They say savants remember and process information in colors and shapes.
I’m no savant, but most of the telephone numbers I remember are shapes to me, not numbers.
At work, I can speed dial my eight technicians without using a speed dial number, like I’m actually dialing their cell numbers. If you still use a landline, you probably can too. If you were to ask me their numbers, though – or when an online form does, like it did today – I have to air-type them out on the phone to remember their number.
If you read a book like Moon Walking with Einstein, these memory champions, people who can literally memorize packs of shuffled cards in under a minute or recite pi to hundreds of decimal places, use techniques like the memory palace where they imagine themselves walking through a mansion with different people in each door doing different activities, each person, room, and activity corresponding to a different number for them to remember. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a decent Wiki on it.)
I’ve wanted to but never actually put in the effort to learn this.
What’s interesting to me, though, is that we already do this to a smaller degree all the time, the memory champions just extend it.
And it all goes back to giving these things meaning. I couldn’t remember a random string of 15 letters, but I can easily spell out my full name.
