I’ve been a long-time fan (and daily practitioner) of memory retention techniques for six or so years, and I love it. But I never really got into memory palaces until recently (after reading the famous Moonwalking with Einstein). But the more I learned, the more exciting it all was. In the end, I gave myself the challenge of getting sub2 minutes in Speed Cards within one month.
That was one month ago. The goal was a little ambitious (at least for me), and though sadly I didn’t make it, I am pretty proud of my progress. My first time was 12:54 a few weeks ago, and then a few days ago I had it down to 3:27 (0 errors).
But I still want to get that sub2.
What do you all think of this daily plan? I can probably give 15–30 minutes a day to this.
Encoding practice. Turn on a metronome and flip a card every beat. If the image is clear and immediate it goes into pile A; otherwise, pile B. Once I finish the deck, I repeat the process with pile B.
Palace practice. Turn on a metronome and then mentally travel to the next locus, making it as vivid as possible, with each click. Then do it again without the metronome. Do this for one or two palaces a day. (I have about ten.)
Time trial. Every 10 seconds, flip three cards, encode, and put at a locus. Try and finish each triple before the timer goes. (If it goes well with 10 s, do with 9 s next time, etc.)
Any feedback on this approach? I’d do it 5-6x a week until I was sub2 (or until a better practice idea revealed itself!). Thanks!
I assume you’re using a PAO approach since you mentioned flipping sets of 3 cards at a time. Remember when you are practicing for recognition to isolate the P’s, the A’s, and the O’s per card individually. More on this here: Tip for practicing PAO
The gradual pushing of your speed is smart too. I think if you stick with it, you’ll see results fairly soon!
Just remember it takes more effort to go faster the faster you go. Going from 3:30 to 3:00 is about a 14% time reduction for a 30 second decrease. 3:00 to 2:30 is about a 16.5% decrease to chop 30 seconds, and going from 2:30 to 2:00, again the same 30 second decrease, actually involves a 20% time reduction. This effort needed scales up rapidly the faster you try to go.
If you ever push yourself to get under one minute, think about the difference between going from 3 minutes to 2 minutes (a 33% decrease) versus 2 minutes to 1 minute (a 50% decrease.) It gets tough.
Thats not to discourage you, but to advise you to be realistic about the effort needed so you don’t get frustrated if you hit plateaus of progress as you get faster!
Thanks for this! Yes, doing PAO, and that’s a good point about isolating the PAOs separately. I was just working on the “card-to-P” linkages (and assuming the AO’s would tag along), but I think it’ll definitely help with speed to create strong card-to-A & card-to-O linkages.
Out of interest, do the folks who get 1–2 minutes in speed cards do any kind of review while their encoding a pack? When I was getting ~5+ minute times, I’d encode one triple, quickly review the last two in my head, then move to the next. It really helped with accuracy, but slowed me down for sure.
Trust your brain to do it in one pass with no going back. (You’ll fail in recall quite a bit at first, but then, you’ll start retaining the scenes. Especially as your loci visualization gets stronger.)
A great way to try this is to take your next target time, lets say 3:20 (210 seconds) for a new personal best, divide the time by 18 to get your target time per scene. (This would be about 11.5 seconds.) Set a metronome to click at that frequency and spend ALL of the time allotted on each scene visualizing it and linking it strongly to it’s loci. Trust the loci to clue you into your scene on review.
At first its going to feel a little frantic and fuzzy, but you’ll get there.
There’s a good android app (not sure if its available for iphone) called “Interval Timer” thats designed to help pace physical workout routines, but you can easily use it for cards by making a workout with 52 “sets” at X seconds per set to practice your pacing for individual element recognition, and you can save a workout with 18 “sets” at X seconds per set to pace yourself with your deck attempts to time each PAO scene and advance you at your target pace.
5 minutes is a long time. The total items memorized will vary widely depending on your pace. If you can do a deck of cards in one minute then in theory you can try for 5 decks. You need to have a very very solid grasp on your loci and have instant fluency so that all of your focus can be on memorable scene construction and interaction so those elements can be recalled.
I think training with no reviews while in memorization mode is a good idea no matter how long your memorization time limit. It will force you to make your visualizations vivid and fast.
I understand… with repetition I can achieve more than 99% accuracy in my training… but I’m slower… but seeing people who memorize 50 names and faces with 60 words in 5 minutes, it’s the same as mine, which is 18 names and faces and 20 words in 5 minutes… I’m going to bet on the same strategy… who knows, maybe one day I’ll double like the athletes above the rankings… because if you look at the statistics, I’m half of those who do double in any subjects… without repetition in names and faces it’s the same as with repetition… let’s see if I improve and get faster…