Comment by zelphirkalt
17 days ago
About the phone numbers thing: I am now 35yo. Do I still remember the phone number of one of my best friends from primary school back then? Hell yeah, I do! These days though, I am struggling a bit with phone numbers, mostly because I don't even try. If the number is important, I will save it somewhere. Memorizing it? Nahhh... But sometimes my number brain still does that and it seems some weird pattern in the number. Stuff like
"+4 and then -2 and then +6 and then -3. Aha! All makes sense! Cannot repeat the digit differences, and need to be whole numbers, so going to the next higher even number, which is 6, which is 3 when halved!"
And then I am kinda proud my brain still works, even if the found "pattern" is hilariously arbitrary.
Same. Somehow there tends to be some "pattern" that stands out, but I guess it's just a mix of the likelihood of "something interesting" and our minds being tuned to pick out "anything interesting". I've memorized a few SSNs and license plate numbers this way, and some digits of pi. I like it; it feels like normal memorization with a twist, without having to resort to "hardcore" techniques.
I finally learned my wife's number last year because I got tired of being asked what her number is when picking things up for her and what not and not actually knowing it, and I've been texting her since 2007. When I learned I could just save phone numbers on my cell phone, I didn't make it a point to ever remember a phone number outside of my own number.