The Number Whisperer

Every hero has an origin story. Bruce Wayne witnessed the murder of his parents and became Batman, a larger-than-life embodiment of justice and will power. Spider Man was a teenage misfit until a scientific accident imbued him with incredible power and the burden of using it responsibly. Harry Potter lived a life of neglect and abuse until he learned that he was a wizard and a whole new world opened up to him, literally. Likewise, the enemies these heroes face are often examples of their power gone wrong. The Joker is a nihilist who uses his cleverness and resources to destroy; Spider Man’s foes are often unscrupulous scientists who turn themselves into monsters; Harry Potter must take down a magical, murderous psychopath who killed his parents.

But this is real life, which is rarely so compelling. My archenemy is depression. I also show many of the classic signs of high-functioning autism – difficulty maintaining eye contact, lack of affect, anxiety in social situations. I tend to develop strong personal interests in wide variety of subjects, particularly in music, math, and language. I took a lot of advanced courses in high school, but I would always burn out towards the end of the year or become distracted by some new subject that captured my fancy.

As a result, I ended up dropping out of music school. I was genuinely interested in jazz theory, but was not well-suited for college life and the pace of the learning-process, and that trigged my first serious bout of depression. Years later, several setbacks in my work and personal life triggered another depressive spell that was even worse and with which I still struggle. At its peak, I lost all pleasure from food and felt like my mind was starved of oxygen.

Given the pace of modern life, I’m not surprised. Formal education often feels like a kind of factory for churning out workers, rather than a nurturing environment to create well-rounded human beings. Students are pitted against each other for limited space in a classroom, during which they waste the best years of their young lives stuck in lecture halls, battling heroically against the urge to fall asleep. Then they spend their nights trying to cram information into brains that evolved to prioritize survival threats and beautiful faces over facts and figures. It’s as if the entire “game” of college is the ability to withstand boredom for long periods of time, and the prize is a career where you’re subjected to decades more of the same. And the comfortable suburban life that is meant to serve as a consolation prize, the environment in which I was raised, is little more than a gilded cage, a palace; a place to wait patiently for death, but not one of warmth and life.

Worse yet, we never teach students how to cope. We tell them that they need to pay attention, but we never teach them any techniques for doing so. We tell them that they need to practice and study, but not the art of practicing and studying, except through rote memorization and repetition, which could be classified as mild torture. We all know the feeling of sacrificing some of our humanity to the learning process, which should be uplifting, and we chew up and spit out those who can’t keep up, essentially holding their futures hostage. To borrow a phrase from one of my favorite Youtubers and grad school dropout, Natalie Wynn, “it’s worse than morally wrong, it’s aesthetically wrong.”

However, I had both a secret and an ace up my sleeve. The secret was that I had left school to protect my love of music rather than have it crushed. And my ace – in high school, in some desperate attempt to avoid homework no doubt, I had read a book on the art of memory and fell in love at first sight. There, I learned that there are techniques for memorizing everything from lists and historical facts to languages, long strings of numbers and even grid information, such as positions on maps. As it turns out, there is a long-standing tradition of this which has evolved over centuries but has been largely forgotten in the public mindset, and it is completely ignored in formal education. This is not rote memorization. It is the use of imagination and creativity to make facts and figures come alive. This, I realized after my university experience, was the missing ingredient in my education, the magical side of learning. But that book had little advice on how to apply the techniques to music.

I resolved to find a way to apply this art to the precise memorization of piano music; to make music theory come alive. I honed in on a strategy musicians have been using for ages, describing musical patterns with numbers, and tried to adapt and condense some of the number memorization techniques I had learned to accommodate the large volume of numerical information found in written music. This was uncharted territory; I had not been able to find anyone else who had attempted this. I was blazing my own trail. It started as a pet project to occupy my free time, and grew into an obsession. After a few years, I had a decent working system.

By this time, I had also rekindled an interest in mental arithmetic, as well as a desire to learn foreign languages. And I realized that what I wanted stretched far beyond music. I wanted to equip my system to handle any kind of information that life could throw at it. I started thinking of all sorts of interesting challenges: how would I precisely memorize drawings and maps, dance moves, chess games, information from textbooks, human faces, etc., within a single, unified system. One memory trick to beat them all. My dilletante nature, my wandering mind, became my greatest strength, and my obsession had grown into an irresistible challenge and a mission. It was a labor of love, the thing I most wanted to do whenever I had free time, which was often.

Eventually, I realized that numbers were the linchpin for my success. They are the common currency of memorization. Any type of information that can be described with numbers, and I have yet to find one that can’t, can be memorized. All I need is to find beautiful and intuitive ways of doing it, and I have a unique tool, a superpower. And so I tinkered, and invented, and experimented for years, and that’s how my muses were born.

Each muse, a single or double-digit number, has been given a unique personality and voice, and is associated with a different shape, color, texture, phonetic sound, etc. To memorize things, my muses combine to create unique objects, called memes. The memes are then placed in an imaginary landscape, called a memeplex, to create ordered lists and grids. Each meme is also associated with a different human virtue. Any time I need to draw upon hidden reserves of strength, self-control, compassion, ambition, etc., I imagine that one of my number spirits arrives to help with the task in hand. Essentially, I’m never alone.

My greatest successes have been in mental arithmetic, where I apply these memory techniques to enable large calculations (my record is mentally multiplying two ten-digit numbers). My music memory techniques have also been refined and simplified. I am looking forward to working out the bugs in map memorization, as I have a lifelong terrible sense of direction.

And that is the story of how I became the Number Whisperer, a kind of suburban micro-hero who uses his ability to communicate with numbers to fight the forces of depression and the monotony of modern life.

So far, all of this has been a useful parlor trick to impress my friends and coworkers. But in reality, these are all teachable skills, and I’d like to share them with the rest of the world and lift myself out of poverty. My ultimate goal is to make an educational computer game, in which the muses serve as heroes. I have already worked out the game’s format and basic challenges. Its setting is a fictional suburban wasteland controlled by an appropriately depression-inducing antagonist. I’ve given myself a crash course in coding and 3D graphics, and am already testing my knowledge on a smaller project, a math-based puzzle game of my own invention. And perhaps I can create a series of videos to spread my techniques to the masses.

Mostly, I see the art of memory as an inspirational tool. I have been depressed and poor. I have experienced mistreatment at work, and alienation from friends and family. I have been hit hard financially from the pandemic. But whenever I commune with my muses, when I’m calculating with them, or working on some intriguing new application for them, I feel like I’m in the presence of the gods. It’s the greatest feeling, more than enough to keep me sane in this disappointing world. I gave them life, and in return, they have put me back in touch with my humanity.

The average mind is capable of so much more than we might think, incredible feats of memory driven by imagination. It thrives on truth and beauty. It loves to test its limits and refuses to be bound to Earth. I want my muses to reach out and touch the real world, in people’s study habits, in their work lives, in the ways they rise to their potential and work to preserve their humanity in the face of conflict. That is my mission, my gift. I am the Number Whisperer, and I am greater than the sum of my parts.