How to Develop a Perfect Memory (21 page)

I have written out below 25 stages of the route I use for memorizing 100-digit numbers, together with the digits, their persons and actions.

STAGES

PERSON

ACTION

1

Patisserie

Arthur Daley

14 Chalking blackboard

15

2

Road

Nigel Benn

92 Playing tennis

65

3

Fountain

Clint Eastwood

35 Taking the helm

89

4

Jewellers

Gamal Nasser

79 Blindfolded

32

5

Car Park

Charlton Heston 38 Cooking

46

6

Fence

Bram Stoker

26 Casting a spell

43

7

Orchard

Charlton Heston 38 Blindfolded

32

8

Stream

Gamal Nasser

79 Chewing thistles

50

9

Old Gunpowder mill Benny Hill

28 Holding up Davy lamp 84

10 Bridleway

Andrew Neil

19 Playing rugby

71

11 Bridge

Steve Nallon

69 Writing

39

12 Windmill

Nadia Comaneci 93 Singing

75

13 Fish farm

Aristotle Onassis 10 Conducting

58

14 Gateway

Bill Oddie

20 Gambling

97

15 Manor

David Niven

49 Combing hair

44

16 Stonewall

Emperor Nero

59 Waving American flag 23

17 Lake

Organ grinder

07 Computing

81

18 Boathouse

Sharron Davies

64 Backgammon

06

19 Old oak tree

Benny Hill

28 Playing golf

62

20 Steep hill

Oliver Hardy

08 Washing up

99

21 Church door

Harry Secombe

86 Milk float

28

22 Font

Oliver Cromwell 03 Becoming a mermaid

48

23 Congregation seats

Brian Epstein

25 Ice skating

34

24 Bell tower

Bryan Adams

21 Guinness

17

25 Graveyard

Omar Sharif

06 Riding a camel

79

You are probably thinking that the number on its own was preferable to this mass of data. But information presented in a linear form like this always looks more daunting than it really is. And as I have said before, an instant mental image often takes several lines to describe.

Despite appearances, the 100 digits have been translated into a series of images that the brain can accept and therefore store more easily. You are now in a position to start memorizing.

SHOOTING THE SCRIPT

Memorizing long numbers is a bit like making a mini-epic. You are the direc-tor, and a whole cast of actors, musicians, comedians, singers, stuntmen, and props are waiting to act out their scenes at a series of specially chosen locations. Here is my script:

OPENING SCENE: 1415

Location: Patisserie (1st stage)

Person: Arthur Daley (14 = AD)

Action: Writing on blackboard (15
=
AE = Albert Einstein)

I am obviously directing a comedy. Arthur Daley, as we saw earlier (in

rehearsal), is writing something on a blackboard. He is standing in the middle of the patisserie, trying to flog a special recipe to the manager by chalking up its secret formula. I can feel the scraping sound on the blackboard (it gets me right in the teeth) and smell the delicious aroma of freshly baked pies.

SCENE TWO: 9265

Location: The road (2nd stage)

Person: Nigel Benn (92
=
NB)

Action: Playing tennis (65 = SE = Stefan Edberg)

Nigel Benn is practising his famous 'punch' volley. For some reason, he has erected a tennis net in the middle of the road and is oblivous to the traffic queuing up behind him. I hear the sound of the horns and smell the fumes.

Benn is holding the racket slightly awkwardly in his bright red boxing gloves.

He hits ball after ball. Perhaps it is just the camera angle, but he looks vast, towering above the net. Hundreds of fluorescent yellow balls are rolling down the sides of the road.

SCENE THREE: 3589

Location: The fountain (3rd stage)

Person: Clint Eastwood (35
=
CE)

Action: Standing at the helm (89 = HN = Horatio Nelson)

The advantage of directing big-cast movies is that you get to meet all the stars.

In this dramatic scene, Clint Eastwood is wearing his usual deadpan expression and chewing on a cheroot, despite being soaked to the bone. He is standing in the middle of the fountain, where an enormous wooden wheel has been erected. The special-effects department have let me down. Eastwood is pretending to be Lord Nelson, battling with the helm in a raging storm. I feel wet as the spray drenches me as well. The whole scene looks like something out of a B

movie, not the mini-epic I had intended.

REMAINING SCENES

And so it goes on. I am sure that with your own actors and journey, you can devise a series of far more amusing, off-beat and memorable scenes.

Continuing with my film, Nadia Comaneci is singing from a windmill,

Emperor Nero is waving the Stars and Stripes, and Benny Hill is up an old oak tree practising his golf swing. He's probably got his 'tree' iron out. An old joke, I know, but they are often the ones we all remember.

FINALE: 0679

Location: Graveyard (25th Stage)

Person: Omar Sharif (06 = 05)

Action: Riding a camel (79 = GN = Gamal Nasser)

The final scene is a typically atmospheric shot, full of meaning and Hollywood dry ice. Graveyards are always misty, and this one is no exception. I see Omar Sharif in the distance, riding a camel. He is picking his way slowly through the tombstones and is wearing heavy, ghost-white makeup. I feel uneasy and cold.

The mist is swirling and a full moon is up. Roll end credits!

REVIEWING

Once you have completed shooting on location, it is time to put your feet up and play back the film. Judge the results for yourself; you may need to do a little editing in places. If some scenes are too vague or confused, you may even have to call up the relevant actors and ask for a re-shoot.

If you are confident that all the scenes are equally memorable and are satisfied with the quality of the acting, you may decide you want to keep your home movie. (It is, after all, the first 100 digits of pi, and people won't believe it when you say you can recite them.) In which case, don't record over the

journey. See it as your master tape, kept solely for remembering pi. After a couple of matinees, you'll soon know the story back to front, literally.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that it is just as easy to recall the first 100 digits of pi in reverse. Watch the film carefully as you walk back along your journey, re-winding the tape. Each scene should come back just as easily, providing you have chosen a well-known journey. You might have to

concentrate a little harder as you break down the complex images, but with practice you should be able to do it effortlessly.

INDIVIDUAL PLACES

Once you are familiar with the positions of each stage (the 11th stage is a bridge, for example), you can start locating the position of any digit with impressive speed.

What is the 16th decimal place to pi? The first thing you did when you

memorized pi was to divide up the 100 digits into 25 complex images, and locate each one at a separate stage. It follows that if you want to know which stage contains the 16th decimal point, you must divide 16 by 4.

You now know that it is the fourth stage, the jewellers, which contains the 16th decimal point. Breaking the scene down into its constituent parts, you have Gamal Nasser, who represents 79 (Gamal Nasser
=
GN = 79) and the action of being blindfolded, which represents 32 (Cilla Black = CB = 32).

The sixteenth decimal place to pi is 2.

What is the 50th decimal place to pi? Divide 50 by 4 to find out the relevant stage. It must be the 13th, which is the fish farm. (The 12th stage covers the 45th, 46th, 47th and 48th digits; the 13th stage covers the 49th, 50th, 51st, and 52nd digits.)

Break the scene down into its constituent parts: The person is Aristotle Onassis (AO = 10). The action is conducting (Edward Heath = EH = 58).

The 50th decimal place to pi is zero.

BIGGER NUMBERS

With practice, you may become more ambitious and want to attempt even

longer numbers. There are two ways to do this. You can either increase the number of stages on your journey, or expand the existing stages to accommodate a bigger complex image. If you have two persons and two actions at each stage, for example, you immediately double your storage capacity to 200

digits. Complex images of this sort are not difficult to form. In Chapter 4, you created ten digit complex images to remember telephone numbers. Wherever possible, try to devise a simple storyline to link the persons and actions.

THE PI CHALLENGE

When I begin to memorize the first 50,000 decimal places to pi, I intend to have 50 separate journeys, each with 50 stages. Every stage will incorporate 5

people and 5 actions, linked by a story. In other words I will be allocating 20

digits to each stage. 50 x 50 x 20
=
50,000.

I find this the optimum geographical design, facilitating the location of any digit. For example, to find the 33,429th decimal place, I would initially take an overhead view of the 33rd journey (around the County of Cornwall), before dividing 42 by 2, to give me the 21st stage. I would then break down the complex image, locating the 9th digit, which in this case happens to be 7. I can make this calculation in seconds, possibly faster than it would take someone to instruct a computer.

Unlikely as it may sound, I intend to memorize the number quickly and

painlessly, absorbing 4-5,000 digits daily over a two-week period. I will then recall the number in front of invigilators, hopefully breaking the world record, and finally erase it; 50,000 digits of pi is not the sort of information I want to carry around in my head long term.

I expect Mr Tomoyori or someone else similarly minded will gradually edge up the record. I predict that the first 100,000 decimal places to pi will have been memorized by the end of this century. Perhaps you are the very person to do it? The only problem I can foresee is finding invigilators who are sufficiently patient and willing to sit through such an event!

23

REMEMBERING

BINARY NUMBERS

HEADS I WIN. TAILS YOU LOSE

I once bet a friend of mine that I could memorize the result of any number of coin flips as fast as he could spin the coin. He accepted the bet, thinking that he was on to a winner. A separate referee recorded the results: if it was tails, he wrote down 1, if it was heads, he wrote down 0.

After ten minutes, the referee had painstakingly written down the results of 300 coin flips. My friend thought that 300 would be a more than adequate number to win the bet. He was wrong. I was not only able to repeat the entire, monotonous sequence, but I could also locate instantly the result of any individual spin he chose. I could tell him, for example, that the 219th spin was a head.

I have to admit that there aren't many practical applications for memorizing 300 flips of a coin, other than taking money off gullible friends. But the ability to memorize binary numbers, which is how I knew whether the coin was heads or tails, opens up a whole range of possibilities.

BINARY

Binary is the language of computers. It is one of the simplest ways of representing information because only two symbols, 0 and 1, are employed.

Anything of a two-state, or dyadic, nature can be translated into binary: on/off, true/false, open/closed, black/white, yes/no, and even heads/tails.

Long binary numbers, however, are fiendishly difficult to remember. On the face of it, they would appear to present even more of a challenge than their base 10 cousins. Unless, of course, there is a way of bringing all those noughts and ones to life...

I have developed a system for memorizing binary that is an offshoot of the DOMINIC SYSTEM, in that it translates boring digits (and let's face it, in binary they are particularly dull) into persons and actions. Only this system is even more efficient. It allows you to remember a 12 digit binary number using just one person and action, brought together in a single complex image.

The task of memorizing 300 flips of a coin is thus made very simple. All I had to do was remember 25 complex images in a leisurely ten minutes - far less of a struggle than trying to recall 300 individual bits of meaningless information.

THE DOMINIC SYSTEM II

The first stage of translating a string of noughts and ones into people and actions is to break them down into a series of smaller groups, each one consisting of three digits. For reasons that will become apparent, you must then ascribe a single digit, base 10 number to each group.

There are eight different ways in which a 3-digit binary number can be

ordered. I have listed them below, together with their new number:

000 = 0

110 = 4

001 = 1

100 = 5

011 = 2

010 = 6

111 = 3

101 = 7

Commit this code to memory. Use mnemonics to help you remember the various permutations. For example, 010 might remind you of an elephant — two ears either side of a trunk. (A trunk, you will recall, is a possible number shape for 6); 101 looks like a dinner plate with a knife and fork either side. (I happen to eat at 7.00 pm most evenings.) And so on.

You can now represent any 3-digit binary number with a single digit base-10 number. It follows that 6-digit binary numbers can be represented by a 2-digit base-10 number.

For example: 011 = 2 and 100 = 5. It follows that 011100 = 25.

A 2-digit, base-10 number such as 25 is a far more attractive prospect to remember than 011100. Using the DOMINIC SYSTEM, you can translate it at