Posted by nate 6 days ago
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.)
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.
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.
We're hardwired for spatial awareness.
1, bone; 2, shoe; 3, tree; 4, door; 5, hive; 6, sticks; 7, heaven; 8, gate; 9, line; 0, hero.
123 -> bone shoe tree
But also Run blue bee (imagine a blue bee running with legs!)
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?"
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.
It was an iterative process. Various words have been replaced over time, as problems became obvious.
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 )
Perhaps I have now infected one of you. I am sorry.
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.
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)
But probably not for aphantasts, at least I struggled. Much more with memory palaces.