What’s the longest, most interesting thing you’ve committed to memory?

For me, it was probably the names of all 50 states, in alphabetical order. It helped that there was a song we sang every week in U.S. History class. Don’t worry, I won’t sing it for you now. (Honestly, I can’t remember most of it.)

I recently learned of a middle school student at my daughter’s school who memorized the first 300 digits of Pi. Off-hand I only know five: 3.14159. Pi is a strange number, because there is no discernible pattern to it. I’m sure there are some memorization devices people use, perhaps even a song, but the number itself offers no help. It is truly a feat of mental toughness that this student is able to hold hundreds of digits in his mind, in the right order, and can divulge them upon command.

But in the age of calculators, computers, and now AI, I have to be honest that my first reaction when I heard about this. It seemed like a waste of time and mental resources. What is the practical use?

There’s an underrated (or depending on your tastes, overrated) movie from the early 2000s called Red Planet, starring Val Kilmer. It’s about a group of astronauts who land on Mars. At one point, these explorers have to make a navigational decision using only math and rudimentary tools. And one astronaut remarks to the other, “This is it. That moment they told us about in high school where one day algebra would save our lives.”

What could it look like for your life to be dependent on knowing 300 digits of Pi? Will you ever be in a situation where you have to determine the circumference of a circle, to a high degree of precision, by hand?

Hopefully not. Which brings me back to the original question: why memorize Pi? For that matter, why memorize or anything else? Our phones and AI chatbots can remember everything for us, right?

I posed this question offline to some friends, and one said, “Maybe the process of memorization unlocks other abilities in the mind.”

That took me back to a story I heard once about pastors in China. They are at such high risk of being imprisoned that they push themselves hard to memorize large chunks of Scripture. The thinking goes that when––not if––they get thrown in prison, the only Bible they will have will be the one in their minds. But this gives them a superpower: they will be able to teach the Bible to others no matter what is taken from them.

And I’m sure that committing so much of God’s word to memory has other spiritual benefits. Blessings that I’m missing because I rely so much on the Search function in my Bible app.

I wonder what else I’m missing by outsourcing my memory.

Then again, we live in age with an absolute deluge of information. My address book app has over 3,500 contacts. I’m glad I don’t have to memorize anyone’s phone number like I did growing up. However, I still can’t remember my daughter’s phone number. I should probably memorize that.

My maps app can give me directions to anywhere on Earth. And I can be absolutely anywhere and always get directions home. I can wander aimlessly and never worry I’ll get lost…as long as I have my phone. Which is great, because I am naturally very bad at navigation. Embarrassingly bad. Hmmm, maybe I should memorize more roads.

I wonder if there’s something hard I could memorize that will restore my ability to remember other things. Perhaps committing something like Pi to memory could strengthen my mind.

What about you?

What will be your 300 digits of Pi?