Thought about it, snce it’s near New Year’s.
In my opinion, exercising/training/stretching atleast once a week would be a good thing for most people.
Thought about it, snce it’s near New Year’s.
In my opinion, exercising/training/stretching atleast once a week would be a good thing for most people.
Memorizing long sequences of numbers and conveying mnemonics for them (e.g. 512 becomes EAB, 3.1415… becomes C.ADAE…). Technology allowed humans to forgot how to memorize, for example, phone numbers. This is not good for long-term memory.
I’m reminded of Plato’s argument against writing, in which his position was roughly that relying on writing will make us become less practiced at remembering. I especially love the line, which goes hard.
Though the entire passage where the quote is from is great; It’s thought provoking even if I don’t necessarily agree with it.
But how does this improve your life? By improving your memory all around?
The brain is like a muscle. it needs to be exercised, otherwise it would become weakened. The more you exercise it, the more it’ll be stronger, and the more your thoughts will become clearer. Numbers are especially hard to the brain, because brains aren’t naturally designed for numbers, so math is like a gym weight for the brain.
The opposite can be asked: how memory wouldn’t improve one’s life? I can’t see how it wouldn’t. The lack of memory skills would surely be problematic, especially when the modern life requires dealing with lots of information. Sure, we can delegate these oceans of information to our little bright rectangular stones which we often carry around with us like they were extension members of our bodies, but we’d be delegating our intelligence to things that can’t be intelligent at all (smartphones, which lack the "smart"ness of human brain). To be intelligent is to intellego, to understand, to comprehend. Only living beings can comprehend things. However, in order to comprehend, the brain needs to be used for constant comprehension, the brain needs to be developed through neuroplasticity, which is why improving one’s memory is important.
Turning them into letters just seems harder to me, lol
Yeah, indeed it is. And to make things worse, our brains aren’t really native to numbers, our brains are native to meanings and emotional correlations and names. We get to memorize a song or a smell better than we get to memorize the 10 first digits of pi.
I sometimes tinker with math, programming (this one used to be my professional field), ciphers and steganography (scientific, logical approach towards the alphabetical positioning), as well as Gematria and numerology (non-scientific, esoteric/spiritual approach towards the alphabetical positioning). This allowed me to memorize the numerical position for some letters (for example, L=12, H=8, T=20, W=23). I got these letters specifically memorized due to emotional/spiritual/meaningful correlations (e.g. Lilith’s name can be represented by the sequence 12 09 12 09 20 08).
When some of the letters are memorized, the other letters become a matter of counting from the nearest letter, until they’re also memorized. Then, the reverse conversion (numbers to letters) become a bit easier to do (if I managed to memorize that T is 20, with enough repetition, I get to memorize that 20 is T).
I also memorized that 97 is the ASCII code for lowercase a, while 65 is the uppercase A, so this also allows the conversion between a text and its numerical ASCII representation, although it involves a lot more of math than simply converting numbers to letters within the alphabet or vice-versa.