Those memory champions you hear about who can recite thousands of digits of pi are most likely using a Peg System along with a Memory Palace. Anybody can do this, not just the memory geniuses. You just have to learn the technique and install into your mind a Peg System. Then Numbers will become much more interesting and stick to your mind better.

A Peg is a word or image assigned to a number so that numbers take on additional meaning.  The Peg word and image becomes part of your mental filing cabinet structure.  So attaching memory content is a matter of linking content with the Peg Word in some way.   

While it takes some work to build a Peg Word mental filing system, once part of your memory bank, with practice, it provides an extremely powerful upgrade to your natural memory.

There are several different ways of constructing Peg Words for numbers.  Let’s review a few different associated techniques that are used for creating Peg Words:

One traditional technique is rote memorization. 

However, rote memorization is a brute-force approach that can take a lot of time and it is less sticky than some other methods.  Ideally, you want to build in some layers of real meaning to a number so it sticks better for the long term.  However, use of spaced repetition methods 

Associating numbers with unique visual images allows you to see a number as an object in your mind’s eye.

Another technique is rhymes.

An example of using rhymes for Peg Words would be:

1 is “gun” and 2 is “shoe” and 3 is “tree,” four is “door,” five is “hive,” six is “sticks,” seven is “heaven,” eight is “gate,” nine is “vine,” and ten is “hen.” 

Then when you want to remember a list of ten things you associate them with this rhymed Peg word list.  This technique works great because recall can be pretty fast for rhymed material.  However, beyond ten things, rhyming Peg words becomes more challenging when you use multiple-digit numbers, and especially strings of them. 

Yet another technique is to create associated images that represent words and identify numerical shapes in the numbers.

For example, we could use a stick representing a “1” and an hourglass might represent an “8.”   An interesting variation of associating numbers to Peg words using their visual shapes is the Shaper System coined in 2018 by a mnemonist, Erol Ozvatan.  For more info on his system, you can read about it at paolist.com.  For example, in Erol’s Shaper System, “11” represents drum sticks and “20” represents a snail as it looks like a snail going to the left.  An interesting thing about the Shaper System is that it shortcuts the visual number to meaning without the need for any linguistic interference, and the number-to-meaning decoding can be very rapid.  Erol adds sounds and actions to these visual images, which allows you to simply see and hear the numbers.

Fact or story associations such as a clock for 12 because a clock has 12 hour hands or a hand for 27 because a human hand has 27 bones.  

Finally, we can convert numbers to phonetic sounds so that words are phonetically associated with numbers. 

The Major System is such a system for building phonetic associations, and it is widely used among memory champions.   

We will be building a list of Peg Words that use a mix of associative techniques for each number.  Every number will use the Major System, and in addition additional associative techniques will be used to strengthen the mental linkage.  With enough practice, the Peg Words become part of your memory architecture, so that when you see a number the Peg word or image should immediately be retrievable without the need for revisiting the original associative logic that created the original associations.