Impressing myself by memorising the first 18 digits of pi
Recently, I impressed myself with my own memory.
You have to trust me on this one that I’m doing this from memory, but the first 18 digits of pi are 3.141592653589793238.
For the longest time, I believed I had a terrible memory, but I’ve started using this app called MemoryOS, and it’s completely changed the way I think about my own memory.
The app is a game designed to help you improve your memory and it does so by having you walk through virtual rooms and recalling the objects in the room in a gamified way. This way you build up a memory palace of the room. Then, by connecting what you want to remember to these objects in these rooms is how you store information in these memory palaces.
What really surprised me was how easily I could visualise these rooms. I have a terrible time “remembering” things, but picturing these rooms just feels so natural. Like playing a game that you’ve played thousands of times.
What I’m trying to say is that maybe you don’t have a bad memory, maybe you just need to change the way you recall information. I for sure impressed myself with my own memory, and that doesn’t happen often.
Extra
So how exactly did I memorise the first 18 digits of Pi? This gets pretty involved and I actually do not use a memory palace for this, but it works in a similar fashion, by creating vivid mental imagery of what you want to remember.
First, make chunks of 6 numbers: 14-15-92, 65-35-89, 79-32-38. Now convert each number to a letter, this is done with a mnemonic system called the major system.
Applying that, we 14 becomes tr which becomes jantr (me), 15 becomes tl which becomes til which means “carry” in dutch which I convert to the imagery of a deadlift, 92 becomes pn (pan). So I imagine myself deadlifting a bar with pans at the end instead of weights. Doing this trick for the different chunks allows me to build up a mental imagery.
Instead of recalling the numbers I recall the mental imagery of the three chunks, the first one being myself (tr → 14) deadlifting (tl → 15) a set of pans (pn → 92). By playing up this story in my head is how I recall the string of numbers.
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