If you were born before the smartphone era, you probably remember how tough it was to keep track of phone numbers. Thanks to contacts lists and other smartphone features, remembering phone numbers don’t seem quite so important. There are, however, some good reasons to keep your friends and family’s numbers at the forefront of your memory. Some are practical, while others are purely sentimental. No matter the reason, though, you may want to start committing those digits to memory.

Emergency Contact

Perhaps the most immediate reason to get back to memorizing your friends’ phone numbers if because you might not always have access to your phone. If you’re in an emergency, your giant list of contacts will not help you. If you put the effort into memorizing the phone numbers of your friends and family, you’ll be able to use another person’s phone to call for help. Preparing for this type of situation is a good idea, especially because phones are so unreliable. Rather than being trapped alone due to a dead battery, you can get help with a few memorized digits.

Working Your Brain

It often feels like people are offloading a lot of their actual mental work to other devices. One thing that’s certainly suffering is the memory, largely due to the omnipresence of smartphones in the world. If you want to keep your memory in working order, it’s a good idea to keep using it as often as possible. Start working on memorizing your friends’ phone numbers not just as a method of getting in contact with them, but as a way of putting your brain through its paces. You’ll be surprised by how much more alert you feel when you make your brain do some heavy lifting. Regardless of the mental workout, it can be extremely useful to be able to memorize an address or phone number.

Remembering to Care

There’s also something that’s just nice about knowing you have someone’s number memorized. It takes your friend from being just another name in your contacts and makes them something more. It’s the kind of thing you do not just to help you out of a tough spot, but to reaffirm the basic human connection between you and another person. When you memorize a friend’s phone number, you’ll be making a commitment to remembering that person no matter where the two of you happen to be.

Memorizing numbers can improve your memory, help you to connect with people, and even save your life. Make sure you commit at least a few of your friends’ numbers to memory, just in case. You never know when doing so might pay off.