because my university group has a small mobile sauna on a trailer, where anyone at the back moving past the others will necessarily shove their nethers in the others' faces. At some point I forgot to even think about it.

Human lives are so different, but nutsacks are basically still all the same. I hope you can one day forgive the Bavarian for their swinging sacks and overenthusiasm for the top seat.

>> And I like my space free of other naked people

> How sad. I wonder what the deep problem is. Religious, cultural, something more serious. Imagine not being able to go to a sauna, or shower in public, because of a fear of people.

It's not sad. It's very fucking annoying. The deep problem is some people are just like that. Religious? No. Cultural? No. Something more serious? Yes. Imagine not being able to go to a sauna. Ok, done that, now what? Imagine not being able to shower in public. Ok, done that, now what? "Because of a fear of people". Ah!

I didn't know I had a 'social anxiety' (because everyone has 'something', these days), but it turns out I have, and it can be seen (at various times, to varying degrees), throughout my life.

Many people don't so much have a problem with naked people, it's often just 'people', and the 'situation'.

Try reading (several sources) about agoraphobia. It's not always as clean cut as you kind of unknowingly make it out to be.

You ever been to a war zone? I have - with bullets and tanks and mines and ugly death and living badly in holes and showering and shitting in front of others, and other good-for-the-grandkids stories. Somehow, I absolutely fucking loved it, and would go again tomorrow, *though drones nowadays add a new, and very game-changing perspective.

Would you come with me, and we can do all the being naked together you want? Are you one of those people that struts around public showers like a lonely peacock, and tries engaging people there in conversation?

Actual nudity may not always be the issue. Cunts, and situations, often are.

All I got from this is people need to get over being naked / seen naked.

In Japan it's common to get naked with strangers people of the same sex at a hot spring. IIUC in Finland it's common to get naked with strangers of all sexes at a sauna.

In the past, in the USA it was common to take communal same-sex showers in PE class in junior high school and high school.

But sometime in the past 40 years, that seems to have changed in the USA. I've met lots of 20 somethings and 30 somethings that can't handle a sauna or hot spring because they claim they've never been naked with anyone else. WTF!

Finnish sauna enthusiast here: going to same sex sauna naked is absolutely common (although you'll also find people who avoid it), but mixed sauna is less commonly done.

Amongst technical university students it used to be effectively universal that sauna was all mixed and naked. At some point it became common that some people, females especially, would wear swimsuits into sauna. It has also become common that before mixed sauna there is scheduled separated sauna turns for those who want to go but don't want to enter mixed. (Scheduled so no one has to raise their hand up and publicly say "I'd prefer to go without mixed bathing.")

In private life, a mixed naked sauna between eg. close friend families is something I consider pretty normal and do frequently enough without really blinking an eye. But that's because it's between two sauna-crazy families. It's all pretty dependent on the person or people.

I find it comical that modern beachwear leaves almost nothing to the imagination and nudity is still taboo in some cultures.

The naked men were more interesting than the world's most well-known technique for memorising numbers.

I would not conflate stimulating with interesting.

Edit: if that was too snarky, see the last paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23087737 for a longer explanation.

I wouldn't conflate "x > y" with "x is large".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com