Memorizing 40 Digits of Pi with Memory Palaces, Synaesthesia, Hypnosis, and Sex

I texted khatsha, "If you could memorize anything, what would it be?"

She wrote back, "How about the first forty digits of Pi?"

She's a nerd, and I love it!

For a long time, I've been thinking about how hypnosis could be powerful for memorizing, when combined with other mnemonic devices. Mnemonics are a huge interest of mine, ever since I learned that they are extremely effective, which I wish my teachers had let me known when I was still in school.

My plan was based on the concept of a memory palace, a device used as far back as Cicero for remembering the order of things (such as sections of a speech). I experimented with it on myself, memorizing the order of verses of Bob Dylan's surreal Desolation Row. Here are the first lines of the first five in the correct order, from memorizing it 7 years ago and probably not recalling in a year:

- They're selling postcards of the hanging
- Cinderella she seems so easy
- Now the moon is almost hidden
- Ophelia she's 'neath the window
- Einstein disguised as Robin Hood

The secret is to choose a set of physical locations that you know very well, and ideally a route between them that is natural and that you can clearly picture travelling.

There are many ways we could have approached learning a sequence like this, for instance anchoring it on to the digits from 1 to 10 (maybe using the "one - bun" "two - shoe" mnemonic), but I wanted something that would let her rip through at speed, with relatively little practice.

For khatsha her memory palace was the route from the train station to her parents' house. She chose a set of ten landmarks along the way, such as the station itself, the yellow buses parked out front, and the grocery store right across from the station. What's cool about a memory palace, I told her, is that they are reusable: many ordered lists of 10 things could be associated with these ten locations, as long as they were from relatively different domains.

I broke the first 40 digits of Pi into ten groups of four, which I called "quartets" (this is exploiting another memory trick, called "chunking") Now the challenge was to associate these quartets with each of the locations. Ideally, they would be deeply integrated with that location, not just say written on a piece of paper there.

My initial idea was to have the digits engraved in surfaces in these locations, with the different materials perhaps helping to associate the digits with the location, e.g. carved into rock. My other idea was that a kind of glyph could be made of the four characters, as in graffiti art, so that for example "5213" could make a heart (52) and then a B (13). Or one could imagine them as animals (like 5 is a snake) involved in some kind of story.

But khatsha took an active role, and reminded me that she is synaesthetic. For her, each digit has a distinct and vivid colour association, that has stayed constant for as long as she can remember. So we decided to exploit this. For each location, we came up with a little scene, which I'm going to call the icon, that would contain the four colours, and hopefully be involved in the location.

For example, one location was a particular grey rock. She imagined a green python with blue eyes curled around the rock, pooping, with some of the poop dried. Based on her colour associations, once she had this image in mind, she could translate it back to 2795.

This was not the first version of the icon. I quizzed her through the list several times, and we often had to strengthen an icon. Problems included not being specific enough about the shade of the colour, the icon not being associated with the scene enough, or being too separate to retrieve all at once. One interesting issue was about encoding the order of the digits in the icon. She came up with a set of rules for this, like that the colours would procede from left to right of the icon, or from top to bottom, or large to small.

The first version of the python icon had too many loosely connected elements - like the python was staring at the sun - so I'm glad she came up with the poop. The sillier, more offensive, more sexual, or more emotional your mnemonic devices are, the better.

We also walked through the locations several times, and here we had to do some fine tuning too, when she skipped past one of them. So we made it essential, that she had some food to buy so that she would be sure to stop at the grocery store after the schoolbuses.

Once we had strong icons, and were reliably retrieving all the locations in the correct order, I put her into a trance and walked her through it again. I had her imagine it as real as possible, using all her senses, and I also encouraged her to imagine her icons in a lot of detail.

Was hypnosis necessary in this case? Probably not. But I think it helped settle the memory palace and the icons into her memory.

After only a couple of runs through, khatsha was retrieving all 40 digits perfectly. Then additional practice made it smoother and faster.

This process from beginning to end took about one hour.

I tested her yesterday, eight days later, and she was still perfect. I'll bet if she uses it once in a while, say every week for a while, then every month, then every year (this is the memorizing principle of spaced repetition), correcting it where digits go wrong, she could easily have it 20 years from now. And more digits too.

Because this is Divney's Adventures in Erotic Hypnosis and not Divney's Adventures in Rather Interesting Hypnosis, I'll go ahead and tell you what I did next.

I dropped her into trance again and gave her a trigger that would cause her to compulsively recite the list of digits, staring blankly at her webcam, in a robotic monotone. With each digit she would get more calm and mindless, until at the end she would be completely empty-headed and programmable, staring into the lens. In practice this is an eyes-open trance, and so it is an effective and very hot induction - and it even works via Whatsapp. And it helps motivate both of us to rehearse together...

As a result of this suggestion, and her hypnosis fetish, it seems there's a side effect of my memorization help: whenever she thinks about the digits of Pi, she gets turned on.

Oops!

Induction via Whatsapp

A bit of background. This is my first ever interactive text induction, and my partner's first as well. We have great rapport in our in-person and Skype trancing, and we've played with sneaky inductions, aka covert inductions, a number of times before (and I have some measure of standing consent for that). Even still, it was so exciting and erotic for me to see it work so well (though there are clearly things to watch out for), and to be able to go back and see exactly the words I Swyped that captured her and led her into trance...