One of my friend's house numbers is 256; when I saw it for the first time, the immediate thought which crossed my mind was "28" – in my case, there's no special trick needed to remember that. But when your brain doesn't work with numbers the same way, how can you remember a (long) number? If you have an eidetic memory, you'll be in for a treat. But if that's also not your case, you can learn a smart trick how to remember long numbers.
I've learned this ages ago (and to be honest, I don't need to use it often – I'm kind of good with numbers anyway – but it is sometimes handy for me, so why not share it with you? =)
Imagine you need to remember some reference number or any other weird nonsense number without any pattern (because patterns are cool; I bet no one would really have problems remembering, for example, the ten-digit number 1020304050, right?).
But how about this: 5031376710? It's also ten digits, but way too difficult to remember, unlike the previous example.
The long story short: just substitute every digit with a word that rhymes. It works in every language. I have a set of rhymes in Czech; I'm giving you here suggestions for rhymes in English – feel free to adapt it to make it the most suitable for yourself.
- 0 = zero -> hero
- 1 = one -> sun
- 2 = two -> blue
- 3 = three -> tree (surprise, right...?)
- 4 = four -> Thor
- 5 = five -> (bee)hive
- 6 = six -> chicks
- 7 = seven -> heaven
- 8 = eight -> plate
- 9 = nine -> (gold)mine
So when you have a random number you want/need to remember, just replace the numbers with those rhymes and arrange them in some funny sentence:
5031376710 -> (bee)hive, hero, tree, sun, tree, heaven, chicks, heaven, sun, hero
"A beehive had been pushed down by a hero from the tree, and while the sun was still shining on the tree, the heaven-chicks flew up to the heaven to tell the sun about the hero's misbehaviour."
That's one long sentence, indeed. You can split it or formulate it differently, just bear in mind the right order for the words. That could sometimes cause the sentence(s) to sound a bit weird, because this time, we'll be twisting English instead of maths (hooray!), but this will help you to remember your number-sentence maybe even better...
And that's the whole trick. The more visualisation you use, the better and easier you will remember any long number.
And, of course, it works for short numbers too, even though here I rather think about mathematical bonds – thinking about powers, prime numbers, etc.
