Remembering Numbers

Day by day our lives are becoming more and more complicated. No matter what, one has to remember at least a few bank account numbers, telephone numbers etc.,

How does one remember numbers?

Using mnemonic systems, remembering numbers becomes extremely simple.

There are a number of ways of approaches, depending on the types of numbers being remembered:

1. Short numbers

These can be stored in a number of ways:

The easiest is to use simple Number/Rhyme method associated in a story.

A simple peg system can be used, associating numbers from the Number/Rhyme method, organized with the Alphabet system.

2.Long Numbers

This can be remembered using the Journey System. At a simple level, numbers can be stored at each stop on the journey using e.g., the Number/Shape system.

Using all the simple techniques in concert, there is no reason why you should not be able to store a 100-digit number with relatively little effort. Using the more powerful systems, holding it to 1000-digits might not be too much of a challenge.

Five principles to improve Memory

There are five basic principles you can apply in forming your mental pictures, which will help you make your associations strong and long lasting. These are quite similar to the ones suggested in the mnemonic system.

1. Out of Proportion: In all your images, try to distort size and shape. In the first exercise, you were told to picture a “Huge” sausage or a “gigantic” tie. Conversely, you can make things microscopically small.

2. Substitution: In the first exercise, we suggested that you visualize of a football, or pens growing on a tree instead of leaves. Substituting an out of place item in an image increases the probability of recall.

3. Exaggeration: Try to picture vast quantities in your images. For example, we used the word ‘billions’ (of bananas).

4. Movement: Any movement or action is always easy to remember. For example, we suggested that you saw yourself cutting a sausage and gallons of ink squirting out and hitting you in the face.

5. Humour: The funnier, more absurd and zany you can make your images, the more memorable they will be.

Applying and combination of these five principles when formatting your images will help make your mental associations truly outstanding and memorable. At first you may find that you need to consciously apply one or more of the five principles in order to make your pictures sufficiently ludicrous. After a little practice however, you should fine that applying the principals becomes an automatic and natural process.