Open Loops: The Easy Way to Remember Numbers

Deeply rooted in learning disorders like synaethesia and autism is an unusual attitude towards numbers or symbols. These views aren't necessarily a wrong way to think about things, but they are almost always imaginative and unconventional. Fusing letters with colors? Nice work if you can get it. People who have an unusual innate understanding of linguistic or mathematical systems can do crazy things like recite pi to a thousand decimal places or learn Icelandic in a week.

One of England's most famous autistic savants, Daniel Tammet, isn't unusual because he is a math whiz. He's unusual because he isn't completely incapable of interacting with other human beings. He is able and willing to freely discuss how he perceives numbers like 5, 6, and 7 as colors, sounds, and movement. His brain is hardwired to handle a rich multisensory mnemonic system of its own design.

The rest of us have to try to make our brains work the way Daniel's does, and the real experts can memorize the complete order of a shuffled deck of cards. The way they do this is they assign an idea to each card, and the order in which the cards appear tell a story. Ten of hearts? Think "Bo Derek". Seven of diamonds? James Bond. So if you see the ten of hearts and then a seven of diamonds, picture Bo Derek firing a Walther PPK. Easy as that.

Of course, it isn't really that easy. You can't tell a story if you don't know the characters. If you want to be a math whiz and memorize long strings of numbers (sometimes even for years) you first have to put together a memorable system to apply to numbers:

Open Loops: The Easy Way to Remember Numbers

This is the system I use, if you'll be kind enough to grant me the word "use". (I really don't do this as often as I could or should. I'm not even 100% on how much I pay in rent every month.) It's probably the most common mnemonic "alphabet" by which numbers are turned into consonant sounds. 123 is a "t" sound, then a "n" sound, then a "m" sound. The trick is that you don't hold yourself to hard and fast letters. "t" can also be a "d", so you can remember the value 123 by thinking "denim", which is a whole hell of a lot better than trying to keep the guttural explosion "tinnmuh" in your head.

That's like trying to remember all the planets in the Solar System by yelling "Mvemjsunp!"

All this reminds me of Alexander Graham Bell's work trying to teach the deaf to speak. Deaf people commonly have problems differentiating similar sounds that are formed with similar mouth movements. Try this: cover your ears and have someone whisper the word "ball" and the name "Paul" and see if they look different. Bell taught his students the difference by speaking to them in front of a burning candle. "B" sounds didn't make the flames flicker, but "p" sounds did. Nonetheless, learning to convert numbers into words, even made up ones, can be advantageous to improving your memory.