Obviously there are tons of ways in which one can study memory and recall from the trivial to the immensely important. This morning I was wondering about a tiny corner of this area: how do people remember numbers, and in particular, phone numbers? I wish I had a better reason than the following for bothering with all this. I was woken up, for the nth time, by a phone call from a number that looked much like mine. What gives?
When I answered, the caller hung up. This had gone on for a while. At first I thought I would just ignore it and it would go away. But clearly it didn’t. So I decided to call back the number. The person had no idea what I was talking about (i.e. that someone from that number kept calling me), told me his was a new number (seemingly irrelevant since they were the ones making the call not receiving it) and eventually hung up on me. However, a few minutes later he called back to say that the owner of the number was checking his voicemail and had dialed the wrong number, thus the stray calls. Aha, of course. There are providers that allow you to check your voicemail by calling your own number. Ideally in this case the person would just add a speed dial, but of course that would not help me in cases when they would try to access voicemail from another phone… so I decided to get my number changed. (Other reasons follow below.)
But so why the frequent mistakes? My number looked like this: XAY-BBXA. The number from which I was getting calls was XAY-BBYA. Add to this that X and Y are located in somewhat similar positions on the dial pad (just across from each other) and I guess it is not so crazy that someone would keep getting it wrong. I don’t know much about how we remember numbers, but it seemed such a confusion was within the realm of possibilities (too much so, in fact, as evidenced by the frequently made mistake in this case). I am extremely visual when remembering phone numbers so I just dial them on the pad. In fact, at times even just to remember a number to give it to someone I have to “type it out” on an imaginary pad. I just wish this person would have remembered the right sequence. In any case, the idea that I would have to depend on this person remembering their own number correctly was not appealing so I moved on.
Other reasons I had been annoyed by the number included text messages and phone calls aimed at perhaps the previous user of the number. Her friends had a hard time understanding I was not her and just kept calling.. and sending text messages. This is especially annoying since the receiving end (here: me) pays for such call minutes and text messages (the latter do not even require any action on your part so you cannot just ignore them, the charge is automatic). Add to that the tone of some of those text messages, and I was far from amused.
Lesson learned: when getting a new number, ask for one that is new or has not been in use for a while.
{ 19 comments }
Claire 05.21.04 at 4:29 pm
I once thought someone was ignoring me only to discover that I was texting the wrong person’s phone. I wish they’d texted back to tell me I’d got the wrong number. As a result I got annoyed, they got annoyed and my friend never got the messages.
eszter 05.21.04 at 4:34 pm
One of the reasons I did not message back was that I was concerned about possible spam. I don’t know much about text message spam, but I did not want to acknowledge receipt just in case it led to more messages. Moreover, none of the messages were that directly personal. They were religious messages seemed to be sent broadly.
Regarding the phone calls, of course I told people this wasn’t the person they were looking for. But I didn’t have the person’s new number. I even changed my voicemail for a while to say explicitly that I am the only one receiving messages indicating that the user of the number had changed. Evantually people stopped leaving messages..
Poppy McCool 05.21.04 at 4:36 pm
I remember phone numbers by location on the dial pad and the pattern the number makes. I can never get them right otherwise, because I am dislexic. Worse with numbers than words, but still a problem.
keef 05.21.04 at 4:44 pm
It may have something to do with this:
Seven plus or minus two:
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Miller/
Seven plus or minus two
Keef
Matt 05.21.04 at 4:51 pm
Back in pre-historic times, when people wrote and transcribed numbers from printed lists, and numerical tables had to be proofread, part of the folk knowledge of numerical analysis concerned the typical errors that ‘computers’ (i.e., people who did computations) would make. Two-digit transpositions were high on the list.
One of the early signs that this era was ending was the publication of a book containing a million random digits– the authors admitted in the introduction that hadn’t done much proofreading.
anonymous 05.21.04 at 5:21 pm
Once I got a message on my answering machine on Friday afternoon. The guy was calling to ask for a ride because somebody (a girl) left him somewhere all alone. Anyways I didn’t call back that guy .. I wonder how long he waited.
J Edgar 05.21.04 at 5:33 pm
I do the poppy mccool dial pad pattern trick, also.
ginzu 05.21.04 at 5:43 pm
Check out:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sociologists/
Philip Dennison 05.21.04 at 5:43 pm
My office phone number is XYZ-AYAA. We get somewhere on the order of 30-40 calls a week for XYZ-AAYA, which is the number of a local doctor’s office. They’re nearly always misdials; what’s suprising is how many people then call us back two or three times in a row. Once they’ve dialed AYAA, they can’t seem to dial AAYA without several tries.
Matt Weiner 05.21.04 at 6:03 pm
My number in my previous city was XYY-ACBC. I would get several calls for a local rabbi whose number was XYY-BCAC. Unfortunately these calls would frequently come early Sunday morning when I didn’t want to be woken up. I hope my friends didn’t call him late Friday night :-)
mg 05.21.04 at 6:04 pm
Number position memory isn’t the only thing that can cause dialing problems–the need to include a “9” or an “8” to get out of an internal phone system, or even “1” for long distance, can create major annoyances as well.
My parents live in NY state on the NJ border; their local telephone exchange is 732. Several years ago, the phone company added a new area code in NJ that is also 732. For months afterwards, they were getting misdialed calls for someone in the 732 area code when the caller forgot or failed to dial the “1” to make it a long distance call. To make matters worse, the mystery caller didn’t really speak English, so they couldn’t seem to successfully explain to her what the problem was.
I had a similar problem one year when I was an undergraduate: my roommate and I had the phone number that was reached when people on campus tried to dial Moviefone but forgot to dial the “9” to get out of the campus phone system. We would get dozens of hang-ups on Friday and Saturday nights…the shocking thing to me was that people would sometimes ask me if I knew what movies were playing, even when I told them that they had just dialed another on-campus phone number.
More recently, I was trying to get ahold of a friend of mine and thought I was leaving messages on her cell phone voice mail. After feeling very hurt about her ignoring me, I discovered that I had transposed the last two digits when I programmed her number into my cell phone. The owner of the wrong number didn’t have any message on his/her voicemail, so I had no way of knowing that I was calling the wrong number. (I guess this is a plea to everyone to put some kind of identifying information in your outgoing message, even if it’s just your first name or reading back your number in your own voice instead of an electronic one.)
laura 05.21.04 at 6:39 pm
I had a friend whose number was 919-1XYY. When I dialed too fast, I occasionally accidentally dialed 911. Once, I thought I had hung up before the call had connected and 911 knew someone had dialed them. I went to somewhere I couldn’t hear the phone ringing as they tried to call back. The police came to the door to be sure everything was all right. (Were you there that night, Eszter? You might’ve been.)
vivian 05.22.04 at 12:39 am
“…the shocking thing to me was that people would sometimes ask me if I knew what movies were playing, even when I told them that they had just dialed another on-campus phone number.”
Gee, when I lived in a dorm we’d usually just look up the movie times for the caller. Pre-net days too, but it was almost always one of the two theaters someone would have a schedule for, taped to the closet door.
I used to remember phone numbers in several different ways – the sound/rhythm of saying it out loud, the finger positions when dialing (even on rotary phones), and a way that is hard to describe, but involved color patterns. For fun I’d make words out of the number – it works really well in some nearby exchanges, not so well in others. None of these solve the problem of other people forgetting the number they want, however.
Belle Waring 05.22.04 at 3:15 am
One thing I find striking about remembering phone numbers is that, although I am very good at remembering old ones (like my high school boyfriend’s), I only have one slot for “my home phone number”, and I obviously rewrite over the previous one. So, even a very short time after moving, I can’t remember what my number was in a previous apartment, at all, even though I’ve dialled it many times and remember random numbers belonging to other people from the same time period. Weird.
LTH 05.22.04 at 11:57 am
Um… I hardly know any phone numbers. I never ‘dial’, because my mobile remembers all of the numbers I need. Does this make me an intellectual cripple?
Sebastian Holsclaw 05.22.04 at 5:33 pm
Lth, though I don’t have a cell phone I suspect it just makes you an efficient tool user. But you might want to make a backup the information somewhere since you won’t be able to reconstruct from memory if there is a failure.
I’m like Eszter in that I remember numbers by dialing on the pad. For me it isn’t visual, it is tactile. I’m very good with a 10-key and I think it is a related memory skill. One problem with that is that when I dial off my computer pad from work the numbers are all wrong because a phone keypad starts with “1” in the upper-left while a computer keyboard starts with it in the lower left. See also remembering ATM codes out of country with the key pad similiarly reversed.
eszter 05.22.04 at 7:02 pm
Sebastian – What you describe is what I do (and I also get confused on computer keypads), but I still consider that visual. Maybe that’s wrong. It’s a pattern that I recall, not the numbers on the keypad. But to me the pattern is a visual pattern, if that makes sense.
Lth – I think this is going to be increasingly common. That is, people don’t learn numbers because they have them as speed dial in their cell phones. The reason I still learn numbers is because 1. for some numbers (intl) I use a 1-800# (speed dial) and then key in the actual number; 2. I don’t always use my cell for calling people.
one 05.23.04 at 4:34 am
This isn’t exactly on topic, but i’ve got a wrong number story for the books. I moved to Virginia from NYC four years ago, but never switched to a local cell number, which means i get a lot of wrong numbers from New York. One time, some guy misdialed, and after the usual “you’ve got the wrong number” he decided to stay on the line anyway, and tell me about some party he was organizing etc. etc. After wishing him luck and explaining that I was 400 miles away and couldn’t possibly attend, I hung up and went on with my day. A week later, he called back to tell me that dialing my number must have been “fate,” and could we meet up the next time I was in NY, because he’s sure we’d get along/be soulmates/make beautiful babies together. He’d call on and off for the next three or four months, and I’d usually get him off the phone pretty quickly, or not answer if i realized it was him, and forget about it – it wasn’t frequent or annoying enough to make dealing with Sprint to get his calls blocked worth the hassle.
Long story short, a few months after the initial call, HIS GIRLFRIEND calls, wanting to know why my number was in his phone!!!!!!!! So I explain that she’s dating a psycho guy who decided that dialing a wrong number is a sign from the gods, and could she please delete my number from his phone before she breaks up with him. Well, apparently she was too enraged to bother, and a week later, he calls back to say, “don’t let my girlfriend scare you off, can we still meet up thenext time you’re in town?” I could NOT believe this guy – I couldn’t stop laughing enough to tell him that it wasnt his girlfriend who was scary…
Alex Fradera 05.23.04 at 2:15 pm
I actually know a little something about this. I can even give you refences. Groan now. The fact that Matt mentioned above is borne out in experimental psychology – the most common errors in serial recall – retrieving items from memory in the same order as they went in – are transpositions (items being given in the wrong position), and these transpositions fall along a gradient, such that an item is most likely to be given in its correct position, then next most likely in an adjacent position, next likely one space away etc. This ceases to be true if you group things in memory. if you think of your phone number as
ABC DEF GHI JKL (letters denote positions rather than digits, unlike the examples above), then a transposition of an initial item, such as G, is likely to be to another initial position such as J or D.
Another factor is phonological similarity – items that sound more similar are more likely to be confused. This implicates the ‘phonological loop’ theorized to form one half of short term /’working’ memory (one of the architects of the term, ALan Baddeley, has recently proposed a third component, but that’s very much under debate): we employ a cognitive mechanism that is really just there for the purposes of speech (containing an echo of what was just been said to allow the brain to monitor where it is in a speech command) to help us in wider memory situations.
A final point would be the examples of people employing the key-pad to remember things. For novel numbers you are likely using the visual-spatial sketchpad, the other component of working memory that can retain a snapshot of information in a rehearsable store for you to reenact. As the action becomes regular and practised then it starts to become part of your procedural memory and involves less active involvement from you as your fingers seem to do the work, sometimes to the extent that the original input (the sequence of numbers) can become lost. Serial recall is a big topic for computational modelling, and the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience down the road from me in here in Bloomsbury London has a few of the big names in this- Henson, Burgess and others. Too many numbers hurt my head.
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