I'm fascinated by memory, yet I've never been able to make any progress with any of these memory systems that involve artificial indirection. I don't think in

I'm fascinated by memory, yet I've never been able to make any progress with any of these memory systems that involve artificial indirection. I don't think in a spoken language, so if I have to memorize a word it ends up being the concept, and I pull it out as a cluster of synonyms, and then I also need an out-of-band way to memorize which of the synonyms it is. I really don't know how actors memorize lines. I also can't visualize a complex artificial scene all at once. That's lots of extra things to memorize before I can get to the thing I want to memorize, and figuring out a way to remember these zany scenes is harder than just memorizing the numbers themselves! Numbers are easy. There's no possible synonyms for "8". For phone numbers, 95% of my contact list has the same area code, so they're really only 7 digits. That's the same as a license plate, and I pick those up just by looking at them a few times without really trying. I'm not disparaging anyone who can make this system work -- I'm impressed! It just seems like a lot more work than necessary, if the goal is merely to memorize 10 or 20 phone numbers.