Hey!
I know this is nothing much at all, but I am happy nevertheless. After 26 journeys across 20 days of practice, I’ve reached the 5-minute-line for a deck of cards. Now, I’d like to pose a question for you guys on how to better proceed.
The image below shows a graphical depiction of my training sessions. The blue line shows the actual memorisation times while the green line shows the recall times. To the left of the red vertical line, I was using a “categorised deck of cards”, meaning that I shuffled each suit separately and then stacked them. So, it was obviously much easier to memorize than a fully shuffled deck. My intention was to go light on me, so as to not get frustrated and eventually quit practicing.
A brief analysis shows that recall time usually goes up when memorisation time gets lower. This is understandable, since more time spent memorising each card suposedly better imprints it in memory. A rare exception was on the ninth day (sorry, but I couldn’t put x-axis values in this weird Mac Numbers; I shall use R next time), when I managed to lower both my memorisation and recall times. Recall went well below 5 minutes, one of the three only times I got sub-5 min recall times.
On the 11th practice, I got a “local” best time of 5m52s and then stayed on an overall plateau (although reaching the best time of 5m 29s) until the 19th journey. What I didn’t like was that, although I was keeping my memorisation times reasonably low, recall times were increasing too much.
I then, out of impulse, decided to switch to a fully shuffled deck (to the right of the red line). As expected, my memorisation time went up again considerably, reaching 9m43s, but then kept going down. But that was on the expense of the recall times, which were skyrocketing. Yesterday, I had a worse memorisation time than the day before, got 3 errors (bar plot below) and had a terrible recall time of 17m36s. I thought “You know what, this recall time is so bad, I should just force myself to the 5-min threshold line.”
And so I did. I found this online metronome and set it to 10 beats per minute. This would mean 5 minutes and 12 seconds, so I separated the last three cards and decided to use the 6 seconds I had for the 50th card to “rote memorize” the last 3 cards. That gave me exactly 5 minutes when the 51th beep sounded.
So, great, I memorised a deck of cards in 5 minutes. This is a nice milestone to reach. Now what?
The problem here is the recall time, which, in turn, is simply the reflection of bad memorisation in the first place. When I take my time and spend all the time in the world for memorisation (I did that only once during these 20 days and I used a different improvised memory palace for that), my recall is perfect, meaning that I actually see all the cards where they are supposed to be and recall them in order, one locus after the other. When trying to go fast, recall is a mess! I begin from the last memorised card to the first, but stop after around 30 cards and begin from the other way around. I leave many holes between cards, which I fill up by elimination and constantly re-running the cards in my head. I feel bad when recalling this way; it is not fun at all. BUT, I did memorise a deck in 5 minutes…
So, basically, what I would like to ask is how to proceed now. Do I keep the metronome in 5 minutes and just keep practicing? Do I take my time while memorising and try to recall in less than 5 minutes and adjust accordingly? What now?
Thanks in advance for any help! (and sorry for the long post)
Best!
Tammish.