Let’s face it, most people are horrible bad at remembering numbers. You probably know the struggle of remembering phone numbers or historical dates. Fortunately you can easily improve your memory for numbers. You don’t even need any special genes to do that.

In fact, remembering numbers can be pretty easy if you know how to do it. And I’ll tell you how to do it. Ain’t that great? Yeah, but hold back. The best technique is of little use if you don’t practice using it. And you will need to practice to make this technique effective. That’s the point where most people quit. Don’t be like that.

If you want to be good at memorizing numbers, you need to practice memorizing numbers.

Why Numbers Are Hard to Remember

Numbers are abstract and usually they don’t mean a lot to you. You rarely associate them with any feelings or pictures. You rarely associate them with anything. They’re just numbers. Plain symbols. And that’s what makes it different to remember them.

Your subconsciousness is responsible for recalling remembered facts. But it’s also responsible for seperating important from unimportant facts. And it usually consideres numbers to be unimportant.

Converting Numbers to Words

The major step in remembering numbers efficiently is converting them to something that your subconscious will recall for you. To be able to do that, you should learn The Phonetic Alphabet. It gives you the possibility to convert numbers into words. And that’s exactly what you want to do.

Memorizing Those Words

But transposing numbers to words is not the only technique that’s needed to memorize numbers. I mean, memorizing words or sentences is much easier than memorizing numbers, no doubt about that, but it can still be pretty annoying.

So you’ll want to apply some additional techniques to memorize those words. It may be coincidence but there’s an other article called How to Remember Words on MuscularBrain.com which tells you how to do just that! Wow! You should read it. Then you may proceed.

Converting the Words Back to Numbers

Once you memorized the words you converted the numbers into, you can easily convert them back to the numbers at any time. Just use the The Phonetic Alphabet again.

This process will become faster with a little bit of practice. Plus, you will probably remember the numbers themselves after having recalled them a couple of times with this technique.

Have fun practicing!

Range of Use

The phonetic alphabet I am talking about is used as a memory aid. Numbers are very hard to remember, so transposing them in words makes it a lot easier to remember them.

It may take a little time to get used to it but you will bypass a lot of frustration once you got comfortable using it.

Consonants

Fortunately, there are 10 basic consonant phonetic sound in English, so each sound can be associated with one digit. Of course, there are more consonants, but if you take ‘p’ and ‘b’ for example, you see that the basic sound can be the same for different letters.

This is how the mapping of numbers and consonant sounds looks like:

Learn this table by heart if you consider using the phonetic alphabet for memory improvement. Seriously, if it takes ages for you to convert the numbers you won’t be able to use the phonetic alphabet efficiently.

Vowels

Vowels don’t have any value. They are used as fillers, so you don’t end up with any nonexisting words when converting numbers.

Example

30754 842 could be converted to muscular brain. If you transpose muscular brain back to numbers you get 30754 842 again.

Memorizing muscular brain is a lot easier than memorizing 30754 842 isn’t it? Especially because you can apply other memorizing techniques to remember muscular brain that don’t work for numbers.

This method is very unlikely to bring about any amazing results. So let’s take another approach to memorization.

First, let’s see which things are easy to remember and which are not.

Things We Remember and Things We Forget About

Basically, we remember things that concern ourselves. If we got strong emotions during a situation, we’ll remember it afterwards. If we don’t feel anything about a certain fact, we’ll probably forget that fact.

Things that concern us only indirectly, like the exact numbers of a telephone number, are very hard to remember if you use the wrong technique. The problem is that we often want to remember such things. We don’t want to forget the birthdays of our friends for example.

The Right Technique To Remember Things

If you want to remember something, convert it to something that makes you feel. Something of personal importance. Something that is easy to remember. This could be something funny, strange or even perverted.

There are different techniques to do just that:

• Using mnemonics: You probably used a few mnemonics at school. Most of the time, a mnemonic is a sentence or a word that is easily remembered and can be converted back to the things you want to remember.
• Remember similar sounding words: This one can be used to memorize names for example. Instead of trying to remember the exact name, memorize a similar sounding word and associate this word with the person who’s name you want to remember.
• Using peg words: Peg words are a way for memorizing lists by learning another list of words first and then associating the words of the new list with those of the list you already know. The pre-memorized list should be comprising of words that are easy to associate with numbers. I don’t want to go into great details here, as I plan to write an article about it soon.
• The phonetic alphabet: The phonetic alphabet is a way to transpose numbers in words and words back in numbers. See my article The Phonetic Alphabet for further information about this.
• Conversion to mental images: This one can be used well to remember words or sentences that are easy to imagine. Involve as many senses as possible. Try to see the facts, touch them, smell them, hear them. Visualize them in detail. Form strong mental images.

You can also combine the above methods.

Other Techniques to Improve Memorization

There are some other techniques which don’t really convert the facts but help you to remember them as well:

• Repetition: This one is well-known. It’s the only technique most people use frequently to remember things. Unfortunately, it’s not very effective on its own.
• Exaggeration: Make things seem funny or strange. Make important details of your mental image appear huge for instance. This way you’ll remember them a lot easier.

Short Example: Remembering Passwords

Passwords only concern us indirectly. We usually don’t associate the password with anything that makes us feel. So we easily forget it.

But why not convert it to a sentence? Sentences are way easier to remember than mere combinations of symbols.

You could do it like that:
PEccT2mP+A could be converted to Pink Elephants can cause Trouble to many People and Animals.

Imagine in detail how a pink elephant is causing trouble. Be creative. Use as many senses as possible to do that. See the elephant, smell it and hear it.

It’s easier to remember the password this way, isn’t it?