By Tim Ferris
Author of The 4-Hour Work Week
Numbers, or digit strings, are considered by many mnemonists and cognitive scientists to be the most difficult data to memorize. If numbers are both abstract and difficult, how did Hideaki Tomoyori of Japan memorize PI to more than 10,000 places? How did my classmate in Tokyo also multiply four-digit numbers in seconds?
The answer is proper encoding, or translation of the abstract to the concrete. Hideaki used what I’ll teach you here, whereas my classmate used a phantom abacus like in this video.
This introduction to encoding will provide an overview of the consonant system mnemonic, which encodes numbers as consonants of the English language. In this system of encoding, vowels (a, e, i, o, u) have no value, nor do w, h, or y. Numbers are converted to consonants, which are then converted to nouns and images. Bear with me — the examples make this simple to use.
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