Everyone can remember a phone number because it’s three numbers, where they might have problems remembering ten separate digits
This is slightly irrelevant, but for some reason I can’t figure out at all, pretty much all phone numbers I learned (and, incidentally, the first thirty or so decimals of π) I learned digit-by-digit rather than in groups. The only exception was when I moved to France, I learned my french number by-separate-digits (i.e., five-eight instead of fifty-eight) in my native language but grouped in tens (i.e., by pairs) in French. This isn’t a characteristic of my native language, either, nobody even in my family does this.
I once had memorized the periodic table to 54 places (Xenon) by name, as a sequence with a few numeral fixed points. This helped me in High-school chemistry. Lost some chunks of the higher parts, but I have intuits about most anything in the periodic table. Some of this is visual memory.
I memorized that as a verbal thing initially, kinda like the alphabet song (which I know a large number of people still sing internally when they need to sort stuff lexicographically). But even the alphabet I have with sucess moved partially to visual memory.
IMO, visual memory is an underused resource to audiotorial thinkers (like myself) and probably vice versa.
This is slightly irrelevant, but for some reason I can’t figure out at all, pretty much all phone numbers I learned (and, incidentally, the first thirty or so decimals of π) I learned digit-by-digit rather than in groups. The only exception was when I moved to France, I learned my french number by-separate-digits (i.e., five-eight instead of fifty-eight) in my native language but grouped in tens (i.e., by pairs) in French. This isn’t a characteristic of my native language, either, nobody even in my family does this.
I once had memorized the periodic table to 54 places (Xenon) by name, as a sequence with a few numeral fixed points. This helped me in High-school chemistry. Lost some chunks of the higher parts, but I have intuits about most anything in the periodic table. Some of this is visual memory.
I memorized that as a verbal thing initially, kinda like the alphabet song (which I know a large number of people still sing internally when they need to sort stuff lexicographically). But even the alphabet I have with sucess moved partially to visual memory.
IMO, visual memory is an underused resource to audiotorial thinkers (like myself) and probably vice versa.