It's no secret that our brains remember different
types of information with differing levels of strength.
If you're walking down the street one day and a
grizzly bear pops out and starts chasing you,
you are gonna remember that for the rest of your life.
No study needed.
And that is gonna happen because your brain is
hard-wired to keep information like that
up in its archives forever.
But what about more mundane information?
What about a string of random numbers?
Well, I generated this string of random numbers
on random.org just a couple'a days ago,
and even though I have only looked at it once
since then, I know by heart that it reads
5-1-7-1-9-9-2-8-4-9.
If you were paying close enough attention there,
you might have noticed that there were 10 digits
on that piece of paper.
And 10 is exactly the number of digits in a
phone number, at least a phone number in
the United States.
In other countries, there are differing numbers
of digits and different formatting, but what is
universal is the way that most people try to
memorize phone numbers.
Unless you're already privy to certain memory
techniques, you probably try to remember a phone
number the same way that I've always done it,
through rote memorization.
And this, as you are probably already aware,
is not a very good way to remember things.
I mean, yes, your brain does have to recall things
on a pretty regular basis to build strong memories,
but rote memorization alone is a very inefficient
study technique, especially for numbers.
See, even if you really want to remember that
phone number because, it's the Rock's phone number,
most of your brain perceives that phone number as
what it really is, a symbolic representation
of quantity, and that's not nearly as interesting
to your brain as a grizzly bear chasin' you
down the street.
But fortunately, there is a method out there
for easily remembering any number that you
want to keep up in your cranium,
including this one.
Which is, incidentally, not the Rock's number.
I lied about that.
But the method is called the Major System
and today I'm gonna teach it to you.
(whooshing) This method of
memorization has probably been around
in one form or another for thousands of years.
But it was most prominently explained by the
popular mathematics writer Martin Gardner
in his book Hexaflexagons, Probability Paradoxes,
and The Tower of Hanoi.
And it works in three distinct stages.
(whooshing) First, you take
each digit of the sequence you're trying to memorize,
and you encode it as a specific consonant
using a table of phonetic pairings,
which I'm going to explain in a second,
and which is at the heart of the the Major System.
Next you take these consonants that you
just generated, and you smash them together
to create words.
I'm not talking about gibberish words here,
these are real words that you would
use in everyday speech.
And finally, you take those words and you encode
them as visually striking, interesting images
that, as you're going to find out, are much
easier to recall than random numbers.
Now, we're gonna do a couple of examples
here in a second, but first I do need to
explain that table of phonetic pairings.
Within the Major System, every digit from zero
to nine is paired with a specific sound that
we make in human speech.
And this makes the Major System very flexible,
because there are multiple consonants that
can be bound to certain digits.
For example, as you can see in the table here,
one can be encoded as either D or T, because both
of these have a single downstroke, and when you
say D and T, they sound quite similar.
Numbers like six are even more flexible and have
even more consonant pairings, while numbers like
four have only one.
Now I'm not gonna go through every single pairing
here in the video because you can just pause
it and look at it.
And I am going to have a web version linked
in the description below.
But I do want to note that not every letter in
the alphabet is paired with a number in this system,
and all the vowels are omitted.
Because these are going to be used for forming
words once you do have your encoded consonants.
All right, enough foolin' around, let's do an
example so you can see the system in action.
So a couple of days ago, I went to the coffee shop
near me to do a little bit of reading.
And I started reading this book called The Dip
by Seth Godin.
Now this book is only about 75 pages, but I wasn't
able to finish it in the coffee shop.
I got to about page 48.
And once I got there and I was ready to stop reading,
I realized that I didn't bring a bookmark with me.
And because I don't like to dog-ear the pages
in my books, that meant that I was going to have
to memorize the page that I stopped on.
So let's use the Major System to do this.
I've got the number 48 that I need to memorize,
so that means I'm working with the digits
four and eight.
And if we pull up our handy little table here,
we can see that those get encoded as R and V respectively.
With those two letters in mind, we've got a bunch
of different choices for words.
We could go with rave, we could go with ref,
but I am just going to go with RV.
So that means that RV is the word that's going
to get me back to 48.
So all I need to do now is come up with a
visually striking scenario in my head
that helps me easily remember that word RV.
(whoosing) When you're doing this part,
it can be really helpful to also come up with a word
that represents the context of the situation.
In this case, the book that I'm reading.
And since this book was written by Seth Godin,
and since I know what he looks like,
I'm just going to use him as the secondary image.
So to mash those two things together,
I came up with a scenario where Seth Godin
was hanging out in that space RV from the
movie Spaceballs with Barf and Lonestar.
And yes, that is absolutely ridiculous,
but as you might know, your brain remembers
odd and ridiculous things a lot more easily
than it recalls dull things.
So now I've got this really easy to remember image
and all I need to do to get back to my number
is work backwards.
Seth Godin chillin' in the RV, okay RV is my word
which means that R and V are my consonants.
Translate those to four and eight, boom, 48.
(whooshing) Now at this point you might
be thinking, okay Tom, that was two digits,
that was super easy.
What about that phone number you showed at the
beginning of the video?
That was 10 digits.
What happens when we have a lot more
digits to memorize?
This is the point where you want to combine
the Major System with other memorization systems.
And the first step to doing that is to chunk
the digits you're trying to memorize,
which means to break them down into smaller groups.
Technically, you could use chunks of any size.
But remember, you are translating these digits
into consonants, so the bigger your chunks are,
the harder it's gonna be to find a word that
represents them all, because they all have
to remain in order.
And because of that, I think it's good to work
with chunks of two digits.
If we go that route with our 10-digit phone number,
we get five-one, seven-one, nine-nine, two-eight,
and four-nine.
Then, just like before, we translate those digits
into consonants and create words out of them.
In this case, I went with these.
And now comes the part where you combine the
Major System with another memory system,
because now you need to remember this list of
words in its exact order.
Now there are a ton of different techniques out there
that you could use to do this, one of them being
the Method of Loci, also known as the memory palace,
which has you associating the information you
wanna remember with specific locations inside
a place like your house.
But the method of Loci is pretty complicated
and I should probably do an entire video on it,
so I'm going to do that pretty soon.
And in this case, I'm going to make up a
story using my words instead.
One of the really powerful things about
creating story is that our brains naturally
latch on to stories.
And because stories are linear, we understand
the order in which events happen, so the words
are easy to pull out in order as well.
And just like with my crazy Spaceballs
story from before, the more outlandish and odd
your story is, the easier time your brain is
gonna have remembering it.
So there you have it.
Translate your digits into consonants,
create words out of those consonants,
and then create crazy stories that help you
remember those words.
And then work backwards from there to get
back to those numbers that you wanted to remember.
At this point, you now know how that one weird
kid in your school managed to memorize Pi
to 347 digits, and maybe, just maybe,
you can go challenge him now.
(whooshing) Now there are
a lot of other techniques out there that can help you
improve your memorization skills.
And like I said earlier in the video, we're gonna
be going over some of them in future videos,
including the method of Loci.
But it's also important to note that memorization
is only one skill.
And if you wanna be a top performer in school
or in your work, then you need to complement
it with other skills, like critical thinking
and problem solving.
You also need to be able to build mental models
that link concepts together so you can understand
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