I have a little trick I use whenever I want to remember a long number. Say I’ve got to remember a ten digit number and I don’t have a pen, I break it down into five two digit numbers and then associate each two digit number with a mental picture. For example:
3966218469 becomes 39 66 21 84 69. This becomes:
39 - Robert Powell hanging off Big Ben (Robert Powell was the star of the movie ‘The 39 Steps’ and in the movie he has to fight the bad guys inside Big Ben)
66 - Bobby Moore holding the World Cup (which England won in 1966. Bobby Moore was the team captain)
21 - A bunch of dudes popping kegs (21 is the legal drinking age in the USA)
84 - John Hurt being interrogated in Room 101 (John Hurt played Winston Smith in the film version of 1984)
69 - Well…you know.
I can then link these five images together along a route I know very well. Because it’s a fairly short number, I can use the route from my desk at work to the bathroom. I can imagine Robert Powell at my desk, Bobby Moore by the coffee machine, the drunk guys by the photocopier, and so on. I can then mentally ‘walk’ that route a few times and then, whenever I want to remember that number I can just think ‘Bathroom’ and there it is.
This may seem like a lot of work, but there are three important points. Firstly, when you get used to it you can do all this pretty quickly. Secondly, if you remember a number this way you can remember it forever. Somehow, converting these numbers into pictures forces them straight into your long term memory. Ask me what number I started this thread with in 20 years and I’ll be able to immediately tell you 3966218469. Thirdly, you can do this with a number of any length. Apparently, professional memory experts use this as one of their techniques to memorise pi to 30,000 digits or whatever.
So, why am I starting this thread? Well, the problem is that I don’t have a mental image for each 2 digit number. For example, the number I started with was originally 3966218459, but I couldn’t think of anything to associate with 59 so I changed it to 69 (and also so I could make that joke first).
There are loads of numbers like that, so I thought I’d crowdsource the problem. I’ll suggest a number and the next person suggests a mental image to go with it and then suggests another two digit number for which they can’t easily think of an association for the next person and so on. Eventually, between us we’ll have people or places and stuff that we can associate with any two digit number and none of us need ever forget a number ever again.
The only rule is that the mental images you suggest have to be as weird and exaggerated and OTT as possible. The weirder the image, the easier it is to remember.
I’ll start with one I don’t have an association for: 87.