Joseph Javier Perla

NEW: I created a website designed designed to teach you dozens of digits of pi in minutes using this secret method. If you want more digits, I also open-sourced the code.

Tomorrow, around the country, schools and universities will be celebrating the ratio pi (π).  Students and professors will eat blueberry pies, talk about math, and hold contests.  The pie-eating contests look like fun.

(photo by becw)

Another large part of the festivities are pi recitation contests.  In these competitions, students face off against one another attempting to see who can recite the most consecutive digits of pi starting at 3.14.  A number of schools have them.  The Daily Princetonian, from my alma mater, reported on a contest few years ago where one student recited a couple hundred digits of pi.  Harvard’s Crimson reported on a student last year who recited more than 1000 digits of pi in one sitting.  Even elementary school kids have these contests on March 14th.

Last year, FOX News interviews some students about the significance of these contests.  “Bryan Owens, an MIT senior, says the ability to recite pi is a sort of bragging right, a coin of the realm.”  Math geeks wear the number of digits of pi they know as a symbol of pride. Some people become obsessed: “In 2004 Umile read the digits of pi into a
tape recorder. He did it a thousand at a time and gave it a rhythm _
some numbers high-toned, some low. He listened to the tape constantly. This went on for two years. A two-year trance.”

Two years.  I say, a waste.  I know the Secret to Pi. I have learned 100 digits of pi in under an hour with perfect recall a day later.  That includes overhead of learning the secret, so now I can learn at the rate of 100 digits of pi every 20-30 minutes.

The secret:

First, you must leverage human psychology.  Understand that you can only remember so many things.  Furthermore, human beings evolved an incredible capacity for remembering some pieces of information, but not others.  We have a weak capacity for numbers, strings of digits.  They are unnatural.  However, we have a strong capability for remembering images, and a large number of images.  You can close your eyes and see your childhood home, even imagine walking through it clearly.  In particular, we remember vivid, unique images.  You will remember and recognize the picture above with the pied woman’s face, because you do not see that everyday.

You also have good short-term auditory memory.  That is why it might be easy for you to learn 10 digits of pi very quickly, since you just replay your auditory memory of the digits, but you forget them just a day (or an hour) later.  Stories and images, however, stick with you.  You can imagine most of Harry Potter’s long journey from beginning to end.  How do we take advantage of our natural gifts?

Simple.

• Associate words and hard, concrete images with numbers.
  Take any word with a strong visual image. For each hard consonant sound in the word, associate a digit to that sound. Ignore the vowel sounds. Use the key that is on Tim Ferriss’s excellent blog post on the topic.
• Associate the digits of pi with a list of words. [3.]1415 926 becomes TREADWHEEL BANJO.
• Make a story with the words, in oder. Make it wacky. The more offbeat, the easier to remember. Imagine the story vividly.
  (Or use the method of loci; just don’t run out of locations!).
• Recite pi: simply remember the words in order, then translate each word into the corresponding digits.

So, instead of trying to remember chunks of numbers, and how chunks of numbers relate to other chunks of numbers, you just remember a story.  Imagine you are on a farm, pushing a TREADWHEEL very hard with your own hands (for some reason, remember the zanier the easier to remember;  the droll is forgettable).  You’re sweating from the work, but the sweet farm fresh air keeps you going.  Suddenly, somebody comes in playing a BANJO, playing your favorite song.  And so on.

Instead of imagining a story, you can use the method of loci. This method involves imagining vividly a location you already know very well, such as your home.  Imagine walking through, very clearly, and identify objects one by one.  For example, imagine your kitchen.  You start walking in, the first thing on your left is a CLOCK, then a CUTTING BOARD, then a REFRIGERATOR, then a MICROWAVE, etc.  Finally, associate each word in your list of words with each word in your kitchen, in order.  So imagine a TREADWHEEL CLOCK, then a BANJO where you can cut vegetables like a CUTTING BOARD.  Now, to recite pi, just imagine walking through your kitchen.  You will first see a CLOCK, but you will also immediately think of a TREADWHEEL.  Then you take a step and see your CUTTING BOARD, reminding you of BANJO.  You can use this method to remember any kind of list.

Finally, use the key to translate a word into the sequence of digits in pi.  TREADWHEEL is 1415, and BANJO is 926, so those are the numbers in 3.1415926… And just continue on that way.

Not only do you learn the digits more easily, but also you remember them for weeks without a refresher, and re-learning becomes an easy game of recalling the story just once for a few minutes.

Moreover, this method is overall less taxing on your brain.  You use up less of your mental space (although I think you have more than you will ever need).  To memorize 100 digits of pi, you need only remember 1 story, composed of 40 words, instead of 100 digits.

Finally, learning to recite pi this way becomes useful for remembering other numbers or lists of numbers.  If you ever have to remember a very long number, just break it up into a few words and remember those.

I want to demistify pi memorization.  Although people may treat it that way, it is no more a measure of real intelligence than the SAT or Stanford-Binet.  You can learn a few hundred digits of pi tomorrow morning, go to a pi recitation contest, and blow everyone out of the water.  When people say how smart you are, just tell them you how easily you learned hundreds in a few hours, and how they can too.