With a system derived from that you can quite easily learn to memorise a shuffled pack of playing cards, by which I mean: someone shuffles the pack of 52 cards and deals them out in front of you, one card every couple of seconds. An hour later you are able to recite the sequence of cards forwards or backwards. (But you can't do random access! What you've done is associate each card with its neighbours, so you can step through them forwards or backwards, without necessarily knowing which direction is which.)
e.g. As a 48yo, I remember about 24 ATM PINs for many cards I had over the years, since they are all funny and memorable 4 letter names / words.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria
I started it as a person told my father his phone number (6 digits as Gematria that translate to "a cloth in my mouth")
234-281 (בגד בפי)
We're hardwired for spatial awareness.
1. the NATO alphabet. (Alfa, bravo, charlie, delta…) It's surprisingly easy to memorize: it will only take you a few sittings of practice. And it's useful, for when you need to turn letters into words. And then people cutely wonder if you're ex-military.
2. I tie a small ribbon to my luggage. It could be anything: string, tinsel. If you're familiar with wine glass charms, same idea. It makes the bag identifiable from distance, so long as the charm is in line of sight. It does not, remarkably, stop strangers from grabbing the wrong bag, but it does get funny if they insist they recognize their bag when you ask them "you tied sparkly pink ribbon to your bag?"
It is sticky as hell and surprisingly useful. I do assume that people who know it are ex-military but that isn’t entirely reliable in the US. A lot of other people picked it up, in part because it is so easy to learn by osmosis.
It was an iterative process. Various words have been replaced over time, as problems became obvious.
Others may know it by virtue of being fans of, or simply exposed to the Bloodhound Gang.
( FWiW I'm neither in nor from middle North America )
Perhaps I have now infected one of you. I am sorry.
I also set the combination to all zeroes, to scramble my combination after locking. Easier getting in and out with fixed muscle memory, and easy to confirm this is my locker. No one else does this.
But probably not for aphantasts, at least I struggled. Much more with memory palaces.
More remembering the rhythm than the digits.
1, bone; 2, shoe; 3, tree; 4, door; 5, hive; 6, sticks; 7, heaven; 8, gate; 9, line; 0, hero.
123 -> bone shoe tree
But also Run blue bee (imagine a blue bee running with legs!)
1: candle, 2: swan, 3: handcuffs, 4: sailboat, 5: curtain hook, 6: elephant’s trunk, 7: boomerang, 8: snowman, 9: balloon and string, 10: stick and hoop
Combining it with the journey method helps remember longer sequences. The funny thing is that you might remember the number two by imagining a giant swan in the next room. When you don't need to remember it anymore, you imagine yourself throwing a grenade into the room and blowing up the swan. It really works!
Darren Brown's Tricks of the Mind is generally about his life history in becoming a mentalist, but it has a lot of fun tidbits about methods to get over traumatic memories, amp yourself up for things you don't want you to, defuse arguments/fights, and it was the first place I ever heard of memory palaces.
(ok everyone, we took the naked man out of the title, let's talk about something more interesting now)
In Japan it's common to get naked with strangers people of the same sex at a hot spring. IIUC in Finland it's common to get naked with strangers of all sexes at a sauna.
In the past, in the USA it was common to take communal same-sex showers in PE class in junior high school and high school.
But sometime in the past 40 years, that seems to have changed in the USA. I've met lots of 20 somethings and 30 somethings that can't handle a sauna or hot spring because they claim they've never been naked with anyone else. WTF!
Amongst technical university students it used to be effectively universal that sauna was all mixed and naked. At some point it became common that some people, females especially, would wear swimsuits into sauna. It has also become common that before mixed sauna there is scheduled separated sauna turns for those who want to go but don't want to enter mixed. (Scheduled so no one has to raise their hand up and publicly say "I'd prefer to go without mixed bathing.")
In private life, a mixed naked sauna between eg. close friend families is something I consider pretty normal and do frequently enough without really blinking an eye. But that's because it's between two sauna-crazy families. It's all pretty dependent on the person or people.
How sad. I wonder what the deep problem is. Religious, cultural, something more serious.
Imagine not being able to go to a sauna, or shower in public, because of a fear of people.
I am not afraid of other naked people, but I have had it once too many that certain people in e.g. a hotel sauna (for context, this was in some boutique hotel in Southern Germany) do not respect personal space, and the whole sauna naked thing becomes performative and annoying.
Once the nut-sack of a 160kg weighing Bavarian man makes a near hit with your chin as the man tries to climb over you to the bench at the back... anyway.
I found this with a significant amount of the naked sauna goers t.b.h. the claim of additional health benefits has been thrown at me, which is such obvious bullshit, it merely emphasizes the performativeness of it all.
I've never had a 160 kg Bavarian nutsack in front of my face, but I've regularly gotten my face full of ass or nether regions because my university group has a small mobile sauna on a trailer, where anyone at the back moving past the others will necessarily shove their nethers in the others' faces. At some point I forgot to even think about it.
Human lives are so different, but nutsacks are basically still all the same. I hope you can one day forgive the Bavarian for their swinging sacks and overenthusiasm for the top seat.
> How sad. I wonder what the deep problem is. Religious, cultural, something more serious. Imagine not being able to go to a sauna, or shower in public, because of a fear of people.
It's not sad. It's very fucking annoying. The deep problem is some people are just like that. Religious? No. Cultural? No. Something more serious? Yes. Imagine not being able to go to a sauna. Ok, done that, now what? Imagine not being able to shower in public. Ok, done that, now what? "Because of a fear of people". Ah!
I didn't know I had a 'social anxiety' (because everyone has 'something', these days), but it turns out I have, and it can be seen (at various times, to varying degrees), throughout my life.
Many people don't so much have a problem with naked people, it's often just 'people', and the 'situation'.
Try reading (several sources) about agoraphobia. It's not always as clean cut as you kind of unknowingly make it out to be.
You ever been to a war zone? I have - with bullets and tanks and mines and ugly death and living badly in holes and showering and shitting in front of others, and other good-for-the-grandkids stories. Somehow, I absolutely fucking loved it, and would go again tomorrow, *though drones nowadays add a new, and very game-changing perspective.
Would you come with me, and we can do all the being naked together you want? Are you one of those people that struts around public showers like a lonely peacock, and tries engaging people there in conversation?
Actual nudity may not always be the issue. Cunts, and situations, often are.
Which btw made me realise cheap padlocks all open with the same key - imagine my surprise when I opened a locker that had the same padlock as mine with my key and found that the stuff inside was not mine. Mine was a couple lockers next to it!