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A secret to never forgetting numbers
- deathanatos 11mo agoThis 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?"
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- mattlondon 11mo agoWhy not just put a name tag on your luggage?
- teo_zero 11mo agoWhile effective, a tag is not efficient. Namely it misses two properties: "quickly" and "at a distance".
- aapoalas 11mo agoI have a (knock-off) Moomin character as my tag: now it is again quickly recognisable at a distance.
- deathanatos 11mo agoI 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.
- IAmBroom 11mo agoMy 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.
- rf15 11mo agoAn 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.
- gblargg 11mo agoI 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.
- jandrewrogers 11mo agoThe 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.
- defrost 11mo agoI 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 )
- GaelFG 11mo agoWas 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 ^^
- fainpul 11mo ago> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet
- neonz80 11mo agoRobWords made a video about it a few weeks ago! https://youtu.be/UAT-eOzeY4M https://youtu.be/UAT-eOzeY4M
- devilbunny 11mo agoIt's nigh-universal in the travel industry.
- chias 11mo agoOnce 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.
- xavdid 11mo agoThis 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 https://youtube.com/watch?v=dNYMQpcqscA
- halfcat 11mo agoI once had a customer say, ”G as in dog”. Yes.
- deathanatos 11mo agoIn 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".
- necklesspen 11mo agoOn 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.
- jvvw 11mo agoSame in UK - I usually use it when giving my postcode to people.
- petesergeant 11mo agoabout 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.
- r0m4n0 11mo agoI 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
- goopypoop 11mo agohow can you rhyme 1 with bone?
- rkomorn 11mo agoMight just start saying bone like one and one like bone.
- hshdhdhehd 11mo agoAnd 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!)
- austinjp 11mo agoI do very similar, but one = bun, 9 = wine.
- MangoToupe 11mo agoI just write em down. This trick works amazingly well.
- jorisnoo 11mo agoi'd say take a quick snap with your phone, although that's not ideal in a locker room.
- mattlondon 11mo agoDon't try and remember the number, just remember the location. We're hardwired for spatial awareness.
- jorisnoo 11mo agoThis. I could never recall the numbers, yet i always find the right one, just by a feeling for where it is.
- teo_zero 11mo agoI 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.
- kbrkbr 11mo agoRelated: 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system
- isodev 11mo agoThat’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
- hshdhdhehd 11mo agoI'd do that in reverse. More likely to remember 438 and so can use that to remember the colours!
- isodev 11mo agoThat’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.
- hshdhdhehd 11mo agoYeah 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.
- bloak 11mo agoTalking about memorising numbers, one should definitely mention this well-known system which maps consonants to digits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system 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.)
- vunderba 11mo agoYup. 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 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.
- _factor 11mo agoI 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.
- mrwaffle 11mo agoPersonally, 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.
- tzury 11mo agoI'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 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)
- Syzygies 11mo agoI 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.
- snozolli 11mo agoI 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.
- defraudbah 11mo agoi have a better way, try to remember a number instead of story, way easier
- dang 11mo ago[stub for offtopicness] (ok everyone, we took the naked man out of the title, let's talk about something more interesting now)
- hshdhdhehd 11mo agoAt the gym I use the same locker or near it every time
- omnicognate 11mo agoYou must possess incredible mental fortitude not to get PTSD from all those terrible naked men.
- bakql 11mo agoI 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!
- hdgvhicv 11mo ago> 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.
- mvdwoord 11mo agoHow 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.
- standardly 11mo agoI've also mapped words to numbers. 1 = "one" 2 = "two" Etc....It works for me