It's no secret that our
brains remember different types of information with
differing levels of strength. If you're walking down
the street one day and a grizzly bear pops out
and starts chasing you, you are gonna remember that
for the rest of your life. No study needed. And that is gonna happen
because your brain is hard-wired to keep information like that up in its archives forever. But what about more mundane information? What about a string of random numbers? Well, I generated this
string of random numbers on random.org just a couple'a days ago, and even though I have
only looked at it once since then, I know by heart that it reads 5-1-7-1-9-9-2-8-4-9. If you were paying close
enough attention there, you might have noticed
that there were 10 digits on that piece of paper. And 10 is exactly the
number of digits in a phone number, at least a phone number in the United States. In other countries, there
are differing numbers of digits and different
formatting, but what is universal is the way
that most people try to memorize phone numbers. Unless you're already
privy to certain memory techniques, you probably
try to remember a phone number the same way that
I've always done it, through rote memorization. And this, as you are
probably already aware, is not a very good way to remember things. I mean, yes, your brain
does have to recall things on a pretty regular basis
to build strong memories, but rote memorization
alone is a very inefficient study technique, especially for numbers. See, even if you really
want to remember that phone number because, it's
the Rock's phone number, most of your brain perceives
that phone number as what it really is, a
symbolic representation of quantity, and that's
not nearly as interesting to your brain as a
grizzly bear chasin' you down the street. But fortunately, there
is a method out there for easily remembering any number that you want to keep up in your cranium, including this one. Which is, incidentally,
not the Rock's number. I lied about that. But the method is called the Major System and today I'm gonna teach it to you. (whooshing)
This method of memorization has probably been around in one form or another
for thousands of years. But it was most prominently
explained by the popular mathematics writer Martin Gardner in his book Hexaflexagons,
Probability Paradoxes, and The Tower of Hanoi. And it works in three distinct stages. (whooshing)
First, you take each digit of the sequence
you're trying to memorize, and you encode it as a specific consonant using a table of phonetic pairings, which I'm going to explain in a second, and which is at the heart
of the the Major System. Next you take these consonants that you just generated, and
you smash them together to create words. I'm not talking about
gibberish words here, these are real words that you would use in everyday speech. And finally, you take
those words and you encode them as visually striking,
interesting images that, as you're going
to find out, are much easier to recall than random numbers. Now, we're gonna do a couple of examples here in a second, but first I do need to explain that table of phonetic pairings. Within the Major System,
every digit from zero to nine is paired with
a specific sound that we make in human speech. And this makes the Major
System very flexible, because there are multiple consonants that can be bound to certain digits. For example, as you can
see in the table here, one can be encoded as
either D or T, because both of these have a single
downstroke, and when you say D and T, they sound quite similar. Numbers like six are even
more flexible and have even more consonant
pairings, while numbers like four have only one. Now I'm not gonna go
through every single pairing here in the video because
you can just pause it and look at it. And I am going to have
a web version linked in the description below. But I do want to note
that not every letter in the alphabet is paired with
a number in this system, and all the vowels are omitted. Because these are going
to be used for forming words once you do have
your encoded consonants. All right, enough foolin'
around, let's do an example so you can see
the system in action. So a couple of days ago,
I went to the coffee shop near me to do a little bit of reading. And I started reading
this book called The Dip by Seth Godin. Now this book is only about
75 pages, but I wasn't able to finish it in the coffee shop. I got to about page 48. And once I got there and I
was ready to stop reading, I realized that I didn't
bring a bookmark with me. And because I don't like
to dog-ear the pages in my books, that meant
that I was going to have to memorize the page that I stopped on. So let's use the Major System to do this. I've got the number 48
that I need to memorize, so that means I'm working with the digits four and eight. And if we pull up our
handy little table here, we can see that those get
encoded as R and V respectively. With those two letters in
mind, we've got a bunch of different choices for words. We could go with rave,
we could go with ref, but I am just going to go with RV. So that means that RV
is the word that's going to get me back to 48. So all I need to do now is come up with a visually striking scenario in my head that helps me easily
remember that word RV. (whoosing)
When you're doing this part, it can be really helpful
to also come up with a word that represents the
context of the situation. In this case, the book that I'm reading. And since this book was
written by Seth Godin, and since I know what he looks like, I'm just going to use him
as the secondary image. So to mash those two things together, I came up with a scenario where Seth Godin was hanging out in that space RV from the movie Spaceballs with Barf and Lonestar. And yes, that is absolutely ridiculous, but as you might know,
your brain remembers odd and ridiculous
things a lot more easily than it recalls dull things. So now I've got this really
easy to remember image and all I need to do to
get back to my number is work backwards. Seth Godin chillin' in
the RV, okay RV is my word which means that R and
V are my consonants. Translate those to four
and eight, boom, 48. (whooshing)
Now at this point you might be thinking, okay Tom,
that was two digits, that was super easy. What about that phone
number you showed at the beginning of the video? That was 10 digits. What happens when we have a lot more digits to memorize? This is the point where
you want to combine the Major System with
other memorization systems. And the first step to
doing that is to chunk the digits you're trying to memorize, which means to break them
down into smaller groups. Technically, you could
use chunks of any size. But remember, you are
translating these digits into consonants, so the
bigger your chunks are, the harder it's gonna
be to find a word that represents them all, because they all have to remain in order. And because of that, I
think it's good to work with chunks of two digits. If we go that route with
our 10-digit phone number, we get five-one, seven-one,
nine-nine, two-eight, and four-nine. Then, just like before,
we translate those digits into consonants and
create words out of them. In this case, I went with these. And now comes the part
where you combine the Major System with another memory system, because now you need to
remember this list of words in its exact order. Now there are a ton of
different techniques out there that you could use to do
this, one of them being the Method of Loci, also
known as the memory palace, which has you associating
the information you wanna remember with
specific locations inside a place like your house. But the method of Loci
is pretty complicated and I should probably do
an entire video on it, so I'm going to do that pretty soon. And in this case, I'm going to make up a story using my words instead. One of the really powerful things about creating story is that
our brains naturally latch on to stories. And because stories are
linear, we understand the order in which events
happen, so the words are easy to pull out in order as well. And just like with my crazy Spaceballs story from before, the
more outlandish and odd your story is, the
easier time your brain is gonna have remembering it. So there you have it. Translate your digits into consonants, create words out of those consonants, and then create crazy
stories that help you remember those words. And then work backwards from there to get back to those numbers that
you wanted to remember. At this point, you now
know how that one weird kid in your school managed to memorize Pi to 347 digits, and maybe, just maybe, you can go challenge him now. (whooshing)
Now there are a lot of other techniques
out there that can help you improve your memorization skills. And like I said earlier
in the video, we're gonna be going over some of
them in future videos, including the method of Loci. But it's also important
to note that memorization is only one skill. And if you wanna be a
top performer in school or in your work, then
you need to complement it with other skills,
like critical thinking and problem solving. You also need to be able
to build mental models that link concepts together
so you can understand how they all affect the bigger picture. And if you're looking
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thanks to Brilliant for sponsoring this video and helping to support this channel. And, as always guys, thank
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