Handy MnemonicsThe Five-Fingered Memory Machine

By Kensy Cooperrider
Before humans stored memories as zeroes and ones, we turned to digital devices of another kind
— preserving knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms. Kensy Cooperrider leads us
through a millennium of “hand mnemonics” and the variety of techniques practised by Buddhist
monks, Latin linguists, and Renaissance musicians for remembering what might otherwise elude
the mind.

PUBLISHED
April 21, 2022

Drawing on paper from Mogao Caves, reproduced in the fourth volume of

Aurel Stein’s Serindia: Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia and
Westernmost China (1921) — Source.
No one knows who made the drawing. Likely the work of an eighth-century monk, perhaps a
member of an esoteric Buddhist cult traveling the Silk Road, it long sat forgotten in a walled-off

library in China’s Mogao Caves. When the library was uncovered in 1900, the drawing — lifted
from a trove of religious manuscripts — had aged well. Its subject is timeless: a pair of human
hands.1

The hands are disembodied, perched on lotus petals, palms facing the viewer. Their fingers —

vigorous and elegant — are annotated with Chinese characters: the lowest tier of characters, on
the tips, names each digit; above that, a second row gives the five Buddhist elements: space,

wind, fire, water, and earth; and a final tier, floating upwards as if on kite strings, lists the ten
virtues — among them meditation, effort, charity, wisdom, and patience. The drawing illustrates

a mnemonic system, a way of projecting knowledge onto the hands so it can be studied,
memorized, and stashed in a pocket.

Around the same time this mnemonic was made, another monk — in a Northumbrian monastery,
halfway around the world — was developing a different system of manual knowledge. His name

we do know: Bede. In 725, he published a treatise, The Reckoning of Time, in which —

alongside discussions of shadows, moonlight, and the solstices — he laid out a method for
determining when Easter would fall on any given year.2 This may sound like a trivial exercise,

but, for Christians at the time, it could hardly have presented a more important or vexing

problem.
※Indexed under…

 HandsCalculations involving
“Loquela digitorum” (finger reckoning) after Bede, from an early 9th-century
manuscript — Source.
To find the date of Easter — which falls after the Northern Hemisphere’s spring equinox, on the
Sunday immediately following the first full moon — one needs to reckon with planetary

rhythms, which Bede mapped across his hands. The five fingers, he observed, contain fourteen
joints, plus five nails — nineteen landmarks in all. This number tracks the metonic cycle: how

many years it takes for the moon to return to the same phase on the same calendrical day. The
joints of both hands taken together, minus the nails, gives you twenty-eight landmarks: the

approximate length in years of a full solar cycle. In this way, Bede noted, the hands can “readily
hold the cycles of both planets”.3 Beyond this basic set-up, he left the details obscure and didn’t

bother to include an illustration. (The technique, Bede wrote, is “better conveyed by the
utterance of a living voice than by the labor of an inscribing pen”.4) But his system — known as

a computus digitorum, or simply computus — found an appreciative audience. It was widely

circulated and adapted, and would remain a cornerstone of Christian learning for centuries.

These two systems — perhaps the earliest examples of manual mnemonics — come down to us
only in outline. And yet we have little trouble recognizing their appeal. They seem to spring from

an impulse that transcends time and place, a deeply human drive to reach for props to help us
reason and remember. “When thought overwhelms the mind”, the psychologist Barbara Tversky
has written, “the mind puts it into the world”.5 In the case of hand mnemonics, we put those

thoughts out into the world, in a sense, but also keep them within easy reach.