So just how to you do that? The question most asked of memory competitors. Chief Arbiter Phil Chambers has the inside track.

The World Memory Championships always sees amazing feats of
memory, often with record breaking performances. So how do these mental athletes achieve such incredible feats?

They are not born with superior memory or have abnormal brains. They just use relatively simple techniques and train long and hard as any successful physical athlete would.

All the techniques are based on the principle of
substituting something that is hard to remember, like a pack or cards or a very long number with something that is easier like and object or a person. Competitors then use their imagination to create a mental image of the object in a bizarre, often surreal, situation that becomes very memorable.

Because numbers are abstract concepts they are very hard to remember.

We need to symbolise them with objects that have solidity and can be imagined as pictures.
To do this we use a code called the Major System that first converts the numbers into letters as follows:

0 - z / s / soft c
1 - d / t / th
2 - n
3 - m
4 - r
5 -l
6 - soft g / sh / soft ch / j
7 - k / hard c / hard g / hard ch
8 - f / v
9 - b / p

We then make the letters into words by adding vowels. This is a phonetic system in which the sound of the
letters are important rather than the spelling of the words.

In reality the top memorisers actually employ 'data
compression' techniques to reduce the number of images that they need to string together. Dominic O'Brien uses person - action to code 4 digits. Andi Bell takes this a stage further and creates 3 groups of 2 digits each, that he forms into a person, an action and an object. Ben Pridmore varies the system to give vowel sounds a meaning and hence code more than two digits per word.

The same technique for numbers applies to playing cards and Binary Digits (where the numbers are
converted to decimal - base 10 - memorised and then converted back to binary in the recall phase)

The next step after coding the information into images is to use a pegging system to keep them in sequence.

To find out more about the Major System see the book 'A Mind To Do Business' by Phil Chambers & Elaine Colliar: Chapter 4 including a practical application to learning telephone numbers, 'The Student Survival Guide' also by Phil Chambers & Elaine Colliar: Chapter 5 and 'Use Your Memory' by Tony Buzan: Chapter 12 that extends the system to 1000.

So, to take this a step further, how you can string together many images and hence remember long
numbers?

You are probably familiar with the link system of
memory in which, to memorise a list, you imagine
linking each item to the next via a wild and whacky story trying to make the images in your head a vivid
and sensually rich as possible. This works well for short strings of data but if you get repetition of the same image at different points it becomes very easy  to 
confuse the links and once one link is broken it becomes very hard to pick up the story again.

This limitation of the link system is overcome by using pegs. Pegs, like you have in a cloakroom, have coats and hats hung on them. Memory pegs have information hung on them in the same way. The benefit of pegs is that they provide an unmovable, stable support for whatever you are trying to memorise.

A peg can be anything that you already know well that you can link new information to. The most useful and flexible pegs are known as Loci. Loci are points along a route or journey. For example, take walking down the road to your local shop - You can easily remember the way and the things that you pass.

Let's take this step-by-step. Imagine opening your front door and stepping outside. What is the first thing you see, maybe you have a doorstep, or a garden path, maybe a front lawn. What is the next thing, perhaps a garden gate. The third: maybe a tree, a post box or a phone booth on your street. Each minor landmark is a peg. A location where you can mentally position an object associated to a number (or any other piece of data) in a sequence.  

Let's say you had to remember the number 31 41 59 26 53 (The first 10 digits of pi, but it could equally well be a phone number or the start of a long number in a
competition).  

Your first 5 loci could be:
Doorstep
Garden Path
Gate
Tree
Phone box

Using the Major system, referred to earlier:
31 = Mat
41 = Rat
59 = Lab
26 = Niche
53 = Lamb

Imagine stepping out of your front door onto a doormat - This can't be an ordinary doormat (that wouldn't be memorable). Make it a bright red doormat with bristles so long that they cover your feet and you have trouble wading through it.

The path is covering in thousands of rats scurrying to and fro.
The wooden bars of the gate are replaced by giant sized test tubes filled with multi-coloured bubbling liquids.
The tree outside your house has a large niche cut into the trunk.
As you walk past the phone box you hear bleating you see a little lamb jumping up trying to dial a number.

This may sound ridiculous but with five strange,
memorable images you have learned pi to 10 decimal places. This is basically the same technique used by  many of the top memory competitors.