“At my age, the only problem is with remembering names. When I call everyone ‘darling,' it has damn all to do with pa**ionately adoring them, but I know I'm safe calling them that. Although, of course, I adore them too.”
—RICHARD ATTENBOROUGH, BELOVED BRITISH ACTOR, BEST KNOWN FOR PLAYING KRIS KRINGLE IN MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA
“Oh, ah . . . ha-ha . . . is that your water?” the woman next to me asked. I'd grabbed the wrong water. Once again, I'd somehow ended up at a dinner with a**igned seating, penguin suits, and polished fake laughter. At my last outing, I thought a beauty at the table was flirting with me—that coy smile! It turned out that I'd just splattered tomato sauce all over my white shirt.
Elbows on the table? Check. Stealing the wrong bread? Way ahead of you.
What's a simple Long Island boy to do?
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Just a year ago, I learned three memory devices that have prevented my brutish manners from making me look like a complete animal.
B and D—Make the “OK” sign with both hands, touching index fingers to thumbs. The left hand now looks like a lowercase “b” and your right hand looks like a lowercase “d.” This tells you where your “b”read is (left side) and where your “d”rink is (right side). Sure, it's a little weird making hand signals under the table, but I've never made a mistake again. I still do this more often than I'd like to admit.
LEFT has four letters; RIGHT has five letters—The FORK (four letters) goes to the LEFT (four letters) of the plate. The KNIFE and SPOON (each five letters) both go to the right of the plate.
Work from the outside in—If faced with a Swiss Army knife collection of silverware around your plate, work from the outside in (furthest from the plate to the closest). This also tells you where to put the spoon relative to the knife on the RIGHT side: on the outside.
Et voilà! Problem solved. All of these are examples of smart encoding.
Encoding is a term used in computing and physiology, [37] but in the context of memory, I'll use it to mean one thing:
Converting the unfamiliar and unwieldy into the familiar and manageable.
Mnemonics (pronounced “nuh-MON-ics”), named after the personification of memory in Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, [38] are a form of encoding. These memory devices come in several common shapes and sizes.
Some are acronyms, which use letters to encode words. U.S. elementary school students use ROY G. BIV to memorize the colors of the rainbow:
Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Indigo
Violet [39]
Others are precisely the opposite. Acrostics use words to encode letters. Flashing back again to elementary school, “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge” is used to memorize the basic musical scale: EGBDF. Others, like “work from the outside in” are simply memorable rules of thumb, but you can call them heuristics when you sip Limonata and hang out at the Harvard Club.
Lost for witty party trivia? Try chunking, or grouping bits of data to make them more memorable. How tall is Mount Fuji? It's 12,365 feet, of course—12 months in a year, 365 days in a year.
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To illustrate how far you can take encoding, we'll look at how you handle really difficult material. The first technique can also be used to increase your IQ, a ridiculous metric that's fun to game.
The second technique is out of this world.
Think of both techniques as your Practice One-Pagers for encoding.
This is where the imagery gets weird, and you can lock anything into place. NOTE: if you're not a superdork who loves mental tail-chasing, I strongly encourage you to jump to the velvety smooth DOM on page 102.
Still here? OK then, my precious, you asked for it.
OF SAVANTS AND SOROBAN—SLIPPERY NUMBERS
I remember sitting on a freezing tatami in 1992. Roughly an hour outside Tokyo, my high school's high-altitude judo camp (ga**huku) had started, and the entire team woke up at 7 a.m. to rub their eyes, shake off the frost, and train. In between workouts and before bed, my cla**mates and I would sit cross-legged, drink hot green tea, and play a wonderful Japanese card game called hanafuda.
One night, I had a lucky streak and demolished my buddies without a shred of sk**. Recognizing that it would never happen again, [40] I immediately folded my hand and started smack talking. The back-and-forth devolved into a competition of stupid human tricks. “But can you do this?” Rolling the tongue. “That's nothing. How about this?” The Vulcan hand sign. Then my friend Tanaka called over one of our cla**mates, Nakajima. Tanaka looked at me: “Oh, yeah? How about this? Nakajima, what's 287 times 965?”
Nakajima, still standing, locked his eyes upward and to the right. His index finger danced in the air, and after a few seconds, he hurriedly spit out the answer, as if afraid to lose it:
“276,955.”
I was speechless, and Tanaka laughed. He turned back to Nakajima: “How about 156 times 643?” Nakajima returned to the trance, his fingers darting around within a 6" imaginary circle. He didn't even look at his frenetic hand:
“100,308.”
I looked at Tanaka and stuttered out in worse-than-usual Japanese: “Wha . . . How . . . I mean . . . Huh?”
He held back for a minute, enjoying my confusion, then gave in: “Soroban da yo.” In effect: “An abacus, dude.” Nakajima had used an abacus so extensively in primary school that he no longer needed it to compute. He simply visualized using it, which explained the air waving.
Nakajima wasn't particularly smart, nor was he unique. Many Japanese schoolkids can do the same thing. Becoming a human cal- culator was just a matter of internalizing the age-old abacus.
PARTYING LIKE IT'S 1999
By 1999, I'd played with the abacus multiple times and finally given up. It was too time- consuming. But by synchronicity, I came across yet another Japanese phenomenon at this breaking point: Hideaki Tomoyori. Hideaki memorized pi to 40,000 digits in 1987. In 2006, researchers conducted a barrage of routine numerical and verbal tests to find the secret sauce. Their conclusion: Hideaki has no superior memorization abilities whatsoever. It was all technique.
My routine became memorizing the serial numbers on 3–4 bills in my wallet imme- diately upon waking. I timed myself with a stopwatch and aimed to beat my average time every week. For a bill to be considered “successful,” I needed to be able to recite the num- bers and letters both forward and backward, as well as recall the denomination.
To do this quickly enough to pull off over drinks, I combined the consonant system mnemonic with the loci mnemonic.
(Warning again for non-nerds: Boring paragraphs ensue for four pages.)
The consonant system mnemonic (also called the Major System) encodes numbers zero through nine as consonants of the English language. These consonants are then converted into nouns, then images. Vowels have no value, nor do w, h, or y. These are just used as filler for creating words. Clear as mud? Great. Not to worry. Read on and the examples will help.
The table opposite shows the pairings I used, with recommendations for remem- bering them in parentheses. In a few cases, examples are given to show that what matters is the consonant sound, not the spelling:
Using the below table, 8209 could equal “fan” (82) and “soap” (09), thus a fan made of soap. Remember: numbers are converted to words by the phonetics (sounds), and spelling is unimportant. Thus: 8762 = FKSHN = fikshun = fiction = image: a clear fiction character, like Alice from Alice in Wonderland. But 8762 could just as easily be VKCHN = “vac” “chin” = image: vacuum on a chin. Use whichever vowels you want.
Repeated letters are represented by a single number unless two separate sounds are made: 3230 = MNMS = Minnie Mouse (“nn” is represented by the single 2).
Let's memorize 16 numbers so you can see what I mean. Here they are:
9265358979323846. I've chosen specific nouns to illustrate rules of the system:
9265 — Bone and Shell Image: a huge bone bouncing up and down, smashing a shell.
3589 — Mole and FBI (notice how an acro- nym is fair game) Image: a mole looking like a Secret Service agent, with sungla**es and a black suit, flashing an FBI badge.
7932 — Cowboy and Moon (notice how w and y have no value) Image: a cowboy roping a moon.
3846 — Mafia and Rash Image: The Godfather, Marlon Brando, with a rash on his head. Hang in there—you'll like the payoff.
Next, we're going to incorporate the loci system to keep it all straight.
The loci system, also called the memory palace technique, uses places [41] to hold images. Cicero was famous for using this technique to remember his talking points when addressing the Roman senate during marathon sessions, and it's just as useful today. There are two primary ways you can peg locations.
First, you can memorize stops or land- marks on a familiar route, say 20 spots in your home or 50 spots on the walk from your home to downtown. This route is used over and over again. Having a longer route is very useful for high-volume recall and speed- based competition.
Second, and this is what we'll try now, you can peg items to things in your immediate sur- roundings, such as inside a room.
I did this with my serial numbers and still like to do it with short lists, especially as a party trick. Why? Because then I have differ ent places and clear, independent lists. No overlap, in other words. In college, during my serial-number experiments, I'd have someone mark the bills I memorized with a pen and keep them in his or her wallet. I'd ask that person not to spend them until we next met. Then, perhaps a week later, I'd see the person and ask, “Want to see if I still remember those serial numbers?” I could think back to the room where we were originally sitting and pull up all the images, with almost 100% accu- racy, forward and backward. I could do this for multiple people.
Let's try it out.
Right now I'm on a farm in Victoria, Canada, sitting behind a wooden desk and looking out through enormous bay windows. I see the ocean and mountains in the distance, I'm drinking Pu-Erh tea, and a dog is lying down by my side. All is right in the world. Scanning from left to right around the room, I'll pick four spots for our four sets of numbers. In order, I'll choose the telescope, sewing machine, mannequin, and rocking chair. Here are the images, then:
On the telescope, I imagine a huge bone bouncing up and down, smashing a shell.
On the sewing machine, I imagine a crouched mole looking like a Secret Service agent, with sungla**es and a black suit, flashing an FBI badge at me.
Balanced atop the mannequin, I imagine a cowboy roping a moon.
On the rocking chair sits the Mafia (The Godfather, Marlon Brando) with a huge, red rash on his head.
Pick four locations around you, in scan- ning order, and try it yourself. Or just imagine my room and go for it. Try this, please, before continuing. Do it 1–3 times through.
Now, guess what?
Tag the 3.1415 on the front, and you've just memorized pi to 20 decimal places! If you really want to get laid at the math bar down the street, recite them backward.
BIG-GIRL PANTS AND MOVING TO COOKING
But let's say you want to go a step further and become a Memory Grand Master, joining fewer than 100 people in the world with that title. You'll need to put your big-girl pants on for a bigger test: a deck of cards.
This is also more involved, and therefore outlined in the Appendix on page 606. For those up for a challenge, there is a $10,000 prize involved.
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Now, shall we get you kicking a** in the kitchen? Notes
37 For instance, when a pinprick is converted into a nerve signal, something the brain can interpret.
38 Trivia: she also slept with Zeus for nine nights to create the nine muses. Zeus must have been using pine pollen (page 186).
39 The parts of the electromagnetic light spectrum visible to the human eye.
40 “Saisho de saigo,” as the Japanese would say—“the first time and the last time.”
41 Literally loci in Latin, plural of locus, meaning place.