Seriously. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to give it out in the past few months. If I didn’t have it memorized, every time I had to tell it to someone over the phone, I’d have to hang up, look it up, write it down, and call them back.
Even though I’m not a very musical person, I find it easier to remember numbers (or lists of words*) by mentally assigning a rhythm to how I “say” it in my mind. After repeating it a few times, the numbers and rhythm lock together so a different number clearly doesn’t “fit” anymore.
- I still remember the tables of German subordinating conjunctions my textbook had because I gave each table its own rhythm. So instead of remembering one table as bis, da, dass, ob, weil, wenn… It’s BIS–da-dass, ob-weilWENN.
Since I’ve lived on my own, I’ve made no effort to memorize my landline #. But I can tell you my childhood #, my parent’s current #, my grandparent’s # from back then, among a couple others.
I never graduated HS and really just checked out by my freshman year. I somehow have a really good knack at mathematics. I can still help my daughter with her 8th grade math easily. I have absolutely no idea how I know algebra and other math concepts. I got all my other knowledge from reading and studying on my own but the math is odd. I set my alarms with a lock that requires me to to 5 math problems before I can shut it off or hit the snooze. It is set for 7 days a week weather I need to wake up or not. I enjoy doing the math in my head then going back to sleep if it is a day I can sleep in.
I really did no schooling at all yet have a good grasp of many subjects from reading and teaching myself after I was done being a dickhead kid and sobered/grew up. The one that I never really got down and have been unable to teach myself was the proper English conventions.
Phone numbers are becoming harder for me to memorize. I often only hear or write them once then in the contact list they go. Sometimes I wont put a name to the number in the list so in my logs there are several strings of numbers. I will do this for a bit before I attach a name in order to memorize it but it rarely works. As I and up using some trick to remember who’s number it is without actually memorizing the entire string.
I have lived in the same small rural town for 16 years. I miss my turn constantly and rarely know what direction to turn. It drives my daughter crazy and most people that I drive with. And one of my favorite activities is driving around. It is the weirdest thing. I just don’t get it . I have a block or something. Put me in a bigger city and I am perpetually lost.
Oops, completely forgot about the thread!
Wow, didn’t expect so many responses. And the comment about Dyscalculia is really interesting. I read up on it and a lot of the symptoms are things I’ve struggled with. Being unable to glance at a group of objects and say how many there are, being horrible with names, difficulty visualizing numbers, inability to grasp math concepts/formulas, being good at Geometry. I talked to my mom about it and she thinks I should get tested, but I think that’s only helpful if you’re in school right? Because it’s classified as a learning disability.
Knowing about this would have been greatly helpful to me in high school, that’s for sure. Part of the graduation process was completing five big, comprehensive tests. Reading, writing, speech, advanced math and basic math. The basic math test had to be passed without a calculator. They were actually banned and you’d fail if they saw one. I failed that damn test three times and if I didn’t pass it, I wasn’t going to graduate. So I was able to sneak in a calculator and finally passed it.