For instance, I want to remember 1.1 million and 900,000.
I guess I could remember the person and action for 1 in my PAO, with 6 repetitions of the 0 image, but would it make more sense to just have an image for a million?
And even for numbers in the hundreds of thousands it seems like a stand in makes sense.
How do you handle big numbers?
I have a 999 PAO and, for 4-digits numbers, I encode only the last 3 digits. For example, for dates, 1705 BC, 705 BC, 705 and 1705 all use the same image. I feel thereās not much chance that Iāll mix them up, because they are so far away in time. If I believed that Sargon II died in 705 instead of 705 BC, it would mean that I seriously mixed up historical periods! (And also they are at different places in my history memory palace, which gives me a visual cue).
For bigger numbers, you could have images for the prefixes of the international system of units (kilo, mega, gigaā¦). Like 10k is 10000, you only need to encode 10 and kilo. 1M is 1000000000 so one image for 1 and one image for M (million).
There probably are some threads about encoding numbers from the periodic table, Iām sure people have come up with other ideasā¦
I change to standard form so 1.1 million becomes 1.1Ć10ā¶ and 900,000 becomes 9Ć10āµ. Then I encode as 11 with object of 6 and 9 with object of 5 respectively, I know that I used standard form, so no point encoding decimal point and I know it isnāt just a long number because there is no action between the person and object.
Yes, got shorthand for 500, 1k, 10k, 100k, 1m, 1bn and special PO for 1-21 (centuries), addition for single digits 1-9 and A-Z.
Anything that recurs often should be turned into a mnemonic image. Others like Left, Right, North, East, South, West, Road, Street etc etc. Good to have a mnemonic device for each so you can quickly plop it into the scene.
Example, Billion is Damien Lewis. And Million is Lee Majors.
North is a Norse helmet, East is a Paddy-Field hat and West is Stetson. These are great to add to scenes which more often or not have some form of person/character in them. Street is anthropomorphised Quality Street chocolates and Road is a Shopping trolleyā¦
More or less all of these come up monthly, some daily.
Edit:
To answer specifically 1.1m would be Damien Lewis pointing at Scrooge McDuck pulling a Toy (PAO Major for 1) car. 900k could be Scrooge stuck in iVy.
It depends. If Iām doing something like memorizing the population of China Iād just memorize 141 because I know it has to be billions and I know it canāt be 141 billion, so it is 1.41.
If for some reason I do need to memorize the whole number then Iāll just use a normal PAO sequence as I was memorizing any number, just transform each digit and store it in a MP.