Found this via Braingle‘s RSS feed:
We have talked about how the average short-term memory can only hold around 7 pieces of information. Here is a test to see how good your short-term memory is.
Slowly read each line once and then look away and try to recall the numbers. The first few should be easy. Once you get to 7 or 8 digits, you will start to have a very difficult time.
4 8 6
2 5 7 8
5 8 2 5 7
9 1 3 4 0 6
6 7 2 8 4 3 8
1 9 8 3 0 7 5 2
0 9 3 7 0 4 6 9 1
I could easily do upto 6 numbers, but then had to use some techniques to remember longer series. The way I normally do is visualize the numbers and repeat them out from the visual memory! This is good for short term retention! I would have to associate the numbers (rather the combination of numbers) to some funny thing for long term retention!
How far can you go?
Remembering upto 10 digits (phone numbers) is easy if you break the number into chunks of 3 digits. For example:
997-222-9467
No problems here. But if the no. of chunks itself exceeds 4, remembering becomes difficult. Credit card numbers (15 or 16 digits) suffer from this.
BTW, this is the reason, I prefer giving out my landline number in the same xxx-xxx-xxxx format, irrespective of the STD code. Instead of saying “call me on 22-25673476”, say “222-567-3476”.
cheers
nilesh