Poem found in calligraphy practice papers

**If you're looking for Pi Memorization help, scroll down; it's below this post.

This poem was written long ago, pre-Finn, but was likely written with all thought given to its script rather than its content -- meaning it's not that substantial since the composer was rapt in the writing, practicing calligraphy. It was still pleasant to stumble across such a positive sentiment forgotten in the papers of my office this morning, however lacking in art it may be.

If it were but always so,
the whisper of summer in the trees
like 7th graders falling in love,

When the world is defined by
intensity and dizzying desire,

When the birds are so loud in the morning
that I wish through my dreams
that the window were open --

But somehow or other the
Earth is awakening in bloom and I
am set to aching by
the beauty of the Spring.

How to Memorize Your Own Pi by 3/14

Numerical associations: where to start and why to start there

The more associations you link with any single idea, the more neuronal pathways there are to activating its representation again – the more different stimuli will bring it to mind. The web provides a perfect analogy. If you have a webpage but there are no links to it from other websites, it can only be accessed by entering its actual address (or value) in the browser; if 10 friends have links to your page from theirs, 11 different web addresses can lead to it – so it’s a whole lot easier to find. In the same way, knowing the value of a number gives you one association with it, posts it as your primary webpage so to speak; people with a disorder called Cognitive Synesthesia perceive numbers as being inherently colored, so they have two links to the number, both the value itself (like 5) and the color they associate with it (like blue). There are 5 kids in my family, so for me the number 5 can trigger thoughts of childhood. Lots of numbers make you think of other things, just arbitrary associations common to all of us that we’ve learned because we’re in this culture:

• 666 – evil
• 911 – an emergency
• 9-eleven – the tragedy that occurred on that date
• 7-eleven – a convenience store

Other such associations are specific to what demographic you hang out with.

• 501 – Levi’s 501 Jeans (if you’re a child of the 80s)
• 10-four – old buddy (if you’re a trucker)
• to 86 something – to nix it, say no, I have no idea where this comes from
• 42 – the Answer (if you’re into Life, the Universe and Everything)
• 420 and 69 –very specific ideas entirely unrelated to the value of the numbers and generally not discussed in undergraduate classes (but understood by almost all undergraduates)

Unquestionably the best source for numbers with associations is your own life, though. Dates, ages, phone numbers present or past, zipcodes present or past – relevant to you or to anyone you know – those are all numbers with passive associations to ideas. All of the associations I have mentioned are passive because none of us ever said “the number 666 will from now on remind me of evil”. That would be an intentional, conscious, ‘explicit’ pairing, whereas passive associations are often unconscious or ‘implicit’, just made stronger by repetitive exposure. When two neuronal representations are activated at the same time, the connection between them grows stronger, so one representation ‘primes’ the activation of its match. That’s the premise underlying this whole game: the stronger the pairing between one idea and a second, the more quickly remembering that one will remind you of the second.

Diversify, diversify, diversify

That premise has a twin – the more representations that are linked, the easier it is to find any one of them. Different senses or “modalities” are a great way to create completely different links in your brain to the same representation. I have tried to recruit many regions of my brain to remember numbers instead of relying on the single strategy of semantic encoding (my term for putting meaning into numbers with idea association). Some of the other strategies are the following:

• visual (recruits occipital cortex): color-coding ‘chunks’ by the value of the first digit; using a fixed presentation of digits for visual context clues learning it by practicing on a spreadsheet;
• auditory (recruits temporal cortex): listening to my own voice repeating the sequence, listening to the same music starting at exactly the same place every time, pairing every number with a specific note and remembering the melody
• spatial (recruits cortex distributed across regions): Melissa Dawe invented the famous Pi Samba in which she stands on the 5 of a number pad and the steps of the dance correspond to the locations of the numbers around her, with special flair thrown in when digits repeat.
• kinetic/tactile (recruits motor and sensory cortex): just typing the numbers on a number pad (this is starting to work but I’m too slow at it for it to help much right now). The Pi Samba also recruits motor cortex for the movement to execute it, but the intermediate step of imagining where number keys would be in a hypothetical number pad makes the resulting representation in the motor cortex secondary to (so probably weaker than) the abstract spatial representation.

For me, semantic encoding is by far the strongest and easiest strategy, but I’ve always read a whole bunch, so stories come naturally in my head. If you’ve played the piano, the keypad method might encode more efficiently; if you do martial arts or dance, the Pi Samba might stick better; if you’re an artist, go with color or weird fonts.

I memorize Pi by first making my own passive associations explicit, so I have a conscious repertoire of numbers that stand for ideas, then bolstering that vocabulary with lots of intentional associations. Some numbers (like 75, the year I was born) refer to a noun (like me); some numbers (like 66) act like adjectives (30-66-47, me(30)-mad at (66)-my dad(47)), and a very few refer to verbs (to 86 something). Often a number like 82 will identify the time of my life that the next ideas refer to, like digits 121-130:

• 85 – happened around 1985 when I was 10
• 211 – my brother Jon, because the number that is really him (34) occurs right before 211 in digits 91-100
• 0555 – three 5’s is childhood, childhood, childhood. 0 just hangs on, no meaning
• 9 – great (trinity times trinity)

So 8521105559 means that around 1985 my brother Jon made my childhood better.

The next step is to reverse the passive association from number-to-idea and intentionally use the idea as a clue for the number. The hard part is relating the ideas triggered by the numbers in ways that make enough sense to remember. It is a very creative process. Once the original encoding is done, once I have ideas assigned to the numbers in such a way that each 10-digit chunk tells a story, then the continuous recall of the idea sequence becomes meditative – relaxing, centering. I cannot obsess about problems if I am concentrating fiercely on recreating the story from its trail of numerical clues.

Hints for Memorizing Pi

1. How you encode it highly effects how you can remember it. If you memorize it on a keyboard, you can recreate it on a keyboard, but saying it out of your head without a screen in front of you is an entirely different act.
2. Don’t repeat an error too many times. The more times you say the wrong thing, the more likely you are to say the same thing wrong next time.
3. Weirder stories work better. They have to make enough sense to remember, but the more vivid they are, the easier they stick.
4. Encode the minimum to recall the chunk. Only about 6 of every 10 numbers has a meaning in my own encoding – the rest of the digits just ‘hold on’ meaninglessly to a strongly-remembered number beside them.
5. Different strategies create links from different parts of your brain. Color, visual structure, sound, movement, saying the numbers out loud vs. in your head, even reciting with your eyes open or closed – every difference results in slightly different neuronal activation, which buys you a couple more clues.
6. Be creative in your associations so numbers can act like nouns, adjectives and verbs. If you remember the phone number of a childhood friend, that number could represent that era of your life, the personality characteristics of that friend, that friend themselves, the state you lived in when you knew them…
7. Keep a pocket Pi in your pocket. It’ll be there next time you find yourself thinking about something you don’t want to be thinking about, waiting for the bus or in line at the bank, and if you’re following a trail of numerical clues to your own story, you can’t bum out about other stuff. Meditation on the fly.

To make your own, write numbers with no punctuation:

___________ Current cell phone

___________ home phone,

___________ parent’s phone

___________ current friend’s phone

___________ first childhood phone # you remember

___________ SS#

___________ Own Birth Date

___________ mom’s birth date

___________ dad’s birth date

___________ sibling’s birth date

___________ friend’s birth date

___________ Current house #

___________ current zip code

___________ Year of HS graduation

___________ Favorite/childhood locker combo

___________ shoesize

___________ ideal weight

___________ worst grade ever in a class

___________ score of most memorable sporting event you played in or watched

___________ channel you watch most often on TV

___________ radio station you listen to most often

Freebies:

• #s w/ cultural meaning: 69, 420, 10-4, 911, 666, to 86 something, 007, 501 (Jeans), 42, 747 (plane), 13 (unlucky)

• Decades: 30’s depression, 40s war, 50s innocence, 60s political hippies, 70s pot hippies/cool music, 80s cheesy music/childhood memories, 90s DINKland/memories/dotcom explosion, 00s life after HS (college for me)

Now decide the string of numbers you want to encode. Try to find instances where 2 or 3 numbers occur in the same sequence from the numbers you wrote of your own ideas. Once you have three ideas, glue them together with a story. That’s it!

In case you have fun with this, I always through a Pi Party on 3/14 every year. No one has taken me up on my memorization challenge. By all means, keep my email, and come over to eat round/spherical/cylindrical things and hang out with interesting weird people at my house next March. Good luck!

3…

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5820974944 5923078164 0628620899 8628034825 3421170679

8214808651 3282306647 0938446095 5058223172 5359408128

4811174502 8410270193 8521105559 6446229489 5493038196

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