Let’s Talk About Mental Leverage, Pt. 6

Okay, for those of you following along, this will be part six of the series. Today we talk about how to convert between digits and consonants and back again. The chart below has three columns, 1) The digits, 2) the corresponding sounds, 3) a memory peg to help you associate 1 and 2. Similar sounds are lumped together for brevity and that leaves us with just ten consonants.

Some memory pegs will seem far fetched or silly, but remember the more impossibly wild the association, the stronger the bond.

Digit Corresponding Sound Memory peg

1. t or d, There is one downstroke in a mall t
2. n, There are 2 downstrokes in a small n
3. m, There are three downstrokes in small m
4. r, The digit four ends in r
5. L, Five fingers with the thumb out form L
6. j, ch, sh, soft g, There are six letters in SHucks
7. k, hard c, hard g, By moving two 7’s around you get K
8. f, ph, v, Handwritten f looks like an 8
9. p or b, Hold a nine up to a mirror and you see p
10. soft c, s, z, The final digit is 0 and the final letter is z

Reading over the chart several times a day will re-enforce the connection between the numbers and signs and you will find you no longer need the pegs to remember the chart. Therefore, having done so, you can now practice converting phrases from letters to numbers and back again. It’s the first part that takes the longest. You saw, for example, that the letters, MNTLLVRG could form several phrases; but any phrase made up of those letters can only convert to 32155846. Each consonant can only stand for one digit.

Let’s try another number, 3845912. This gives us the following consonant sounds, MFRLPTN.

This could be: “my for real put on.” Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense except that for real and put on are opposites and can be remembered quite easily. Now, to prove the system works, take the phrase and look up the numbers in the chart. What number do you come up with?

Digit conversion is often used by those who want to remember a long series of phone numbers, or in this case, serial numbers of products they work with. Wouldn’t it be great to remember all the phone numbers you need without having to look them up?

We’ll talk about this more next time... if anyone is really listening out there....anyone?