The chapter on memorising numbers from he book <i>The Memory Book: The Classic Guide to Improving Your Memory</i> by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas uses a similar technique. They recommend memorising this mapping:<p>0: 's'<p>1: 't'<p>2: 'n'<p>3: 'm'<p>4: 'r'<p>5: 'l'<p>6: 'sh'<p>7: 'k'<p>8: 'v'<p>9: 'p/b'<p>To use it, just make images/stories that correspond to the digits you need to remember.<p>The more absurd the story, the less likely you'll forget.<p>E.g. pi (3.14159265359 ) could be the image of these objects: mit, rat, lab, Noah, shell, mail, bee. Then just sew them together in a story e.g. someone drops a mit, it lands on a rat, the rat runs up to someone in a lab, it's Noah, he throws a shell, it knocks over some mail which lands on a bee).<p>The only time I really use it is when I check in to an airbnb or serviced apartment and they use an 8+ digit pin for the door code. It's saved me a couple of times when I went out without taking my phone and probably wouldn't have been able to recall the pin without assistance.
Moonwalking with Einstein is a fun read. I started using some tricks in real life. One of the key premises is that humans are much better at remembering sensory things than abstract ones.<p>A good example is remembering names: when one’s name is “John Baker”, it is so much easier to remember by silently adding “the” in front of it.<p>We’re also very good at remembering salacious stuff. I tried constructing my own memory palace for a grocery shopping list that included cream cheese. If you mentally make Claudia Schiffer take a bath in cream cheese, you’ll never forget that. (I read the book at least 10 years ago and still haven’t…)
In 1999 when I was about 12, I memorized 120 digits of pi with little issue. I had some extra motivation: once I got to 20-30 digits, a classmate bet me I couldn't get past 100, and he'd give me $1 for every digit I memorized past 100. Never saw my $20 :(. Pretty sure it was a well-executed nerd-snipe.<p>Having not practiced at all since about 2001 or so, I can still get to about 30 pretty easily. I didn't use any techniques specifically, I just kept practicing as far as I remember.
If Socrates were alive today, he'd encourage engineers to internalise the spigot algorithm<p>Then, like a MENTAT, they'd be able to tell you the 16afedf97fd4th digit of pi when prod<p>In hex, naturally
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%93Plouffe_formula" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%9...</a><p>><i>The BBP formula gives rise to a spigot algorithm for computing the nth base-16 (hexadecimal) digit of π (and therefore also the 4nth binary digit of π) WITHOUT computing the preceding digits.</i>