I’ve always been very good at remembering numbers. People who know me know that I memorized the first 500 decimal places of pi just by spending 5-10 minutes a day memorizing the numbers, 50 at a time. I didn’t use any memory tricks like converting numbers into other things.
I’m not so great at remembering names, places, and events, however. So I sometimes use a trick analogous to checksumming. By using the same principle that seems to rule over those elementary school “cryptic” “puzzles” where a=1, b=2, c=3, etc., it’s easy enough to calculate the sum of the letters. For example, the word hello becomes 8 5 12 12 15. The sum of these numbers is 52. So, if I somehow forget the word hello, I only need to know a two digit number, 52, and I can associate that back.
Grocery lists are a great example. Say I have a grocery list containing 5 items: bread, cheese, celery, yogurt, and chicken. The checksums for each word are respectively: 30, 45, 68, 106, 53. If you’re like me, you can remember these numbers far more easily than the items themselves. You might even go further and take the sum of the digits: 3, 9, 7, 8. With a little magic, you might be able to now associate these numbers with their respective foods. Beware, though: this technique only works for some people. I know people who memorize things in all sorts of different ways. Some of my friends memorize by listening to the way words sound, some are amazing with mnemonics. I even know someone who has a touch of synethesia. Everyone has different ways of memorizing things.
Here’s a quick and dirty Python program that will allow you to easily checksum words:
http://joeyjwc.x3fusion.com/ext/stringsum.py
Save it as stringsum.py, run chmod +x stringsum.py, and then run ./stringsum.py word, where word is the word (or the sentence if you want; spaces, periods, and other characters are ignored) that you want to find the sum of. With Windows, you’ll need to run python.exe stringsum.py word or whatever instead. If you don’t specify the word, it will ask you in the next step. It’s not the best programming in the world, but it’ll do.
I put up an online PHP version here. No need to download anything:
http://www.joeyjwc.x3fusion.com/labs/stringsum.php (source)
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