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Engineering Memory: On learning to memorize first 100 digits of pi (2024)
by fuzzythinker
by fuzzythinker
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…)
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.
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.
I can teach you right now, the first 50 digits of Pi, after the 3 and the comma. And with almost zero effort. Just memorize the text below...
Congrats you little, little genius.
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"A poem I write carefully to encode every new digit silently, reminding curious beginners how we can decipher each number in hidden text you see.
Whenever you go through beautiful green wilderness at midnight, remember when I carefully recited a simple paragraph and practiced repeating the numbers again; I remembered."
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Trying to remember 100 digits of pi won't give you any advantage in cognitive functions apart from memorizing 100 digits of pi, for a little while. Better spend your time elsewhere.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do...
And then the payoff... When I would tell people I could recite the first 100 digits of Pi they would be interested and say I want to hear it. So I would start and after about 20 numbers they would just say I believe you and that would be it. So I let that skill lapse.
I think my new talent would be better spent memorizing my credit card numbers and driver's license ID.
[1] i memorized 3,141 digits of pi to prove a point (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAjkicwrD4I)
Edit: I had only skimmed through the OP when I posted this comment, turns out both the video and this article talk about the memory palace method! They diverge in the way it's applied though, with the AiP video associating digits with real life locations
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.
(caveat emptor: I have a phd in cognitive psychology but am unfamiliar with aphantasia research).
Mozart only wrote like 20 piano sonatas and about the same number of violin sonatas. It's no exaggeration to say that most concert pianists or violinists probably know at least 5 of them just as a matter of course because they will have learned them at some point in their musical education and someone who specialised in the classical period would probably know all of them. My wife learns tons of repertoire when she's performing as most of her concerts are completely from memory and this includes a vast range of repertoire from the middle ages through very complex 20th/21st century music.
Conductors often memorize monumental works as part of their preparation. Eg Zubin Mehta conducting Bruckner's 8th from memory age 89. That's a way way bigger piece of music than a Mozart sonata - super long and with massive forces. https://parsikhabar.net/music/zubin-mehta-at-89-still-comman...
This is the same as how chess grandmasters know literally hundreds or possibly thousands of games. Extreme example: David Howell tests Magnus Carlsen https://youtu.be/eC1BAcOzHyY?si=I-xJEo4NQUkLPDQ0
...or jazz musicians know hundreds or possibly thousands of standards.
You kind of have to know these things to perform. That being said with memorizing music you have a lot of structure that makes it easier whereas memorizing digits of pi or e you are learning a transcendental number so it may as well be random. You have to impose whatever structure you can, which must surely make it harder.
I don't find the memory palace tricks helpful at all though. I think that is a consequence of my Aphantasia and something I only realised recently. I can't visualise a memory palace so placing things in it is impossible!
I added one block of 10 digits per night, spending maybe 10 minutes per night? Very roughly an hour total, ~same as the poster spent to get 100 digits, but without the prior investment they spent on the PAO (memorizing 300 key-value pairs, apparently).
You'd want to compare to Anki, too.
Funny thing is that another kid memorized pi to over 500 digits just from pure memorization.
Fun memory from 16 years ago. Next month she'll be obtaining her PhD in physics.
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.
I wonder what techniques from that world are generalizable, since its a pretty remarkable feat with a very long history of practice
I do something similar just not normally in the middle (e.g. "long john baker" and a mental image of someone baking ing long johns), maybe I should give middles more of a try.
They were using a few more mappings per number for instance:
0: 's', 'z', soft 'c'
1: 't', 'd', 'th'
6: 'j', 'sh', 'ch', soft 'g'
etc
The problem I have, is that they present them from 1 to 0, and the first 4 have some mnemonic logic added to them: a bar in 't' for 1, two bars down in the 'n' for 2, three in 'm' for 3, and the 'r' from fouR in 4.
Great. And then mnemonic logic goes out the door. 5: 'l'. Ah. A single bar. Err.. is it 1 or 5..? 7: 'k'. Imagine the K looks like a 7. Ok, maybe.
So the mapping itself starts getting confusing. Unless you do what they claimed all along the book you shouldn't do: rote memorization.. Which was grinding my gears a bit..
On the other hand I learned 15 decimals of pi as a kid through pure rot training and feel they are way more internalized
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