I remember it all too clearly. Eighth grade. Pi day (3/14). Every year, the teacher who teaches the 8th grade math class I was in had the students do three things. First, we all had to come in sporting some sort of shirt which had its own Pi day reference. Second, each student was assigned to do a poster on the history of pi. Lastly, all students of her class participated in a memory contest to see who could recite the most digits of pi. Was I about to go home and study, hours on end, memorizing the many digits of the endless irrational number known as pi? Heck no. So what did I do? Instead of paying attention in all my classes before math (which was all of my classes besides gym), I managed to memorize over one hundred digits of pi. I am baffled by the thought of it to this day, but how did I do it?
With the help of my hippocampus which allowed me to create a huge pile-up of short-term memories, I used the memorization technique known as chunking to achieve first place in this contest. Chunking is used almost daily in everyone’s lives. If you look at a simple telephone number such as 123-456-7890, the ten digit sequence is split up into three “chunks” in order to make the number easier to remember. If you look at the number without the dashes, 1234567890, it seems a little bit harder to remember (besides the fact that the number IS just 1234567890). Back to the memory contest; throughout the day, I created numerous chunks of pi (still talking about the number pi), each consisting of ten digits. I would study the first chunk of ten, saying them in order in my head multiple times over, then move on to the next chunk. As I continued from chunk to chunk, I would eventually start back at the beginning, but combine each chunk to create my huge string of memorized digits of pi.
By the time I stepped in the door of my math class, this technique had allowed me to memorize just over one hundred digits of pi. To my surprise, I was able to recite them perfectly, as though I had been practicing for this contest for ages. The next day though, when I tried to remember them again to impress the girls sitting at my lunch table (such a skill is so impressive I know), I only made it to about sixty. Before I knew it (meaning within a week), I had absolutely no recollection of pi. I was astonished by how quickly I lost my newfound ability, but the pi contest was over, so whatever. The usefulness of chunking remains great to this day, and I’m sure that for all of you readers, the feeling is mutual.