PAO, Part 1: The Major System

Every wonder how people memorize thousands of digits of Pi?

Every wonder how people memorize thousands of digits of Pi?

Yeah, me neither.

But what if we could take that power and use it to memorize the place references of different scriptures? Like, where are all the places in the Bible it talks about baptism? What if we could easily and reliably memorize that along with many other scripture references? The Roman Road, all mentions of faith, the lift story of Jesus, the thematic verses of Exodus. The possibilities are endless.

Now I’m interested.

Let’s start by talking about how much numbers suck. Every try to memorize numbers? Let me give you a few.

010305090204

Try memorizing these numbers in 10 seconds. Go ahead. Try it.

How’d you do? Bad? Me too.

Now, what if I asked you to remember Snoop Dogg violently smashing a weasel. It’s pretty gross and Sandra Bullock decides to snap her fingers for her maids, which are a group of Indian women dressed in traditional Saris who come and, not only clean the mess from the weasel, but also make Snoop Dogg leave the premises.

How hard is that image to remember?

That story is another way of saying 010305090204.

How? Let me start slow. This will take a few posts to explain.

To learn how this is done we have to learn the major system. The major system is a way of encoding numbers, which are very hard to remember, as sounds of the alphabet. I know, it’s weird, but trust me for a second.

0 makes the sound s and the sound z, because the “z” in the word zero sounds like those two phenoms.

1 makes the sound t, d, and th because each of those letters starts with a down-stroke, just like the number one.

2 makes the sound n, because it looks like a capital N turned sideways.

3 makes the sound m, because it looks like a capital M turned sideways.

4 makes the sound r, because it ends with an “r” sound.

5 makes the sound l, because the Roman Numeral L is 50, which somehow makes 5 the l sound? I didn’t make this up and, even if it’s weird, follow it because it will make your life a LOT easier down the road. Once again, trust here.

6 makes a j, ch, sh, or soft g sound, like in genre. If you turn it upside down it looks kind of like a j and a g. This one was the hardest for me to remember.

7 makes a hard c or k sound. Take the number seven and turn it sideways. Then stack another 7 on top of it, but mirror it, and it looks like a K.

8 makes a f or v sound. It looks kind of like cursive lowercase f. That’s literally why.

9 makes a b or a p sound. Flip 9 upside down and it looks like a b.

Any letter or sound not listed above does not have an associated number.

Now, I’ll admit, it seems stupid and like a waste of time. Why would anyone want to do this? Read my The Old Man and the Axe post to understand why I’m doing this. Just because it looks like nothing doesn’t mean it is.

Now that you understand the basic premise let’s explain how the system works. Let’s take the number 21. The 2 would make an N sound and the 1 would make a d, t, or th sound. Any sound in between that is not on the list does correspond to a letter. So, for example, the letter “a” doesn’t mean a number. That means I could put it in front of the n sound and get the word “an”. That would mean 2. If I put a “t” at the end, that would spell “ant” which would then mean 21.

Here are a few of the combinations of words that would mean 21.

and not into want need end went night hand unit note window wind net onto india owned aunt unity andy hunt wound neat hint nato knight knit annoyed handy nod wendy node naughty knot nut nutty undue hindu

That’s not all of them, either… not even close. There are many words that could theoretically mean “21”. For more, go to pinfruit.com and type in some numbers. It’s a very handy resource that I will use over and over again in this series.

You can do this with any number. Both “women” and “money” are good for 32. “Cherry” and “gyro” both mean 64. “Denim” is 123.

To sum up, the beginning of memorizing numbers is to make numbers into the sounds of letters and then to change those numbers into words. In the example above, we used the number 21 and showed that, under this system, many words could mean “21”.

In the next post, I’ll show you how to memorize any 6 digit number with one image.