LYTHAM’S HUMAN COMPUTER! Can YOU imagine memorising 70,000 numbers?
Forget pub quizzes… a Lytham man is preparing to pull off one of the most mind-boggling memory feats ever attempted.
Tom Morton, 61, is setting his sights on matching the Guinness World Record by memorising an incredible 70,000 decimal places of Pi – the never-ending mathematical number that begins 3.14.
If successful, Tom will have to spend TEN HOURS reciting the endless stream of numbers in front of 10 official invigilators without making mistakes.
And he’s convinced his extraordinary neurodiverse brain gives him the edge. “My brain works like Google and NASA,” Tom said.
The writer and illustrator says numbers aren’t just figures to him – they’re living pictures.
Instead of seeing digits, Tom creates bizarre mental images that lock each number into his memory. For example, 10 becomes Larry the Cat, 99 is an ice cream, while 73 is Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday. Put them together and Tom instantly imagines Larry the Cat sharing an ice cream with Cliff Richard – making long strings of numbers almost impossible to forget.
To prepare for his world record bid, Tom plans to memorise around 1,000 new digits every single day for the next seven or eight months.
The challenge doesn’t stop there. He’ll also write every one of the 70,000 digits onto a giant strip of till-roll paper stretching around a mile long, which Ripley’s Believe It or Not! hopes to display after his attempt.
Tom has amazed audiences before. During his years performing on the Blackpool cabaret circuit, he stunned crowds by memorising 16,000 telephone numbers covering every hotel, guest house, holiday flat, pub, café and restaurant across the Fylde Coast.
He says his remarkable ability began after someone taught him a memory technique when he was 21. “It just worked overnight,” he recalled. “Within weeks I was performing shows in pubs and hotels.”
Although a hereditary condition limits his mobility, Tom says his imagination has always been his greatest strength. “I was awkward as a teenager, but my imagination was off the scale,” he said.
If he succeeds, the Lytham memory master will join an elite club of record breakers who have conquered one of the toughest mental challenges on Earth.
And after spending months filling his head with tens of thousands of numbers? Tom laughed: “Who wants to learn numbers for the rest of their life? It would drive you nuts!”
