Choosing Your System

In 2006, in a public hall in Japan, a retired engineer named Akira Haraguchi sat down to recite the number pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, which goes on forever and never repeats. He kept going for hours, with short breaks, far into the night.

By the time he stopped, he had reportedly said a hundred thousand digits, over about sixteen hours. The record was widely reported. It was not officially certified by the record-keeping organisation, so we have to say 'reported'. But nobody doubts that he knew a very large number of digits.

How did he do it? Japanese is helpful here. In Japanese there is a long tradition of making numbers into words by sound. Each digit can be read in several ways, so a string of digits can be turned into syllables, and the syllables into words and stories. According to what he said afterwards, Haraguchi turned the digits into stories made of such words, and he learned them in small groups until they were automatic.

That is just what you are learning. The number becomes words, and the words become a story. The details are different, but the idea is the same.

But notice what Haraguchi's feat does not tell us. It does not tell us that everyone should learn a hundred thousand digits. Most of us need a phone number, a PIN, a year, a code of ten digits on a parcel. For those jobs the best system is the one that is quickest for the job in front of you.

You now have five. In this lesson you put them side by side and learn to choose. A good memory athlete, like a good carpenter, has more than one tool and knows which one to pick up.