How To Remember Numbers In Two Minutes

Making Numbers With Stories

Our brains weren’t made to remember a bunch of numbers or dates in history or the elements in the periodic table - which Dmitri Mendeleev invented so we wouldn’t have to memorize all of the elements (Yeah, I’m looking at you, high school Chemistry teachers).

Our brains are, however, really good at memorizing:

• Images (mostly used for facial recognition)

• Smells (mostly used to remember what foods we should and shouldn’t eat)

• Crazy Stories (so we know how to behave if we ever find ourselves in a crazy story)

• How to Travel Around/Spatial Awareness (so we can find food and still get back home)

• Poetry & Music

(Side Note: I can’t think of any reason why grunting cavemen would evolve to memorize and appreciate rules-based harmony and poetry the way we do. Both are rather recent inventions/discoveries, comparatively speaking. Just try listening to two minutes of Jupiter by Gustav Holst and tell me there is no spark of the divine in there.)

Back to the point of this post!

If we want to easily remember numbers then we need to convert them into something that we are naturally good at remembering, and fortunately for us - there is a way to do just that.

Around 400 years ago the French Mathematician and Astronomer, Pierre Heriogones, came up with a system to help him memorize numbers. If you have used the less-than or greater-than signs, < >, then you are already familiar with some of his work.

The Major System, as it came to be known, associates some consonant sounds with each of the 10 numerals that make up our numbers. Using the Major System we can convert numbers into words and images and then use them to build crazy stories that involve places we already know. That gives you images, stories, and spatial movement combined to help you memorize.

The system has gone through a few iterations over the years, but the table below shows the most common way to assign sounds to the digits. Double consonants are ignored. As noted below - the vowels and the letters W, H, and Y are ignored. Don’t ask “why”, they just are (humor, however bad, helps to memorize!)

To use the system we just convert some numbers into consonants and then add in whatever ignored sounds we can to create words.

Here are a few examples:

(Hint: Sometimes it’s helpful to ignore the first number of a year if you are confident you can place the event in the correct millennium)

3500 BC MLSS = Molasses - Before the Invention of The Wheel we moved slower than Molasses.

3200 BC MNSS = My New Sauce - Writing is invented along with the world’s first cookbook

551 BC - LLD = Lu Lad - Birth of Confucius in Lu China

486 BC RFSH = Raw Fish - Birth of Buddha - which somehow is connected with Sushi

27 BC - NK = Knock - Augustus knocks down the old Republic and becomes Emperor

476 - RKSH = Horkish - The Visigoths sack Rome and hork their stuff

570 - LKS = Luke S. - Muhammed, a prophet connected to an unseen power, was born in the desert (Luke Skywalker also grew up in the desert.)

1215 - TNTL = Town tool - The town tool, Prince John, Signs The Magna Carta

1337 - TMMCH = Time Much? - The 100 Years War began

1350 - TMLS = Team Loss - The black plague wipes out 1/3 of the population in Europe.

1453 - TRLM = The Realm - The Realm of the Byzantine Empire falls to the Ottomans

1492 - TRPN = Trippin' - Christopher Columbus sets sail on a crazy trip to fall off the edge of the earth

1588 - LFF = Laugh off - Sir Francis Drake and the Small English Navy laughed off the Spanish and destroyed their Armada

1605 - CHSL = Chase Law - Guy Fawkes attempts to blow up the English Law Makers

1649 - TSHRP = Too Sharp - King Charles I was beheaded

1666 - TSHSHSH = The Sheesh show - The Great Fire practically destroyed London and then 20% of its population was killed by the black plague in the same year.

1789 - CFB = Cafe Boo - The French scare everybody with their Reign of Terror

1776 - TKCSH = Take Cash - The Declaration of Independence was signed

1848 - TFRF = They, Of Rife - The Communist Manifesto is Printed

1865 - TFJL = Tough Jail - The prison of slavery was abolished in the United States, one of the first countries to do so.

Number Pegs

Another way to use the Major System is with number pegs. These are just predetermined words assigned to each double-digit number. Below is a list that I found on the internet - with a couple of my own changes.

You don’t need to memorize any of these words. You just need to be able to convert a word back into a number. For example, I don’t need to remember that Lava is 58. I just need to know that L is 5 and V is 8.

So let’s say you wanted to impress all of the ladies at work and school with your expansive knowledge of the number pi.

First, you would break pi into 2-digit numbers.

3 . 14, 15, 92, 65, 35, 89, 79, 32, 38, 46, 26, 43,

Then, you look up the peg for each of those numbers, giving us the following:

Tire, Tail, Pony, Chile, Mule, Vape, Cob, Moon, Movie, Roach, Nacho, & Ram

Next, putting together what we have learned about using a Memory Palace and the 4C’s of Memory, we’ll come up with a ridiculous story that moves around someplace you are very familiar with - like your home. Try your best to visualize the scene with sounds and smells.

“You walk into your kitchen and trip over a tire. As you get up, your face is right in the tail of a smelly pony that is eating a chile out of the refrigerator. You walk into the next room, which is filled with smoke because a mule is sitting on your couch vaping with a corn cob pipe. The mule is looking out the window up at the moon, which has a movie being broadcast on its surface. You then notice a roach on the table next to him crawling around some nachos that have been smeared on the table. A ram sitting in the chair at the head of the table begins to eat the nachos.”

Practice mentally traveling through that scene, stopping at each location with a peg, and converting that word back into a number. You can probably recall that whole story after 3 trips around the house.

Congratulations, you have now memorized the first 25 digits of pi!

You can also remember useful things too! Like birthdays for example.

If I had a friend born on 03/19/77 I would associate that person with a sumo wrestler sitting in a tub eating cake. On March 19th I would open my calendar and then think, which of my friends reminds me of a sumo wrestler sitting in a tub? Then I would make sure to avoid that person the whole day so I don’t get drawn into some lengthy conversation about who-knows-what.

It sounds tricky at first, but it gets easy pretty quickly. Good luck!

Bonus! Here is a single-digit number Peg cheat sheet!