How to Remember Any Number
Make numbers mnemonically sticky
My natural memory is embarrassingly bad.
I’ll often forget numbers dozens of times, and for years I assumed I was a lost cause, my leaky skull doomed to empty almost as fast as I poured digits into it.
While I might be a forgetting outlier, I’m not the only one to despair over an inability to hold on to numbers — it’s one of history’s oldest conundrums.
I want to explain an ancient system for making numbers unforgettable. It makes numbers sticky and boosts my retention from abysmal to at least average, and probably downright impressive for some specific applications.
The Problem With Numbers
Numbers are slippery.
People and ideas can be grasped and mulled over because you can imagine and mentally manipulate them. But formulas, birthdays, and numeric passwords are different beasts, and prone to being forgotten.
There are several reasons why:
Numbers are abstract and hard to visualize.
Unlike physical objects and people, they rarely “inhabit” physical places, which insulates them from our incredibly powerful spatial memory
Once we can count, it’s possible to take in and understand a string of numbers with almost no additional processing, meaning that you barely pay attention to them.
The traditional fixes are rote memorization — which is a slog and incredibly inefficient — or turning number sequences into sing-songy chants. You’ve probably experienced the limitations of both approaches.
Ancient Number Trouble:
Number trouble is ancient, and some of history’s keenest minds went hunting for solutions. Lucky for us, they wrote them down, and these techniques have been continuously developed across centuries and are now fine-tuned.
Aristotle may have been the first Westerner to suggest a solution in his On Memory and Reminiscence.
With maddening vagueness, he suggests utilizing the alphabet as a stand-in for numbers. B=2. G=7, etc, and using images derived from individual letters to make those numbers mnemonically vivid.
This system works, but it’s limited, and Aristotle was probably explaining the technique to an audience already well-versed in similar techniques, so he could get away with vagueness.
But ancient Indians discovered a more promising approach and explained it explicitly. The Katapayādi and Chandravākyās systems were used by astronomers who wanted to memorize complex astronomical data. They discovered they could encode digits into syllables (usually consonants).
Through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment, Westerners invented similar systems, with the apex reached by Johann Just Winckelmann and others in the 17th century.
Their approach allows us to overcome numerical slipperiness by making digits concrete, recognizable to our powerful spatial memory, and by attaching handles we can use to manipulate them.
I’ve never come across anything as efficient for overcoming my mind’s aversion to number retention. If you’re struggling with numbers, I think you’ll find it useful too.
Let’s dive into how this system works and the powerful ways we can use it.
This is part of my Memorize for Meaning course. Subscribe to Socratic State of Mind to access the full course.