In everyday life, at university or at work, there are always situations in which you have to remember numbers, dates or certain sequences. There are, for example, telephone numbers, birthdays, credit card or account numbers, which are best to have at hand at all times, even without a cell phone.

Or we have to set a new PIN, a combination of numbers that is easy to remember for the EC card, the suitcase or the bicycle lock.
We should be able to figure it out quickly and avoid using the same combination on different places.

Normally we reach our limits with such tasks quite fast.

Mnemonics (also called mnemonic techniques) are a collection of methods and strategies that are suitable for better access to such information. Mnemonics use the fact that our brain can remember pictures and stories much more easily than pure facts or numbers.

To achieve this, there is a whole range of different methods that, depending on the requirement, provide different tools to use our memory more efficiently.

Some examples of common memory techniques are:

• The Major System:
  This technique associates numbers with images or stories. This technique is explained in detail on this website.
• The "Loci" approach:
  This technique involves imagining specific places or spaces and placing objects or images in them to easily remember specific information or sequences.
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  The loci method was already used by Cicero, i.e. around 50 BC. described. In his work "De Oratore" he explains how he mentally walks through the space of a forum in order to be able to remember the points of a speech.

  The "Loci Method" owes its name to the Latin word "loci", i.e. the plural form of locus - "place". With this method, the user links the desired information with known locations or points on an imaginary route. By mentally retracing these, the linked information can be easily retrieved in the correct order.

  To use this method, you need to do the following:
  

  • Find a route, maybe in your house or the way to the supermarket
  • Identify prominent places along the way and mentally place the items you wish to remember there.
  • When you mentally walk this route later, pick up these items in the correct order

  Instead of objects, reference objects such as images or certain actions can also be used. The combination with the rhyme-number-system described below is also suitable for memorizing rows of numbers.
• The "Chunking" approach:
  This technique consists of breaking long lists or strings of information into smaller units (called "chunks") to make them easier to remember.
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  The chunk technique assumes that our short-term memory is only able to store a manageable number of "chunks", i.e. information units, at the same time.

  The American psychologist George Armitage Miller published a work in 1956 entitled: "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two", in which he describes that the average storage capacity of our short-term memory is limited to a capacity of 7 +/- 2 information units.

  Credit card numbers, for example, are usually divided into blocks of four digits so that only four "chunks" are loaded on the short-term memory when the number is written down. Most people therefore write such a number in increments of four.

  If such a block contains a pattern or an association, such as "1234" or "0000", then, according to Miller, it only occupies a single chunk.

  The chunk technique allows us to break down or group all possible information in such a way that we form larger "chunks" in order to load the short-term memory as little as possible.

• The rhyme scheme, or rhyme technique:
  
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  Rhymes can help us store information in a number of ways. On the one hand, it is well known how easily information can be lost if it is not recorded in writing or otherwise.
  In the game "Silent Mail" a message is passed from player to player, but after just a few transmissions the content is corrupted and details are lost.
  Likewise, our brain loses details by successively emphasizing supposedly important points and suppressing unimportant ones over time.

  One way to counteract this is to write the content in verse, poem, or song. Because the rhyming form acts like an underlying test value and forces us to maintain a very specific style and thus the original text form. Any deviation from the original is immediately noticeable.

  The Number-Rhyme-System takes advantage of another aspect of storing numbers and the orders of lists. The digits 0 to 9 are assigned to words that rhyme with the numerical value and that we can memorize visually.
  This list of terms is usually chosen individually, because the more comfortable the user feels with the terms, the easier it will be for him later to remember the association chains formed.

  Digit	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
  Name	Zero	One	Two	Three	Four	Five	Six	Seven	Eight	Nine
  Rhyme	Hero Biro Cirro	Bun Gun Son	Shoe Zoo Stew	Bee Tree Knee	Door Core Boar	Hive Chive Knife	Bricks Sticks Tricks	Heaven Kevin Leaven	Weight Fate Plate	Line Wine Twine

  
  

  Now let's try to memorize the following shopping list:

  • 1. Butter
  • 2. Milk
  • 3. Potatoes

  So we link the points of the list with the terms, e.g.
  - we want to smear the bun with butter
  - We're trying to steal the milk from the camel enclosure in the zoo
  - We boldly pick the potatoes from the potato tree
  

  We memorize these images. And if we now go through our list in the supermarket, starting with the first number ("Bun"), we get the picture of the buttered bread, followed by the zoo that immediately makes us think of camel milk and so on.
  Since we work through these numbers in order, no item on our shopping list will be forgotten.

  There are still numerous possibilities to change or extend this system. For example, the rhymes (One = Son, Two = Shoe, etc.) are replaced by words that look similar (0 = egg, 1 = flag, 2 = swan, and so on)
  There are also methods of representing the tens place of a number with an adjective, or with a color that expands on the associated term.

• Other tools:
  There are numerous tools and methods that are not assigned to any specific memory technique, but which are often used in everyday life.
  Everyone is probably familiar with acronyms as mnemonics for lists or sequences, but advertising jingles also help us (often against our will) to keep information present in our memory.
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  Acronyms are an easy way to capture terms that would quickly be forgotten individually. Common examples of these are:

  • Eat All Day! Get Big Easy!
    (To memorize the strings on a guitar, E,A,D,G,B,E)
  • My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets
    (For the order of our planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Even Pluto is included here!)
  • Bruce Willis Ruins All Films
    (Checklist for divers: buoyancy, weights, releases, air, final check)
  • SMART goals
    (Acronym as a guide to setting goals. These should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timebound)
  • Sally Left The Party To Take Cathy Home
    (List of carpal bones: Scaphoid, Lunate, Triquetrum, Pisiform, Trapezuim, Trapezoid, Capitate and Hamate).
  • Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain
    (The colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet)
  • Memory Needs Every Method Of Nurturing It's Capacity
    ("A mnemonic for the correct spelling 'mnemonic.')

  
  

  Like acronyms, alliteration, acrostics, neologisms or simple word combinations can be used in a similar way.

  And probably most of us have used our knuckles to figure out the length of a month. This is also a simple tool to make information available.

All of these methods have different focuses and are, of course, also combinable.
There are many other memory methods, but this website is dedicated to the "Major System".

 

The history of mnemonics goes back to ancient times. According to numerous chronicles, Simonides of Keos should have died around 264 BC. to have been the first to deal specifically with memory techniques.
The name "Mnemonic" also goes back to a lost book by Aristotle, the Mnemonikón, and refers to Mnemosýne, the goddess of memory and the mother of the muses.

In the 17th century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz dealt with the principles of human memory. His contemporary Pierre Hérigone developed a numeric code in 1634, which he based on the Indian Katapayadi system ( (कटपयादि)). This was the first European version of this mnemonic technique.

To date, this has often been changed, improved and further developed. So Justus Winckelmann (aka "Stanislaus Mink von Wennsheim") took it up and created the "Winckelmannschen Numerical Code" from it in 1648.

It was not until 1925 that Aimé Paris finally developed the "Zifferncode nach Aimé Paris", which we mainly know today as the "Major System".

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After the numeric code had always changed and developed slightly over the years, Paris succeeded in decoupling the numeric code from the scriptural spelling of the words and instead establishing a phonetic assignment. This eliminated some of the weaknesses of the previous versions and significantly simplified the translation of the code.
Until the 1990s, this was still referred to as the "Zifferncode nach Aimé Paris" (digit code according to Aimé Paris).

In 1936, Ernest E. Wood tried for the first time to make this system available for the English language, but failed because of the different sound of these language.

At the same time, Carl Christian Otto dealt with the art of memory improvement and in 1843 published his work "Lehrbuch der Mnemotechnik" under the pseudonym Carl Otto Reventlow, followed by the "Wörterbuch der Mnemotechnik" (Dictionary of Mnemonics), which contained around 120,000 mnemonic substitutions for the number range 0-999 , as well as the "Leitfaden der Mnemotechnik für Schulen" (Guide to Mnemonics for Schools), in which about 3,000 facts from history and geography courses with mnemonics were compiled.
These books served as guidelines for the use of mnemonics in German schools and thus contributed significantly to the spread of these techniques.

The major system got its name from the Polish major and memory trainer Bartlomiej Beniowski, who wanted to make Paris' system usable for the English language as well. He called his modified system the "Major System" in his 1845 book "A Manual for Memory".

This term caught on in English usage and then, around 150 years later, became known in the rest of Europe and even worldwide.