I know The Guardian is not the best place to find “real” psychological news, but I was disappointed that there were not more details about how he memorizes pi. Haraguchi is essentially quizzing himself on part of pi every day, helping him to remember the order of the story, and thus the number. As Reisberg discussed in chapter eight of Cognition, along with nearly every teacher I have had since high school, you are more likely to be able to recall something if it was learned well originally, and if you revisit the material later by practicing it. He recites 25,000 digits a day, dedicating three hours of his life to saying numbers by telling stories. One way Haraguchi might be ensuring that this does not occur is by rehearsing. The next question is: how could Haraguchi possibly remember the exact wording of all these stories, and in the right order? His working memory has not (and could not) increased, but he has found a way around the five to nine digit “limit.” This is a lot more exciting than the 110 digits memorized by Steve using race times. Additionally, he sees pi as equal to saying the Buddhist mantra, which indicates that he has made it personal. This is utilizing deep processing, since he is giving meaning to numbers, which will lead to better recall later. Now we know that each number is assigned various syllables, but how does that help him remember the order of pi? Haraguchi reveals that he has created over 800 stories by combining the syllables into words, the words into sentences, and so on. Of course, there are ten number (0-9) in which he must memorize, so it might be assumed that his chunking capabilities are slightly higher than the average person’s. This puts his chunking at the maximum of nine, and he continues this for the rest of the numbers. In his interview, he reveals that the number zero is assigned the syllables o, ra, ri, ru, re, ro, wo, on, or oh. Haraguchi assigned each digit several syllables. Of course, we now know that people can hold 7 +/- 2 chunks, so the only question is, how did Haraguchi manage to put 111,700 digits into five to nine chunks? Has he increased his working memory? This is where it gets complicated. My six memorized digits match the 7 +/- 2 digit span task that we have learned about. I am not sure about everyone else, but I have been able to memorize 3.14159, and this number was looped around more of my classroom walls than I would like to admit.
Akira Haraguchi, a man residing in Japan, was able to memorize 111,700 digits of pi.
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