> I was asked to memories the code for a door today.

How peculiar, I had to memorise a number this morning too. It's the
serial number of my old telescope, and I wanted to memorise it so that
I could look it up on Google. I wasn't near a computer, and I didn't
even have my iPod Touch on me, though I was just about to go and get
it.

But I thought since I'm a synæsthete, I don't need to write it down or
keep saying it out loud until I can jot it on my iPod. No silly crap
for me, as long as the number has pretty colours in it.

The ironic thing is that I completely forgot about memorising the
number until I saw your email! But now that I remembered that I have a
number to recall, I can recall it easily:

302058
Yellow, _, Pink, _, Orange, Green

This reminds me of when I was on a coach going through part of London
with friends, and we were talking about memory and they were saying
that they bet I can remember things really well. So there was a random
phone number on the side of a building, and they asked me to memorise
it, and then they'd check me on it later.

As it happens, later on they all forgot about it and so they never did
test me, which was a good thing because I forgot the number anyway.
But of course this is ironic too because the situation is the opposite
of the situation above — I may have forgotten the number, probably
because it had boring colours in it, but I didn't forget the event,
even a decade later!

On 12 Apr 2010, at 11:01, Sean B. Palmer wrote:

> This reminds me of when I was on a coach going through part of London
> with friends, and we were talking about memory and they were saying
> that they bet I can remember things really well. So there was a random
> phone number on the side of a building, and they asked me to memorise
> it, and then they'd check me on it later.

This reminds me of a maths teacher I had during my GCSEs called Mr. Winfield.

The rumour was that he was a Grandmaster, though I strongly suspect this to be apocryphal. However, I do remember some of his antics from the after-school chess club he used to run. He'd sit in the corner of the room blind-folded, and play chess with people who had full boards in front of them — by reading out his moves aloud to them! I don't think I ever saw him loose a game.

Annoyingly enough, for such an influential teacher, I only remember one specific thing he ever said to me. I had plucked up the courage to request a game of chess with him, and before we started I asked if he was black or white. He looked up with a wry smile and said "that's a very personal question."

On the last day of term he told us that we were going to be memorising a big list of random items. He went round the room a couple of times, asking each person to name an object. Once we'd finished, there must have been about 60 words written on the blackboard. He explained that the way to memorise things is link them together in a meaningful way — because the mind is predisposed to recall emotional narrative.

We then spent the next hour going through the list — linking each object with the next through some form of interaction. He stressed to us that the more colourful and absurd the interaction, the easier it would be to remember it. It was quite fun actually, insomuch as we weren't doing our regular maths work! By the time the bell had rung, we had just about made it through the entire list.

We split up and enjoyed our summer holidays, and I'm pretty sure everyone forgot about it. On the first day back, he surprised us by asking the class to write down what we had remembered. And as far as I recall, most of the class had remembered most of the objects! There seemed to be no split of who had done better than others, like there usually would be with something that required skill. Just about everyone in the class had done just about as well as everyone else.

To this day, I still remember that the first item was a CD which someone flings across a beach, until it slices an apple in half that was floating in the air, and then one of the apple slices falls into a VHS machine. Something like that anyway! I still remember small snatches of the rest of the sequence. Which is not bad for something I memorised in under an hour, over a decade ago.