Engineering Memory: On learning to memorize first 100 digits of pi (2024)

Moonwalking with Einstein is a fun read. I started using some tricks in real life. One of the key premises is that humans are much better at remembering sensory things than abstract ones.

A good example is remembering names: when one’s name is “John Baker”, it is so much easier to remember by silently adding “the” in front of it.

We’re also very good at remembering salacious stuff. I tried constructing my own memory palace for a grocery shopping list that included cream cheese. If you mentally make Claudia Schiffer take a bath in cream cheese, you’ll never forget that. (I read the book at least 10 years ago and still haven’t…)

A chapter on memorising numbers from he book The Memory Book: The Classic Guide to Improving Your Memory by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas uses a similar technique. They recommend memorising this mapping:

0: 's'

1: 't'

2: 'n'

3: 'm'

4: 'r'

5: 'l'

6: 'sh'

7: 'k'

8: 'v'

9: 'p/b'

To use it, just make images/stories that correspond to the digits you need to remember.

The more absurd the story, the less likely you'll forget.

E.g. pi (3.14159265359 ) could be the images of these objects: mit, rat, lab, Noah, shell, mail, bee. Then just sew them together in a story e.g. someone drops a mit, it lands on a rat, the rat runs up to someone in a lab, it's Noah, he throws a shell, it knocks over some mail which lands on a bee.

I don't use it often, but I like to memorise any 8+ digit door code when checking into a serviced apartment or airbnb, in case I forget my phone and would otherwise be without the code.

I never found a real life use case for memory tricks. Would be curious to hear if someone has.

I used a memory palace for my A-Level Law exams. I was able to remember names and details for up to 250 different cases very easily, in fact so easily it felt like cheating.

The trick is to embrace incredulity. The more bizarre and strange the “tags” you assign to what you remember, the easier they stick in your head. It feels daft and cringeworthy, but it really, really works.

For this, however, I’d argue a memory palace is overkill. And I still don’t know how well it lends itself to remembering numbers by rote.

Consider this: how many telephone numbers have you memorised?

I can recall four of my own, each of my parents, my wife, and a handful of home phone numbers too.

That’s easily 100 digits in a specific order. Perhaps it’s possible to chunk the 100 digits of pie into smaller pieces, and memorise them like phrases, just as we do with phone numbers.

Learning an entire Mozart sonata is probably easier. How much engineering there is in the memorizing or in the composition I don't know, a lot?

In 1999 when I was about 12, I memorized 120 digits of pi with little issue. I had some extra motivation: once I got to 20-30 digits, a classmate bet me I couldn't get past 100, and he'd give me $1 for every digit I memorized past 100. Never saw my $20 :(. Pretty sure it was a well-executed nerd-snipe.

Having not practiced at all since about 2001 or so, I can still get to about 30 pretty easily. I didn't use any techniques specifically, I just kept practicing as far as I remember.

If Socrates were alive today, he'd encourage engineers to internalise the spigot algorithm

Then, like a MENTAT, they'd be able to tell you the 16afedf97fd4th digit of pi when prod

In hex, naturally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%9...

>The BBP formula gives rise to a spigot algorithm for computing the nth base-16 (hexadecimal) digit of π (and therefore also the 4nth binary digit of π) WITHOUT computing the preceding digits.