Memory Tricks Part 2: The Magic of Numbers

“The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information” is one of the most famous papers in psychology. This study concluds that the short term memory of an average human can remember seven (plus or minus two) objects. However, i will share some tricks with you so you can remember more than just this magical number seven.
Trick 1: Split the code you have to remember into seperate parts.
A phone number for example, has 10 digits. According to the previously mentioned study, this would mean that an average human is not capable of remembering his own phone number. However, a phonenumber is mostly split in seperate parts, which is called chunking. The phonenumber: 0134669111 is much easier to remember when you put it like this: 013 - 466 9111. The same has been done with credit card numbers. The 16 digits are split up into four parts of four digits.
What is even more useful is to split a code you have to remember into meaningful parts. Numbers can be coupled to dates, ages, phonenumbers, roomnumbers etc. For example
201945422 could stand for your age (20), the year the second world war ended (1945) and the number of your appartement (422). The same holds for letters.
1) FBIVIPUVTCBS
2) F BIV IPU VTC BS
3) FBI VIP UVT CBS
Trying to remember (1) can be very hard. The example in (2) is already easier since the code now exists of smaller chunks. However, if you chunk the words into meaninful units, which has been done in (3), it will be easier for you to remember.
Trick 2: Try to give meaning to the seperate parts.
Furthermore, if you try ro visualize the meaningful units, it will be even easier for you to remember. For example, if you look at (3) you can think of a newsreportage from CBS news where a FBI agent was a VIP at the party of the UVT. The weirder the image, the easier it will be to recall the related information.
Trick 3: Make a mental imagery of the things you have to remember.
Pi = 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971...
The most famous example of remembering digits is the Pi memory record. In 2005 the record has been broken by Haraguchi from Japan who could remember 83,431 decimal places of Pi. A trick that is frequently used in these competitions is the word-length mnemonic. The number of letters in each word corresponds to a digit. Here an example to to remember 15 decimal places of Pi.
"How I like a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics"
Trick 4: Use word-length mnemonics.
If you want to now more about mnemonics, come back next sunday for some new memory tricks!