As part of my resolution to do regular memory training, I’m going to write at great length about what I do. I would love it if a lot of other people would join in and share your practice routines, tips and results, and hopefully we can all improve together! I’m thinking of doing a different discipline every day and have a weekly schedule, but whether I can stick to it, I don’t know…
So, I’ll start with speed cards, just because when I’m sitting down to train, speed cards is always what appeals to me the most, and so usually what I do first. On my desk (my training place in my new flat is the table in my living room) are a pile of shuffled packs of cards (I’ve got 34 - used to be 37, but I’ve lost three of them), three other older packs sorted into sequence for recall, a Speed Stacks timer, a pair of earplugs, a stopwatch, a piece of paper to record the time on, and a pencil. A hat (to prop the stopwatch up against) is optional.
I start the stopwatch and wait for the first minute, to correspond with the ‘mental preparation time’ we get in competitions. I use the time to mentally run through the journey I’m going to use, two or three times. Not in any great detail, just visualising the locations and saying to myself “one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine” as I picture them. (I put six cards on a location, so I need nine of them for a single pack). I visualise moving from one to the next, not just picturing them as nine unconnected backdrops.
For example, the journey I’m using today is the one I call “First”. All my journeys have a simple name like that, I have them all written down on a ragged old piece of paper somewhere - not sure where it is after I moved house, I might have to write a new one, but I know the earliest journeys and the order I always use them in without having to look at a piece of paper. “First” is so called because it was the first journey I created - waaaaaaay back in August 2000, when I first decided to try memory techniques, bought a book by Tony Buzan, and worked out a 26-location journey in order to try and memorise a pack of cards (back then, of course, the system was one card to an image, two images in a location, as recommended by the book).
It’s a terribly badly-designed journey, with some locations right next to each other and some miles apart, and the way it looks in my head now is completely and totally unrecognisable from the real-life location it was based on. But it was supposed to start in the London student hall-of-residence room I was renting for the week of the Mind Sports Olympiad, and finish at the MSO location at Alexandra Palace. The first location is the room, then the hallway, then down at the bottom of the stairs, then outside the main entrance, then in the courtyard, then out on the street, then sort of half-way down the street, then at the corner, then half-way down the street round the corner. Like I said, terrible journey, but I’m so familiar with it now, it works for me.
After about 30 seconds of the mental preparation time, I pick up the pack of cards in my right hand (face-down, facing away from me, so if I turn my hand upwards I’d be looking at the bottom card) and put both hands on the timer (having of course turned it on and pressed the reset button before starting the stopwatch). I then run through the journey another time or two, and when the stopwatch gets to one minute, I start memorising. Neurons on the ready, go.
I look through the cards, from my perspective, from the bottom to the top - I saw it got a mention on another thread recently, but there are plenty of videos out there for you to see exactly what I do if you really want to. I always say the name of the image, silently, to myself - the name is what comes into my head first, followed by the picture. As I’ve described in plenty of other cases, each image interacts in some way with the next - there are three images on a location, but the final one on each location interacts with the first on the next, so it’s more of a long, continuous story, and the locations are just a sort of backdrop to it.
I usually go as quickly as I can when I’m practicing. After all these years, I don’t have to stop and think whether I’ve remembered the image clearly enough, I know when to move on automatically (doesn’t always work, of course, but it mostly does). For the last five images (so, the last ten cards, or the last two locations), I just look at them quickly and say the names to myself. The names come to mind immediately when I look at the cards, so I’m saying in my head “guts-Gandhi-Reg Hollis-cob-Hourman”, or whatever the five images were. Having done that, I put the cards down, stop the timer and close my eyes. I usually push my glasses up onto the top of my head and cover my eyes with my hands, but that’s really just a cosmetic thing that’s just a force of habit, it doesn’t make any difference since my eyes are already closed…
The first thing I do in my head is create images from the five names I’ve been saying to myself repeatedly while I’m doing all this. Then, once I’m sure I’m properly picturing those final five images, I go back to the start of the journey and recall what I’ve seen on the first seven locations. I run through everything I can remember - there are almost always a lot of blank spots - a couple of times, then think about what’s missing.
At around this point, I usually open my eyes, look at the time on the timer, write it down on my piece of paper, move the timer away, move away the memorised pack and put the unshuffled pack in front of me. Then I close my eyes again and try to fill those gaps.
Sometimes I’ll pick a card I’m pretty sure doesn’t feature in any of the images I can remember, for example the ace of hearts, and mentally run through the list of all 52 images that feature that card. When I get to the one I’ve seen, it usually jumps out at me, and often helps me remember the images that came before and/or after it as well. Or sometimes I’ll just let my mind wander, and sometimes images will just come back to me.
When the stopwatch gets to six minutes (one minute mental preparation time and five minutes memorising), I stop it, reset it and start it again for five minutes of recall. I fan out the cards on my table (my unshuffled decks are always organised ace to king, clubs-diamonds-hearts-spades, starting from the bottom of the pack, meaning that the ace of clubs is on the right and the king of spades on the left) and pick out all the pairs of cards corresponding to the images I can remember, starting from the first location. I put them in a pile, face-up, and then when I come to a blank spot, I start another pile next to it, and so on until I’m at the end.
Then I look at the cards remaining in the fan. I pick up the one on the right, which will normally be a low-numbered club, and moving from right to left (I don’t know why I do this backwards, I just do), check the image it makes with each other card (so if I’ve got the five of clubs in my hand, I’ll picture all the images with the five of clubs as the first card, and each of the other remaining cards as the second). If there’s an image I’ve seen, I usually remember it, and add it to my pile at the appropriate space. If not, I put the first card down to the far left of the others, pick up the next one on the right and do the same again. When I’ve put a whole pack together, I look through it to make sure that I’ve got them all right.
Again, there’s videos out there of me doing this, if my explanation doesn’t make much sense.
When it’s the end of the recall time, or else when I’m confident that I’ve finished the pack (no sense waiting for the end of the five minutes here when I’m just sitting at home), I put the memory and recall deck side-by-side and turn the top cards over together, just the way it gets checked with an arbiter at the competition.
I do three runs of speed cards whenever I’m practicing, just because that uses up one complete journey. All my journeys are 26 locations in length - location number nine on each serves double-duty when I’m doing speed cards; it’s the final location of pack number one and the first of pack number two.
Today’s results: the first pack was 31.65 seconds, which surprised me - I thought I’d gone faster than that. But the recall was terrible, I couldn’t remember most of the images at all. The second pack was 27.34 seconds and the recall was tricky but not so bad - in the end I’d reversed the order of two different pairs of consecutive images, so no score there either. And the third pack 28.72 seconds and the recall for that was even worse than the first one; nowhere near.
So that gives me a base to improve from! Now all that remains is to sort the recall packs back into sequence for next time, and maybe shuffle a few more packs so they’re ready for future memorising (I’ve got six shuffled packs waiting, so there’s no hurry there).
And I’ll try to post something like this for any other disciplines I practice, too! 