Remembering numbers
Numbers are the hardest thing to remember because there's nothing to see: 7 looks like any other 7. The fix is to turn digits into something you can make an image of. Two ways, a quick one and a powerful one.
Quick: number shapes
Give each digit an object it looks like, and make a scene out of the objects:
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ball | candle | swan | handcuffs | sailboat | hook | golf club | boomerang | snowman | balloon |
A locker code of 4-2-8: a sailboat is attacked by a furious swan, and the only survivor is a snowman, melting in the sun. Good for a four-digit PIN. For anything longer, use the major system.
Powerful: the major system
Every digit becomes a consonant sound. Vowels are free and don't count, so you fill them in to make a word.
| Digit | Sound | How to remember it |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | s, z | zero starts with z |
| 1 | t, d | t has one downstroke |
| 2 | n | n has two downstrokes |
| 3 | m | m has three downstrokes |
| 4 | r | four ends in r |
| 5 | l | L is 50 in Roman numerals |
| 6 | j, sh, ch, soft g | a J turned round looks like a 6 |
| 7 | k, hard c, hard g | a K is two 7s leaning together |
| 8 | f, v | a handwritten f has two loops, like 8 |
| 9 | p, b | P is 9 flipped |
It's the sound that counts, not the spelling: "knee" is just n, so it's 2. Double letters count once if they make one sound.
Worked examples
- 1492, the year Columbus sailed: t-r-b-n, which is turban. Columbus at the wheel of his ship in an enormous turban that keeps unravelling into the sea.
- 42: r-n, rain. 31: m-t, mat. 75: k-l, coal. 90: p-s, bus.
- A phone number, 4231 7590: rain, mat, coal, bus. Rain pours onto a welcome mat, the mat catches fire like coal, and a bus drives through the flames. Or park each word at a stop in your memory palace.
Memory competitors take this further and fix one permanent image for every number from 00 to 99, so any long number becomes a quick chain of familiar images. Start with the ten digits; the words start arriving on their own within a week.
Numbers in Spanish
The number words themselves are just vocabulary, and the keyword method handles them the same way as any other word. Cinco (five) sounds like "sink oh": five fingers waving for help from a sinking kitchen sink.