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.