Thanks!
Excellent!
@Upendi, I was wondering about any special techniques you use for the Tea Party. I just recently was thinking about that and proferred a new idea for training but I would love to hear what worked best for you. Thanks.
Doug
Are you asking how I went about training for it or my approach during the actual event?
@upendi, the types of mnemonic systems you use is what I’d like to know about. Of course, other people who plan to develop their skills in this might like to know about your training as well. Appreciate it!
Doug
So basically I broke down how I was going to tackle the different information and used some different ideas for different kinds of information. Basically I used memory palaces, but more as a guideline or lifeline for particularly obscure answers or anything I couldn’t build any personal associations with.
In the memory palaces I use I know which location is which number and I know which piece of information belongs in which number location just based on the order, so I planned to visualize and store everything but their name in its respective location, but for maybe a third of the information I would end up not encoding anything in those locations and just skip it because something just clicked about their information that reminded me of something else and I felt very comfortable that I would pick up the association in recall. I built up a pretty solid gauge on what was a strong enough association to some memory of a moment in my life or something that relates to me in practice to make this call on the fly. I’ll make reference to examples from the event later in this post.
For the names of the speakers I was basically memorizing the names how I would if I was just doing a names and faces event.
Anything number related it was just using my 3 digit major system to store the numbers. For any numbers that aren’t in convenient chunks of 3 I group them by 3s until the end, and whether it’s a phone number or zip code or something else, I know where the 2 digits or single digit falls and for that I either use 0## or 00#. For two of the zip codes in the event I skipped this because one zipcode was Minneapolis which I just knew, and one of the area codes was 03030 which instantly made my mind jump to my friend who is a huge Steph Curry fan cheering “Oh thirty, oh thirty” every time he hit a big shot, so instead of major system numbers it was just my buddy Anthony in his Steph jersey.
For things like their occupation I look at the person and imagine them at work. Doing so many rounds of practice with so many different occupations I had a lot of practice imagining various occupations quickly. I find this is better than trying to come up with an image and storing it in a memory palace because as I’m looking at the persons face on screen it’s easier to go back to what I imagined them doing for work because I’m actually looking at part of that image.
For the pets I just imagined that pet playing with my dog in the location where I planned to hold the pet information, either with a toy that would tip me off to the name or with some other image that would point me to the name (luckily pet names are usually short and pretty standard).
For colleges I would just try to brutishly carve out some image that would work to remind me what the name of the university was.
Birthdays I didn’t store in a location because I have a friend who is really knowledgeable about celebrity and historical figure birthdays, and in spending so much time talking with her about this I know an embarrassing amount of celebrity and historical figures birthdays. For this reason I just pick the closest celebrity birthday I know and in recall I’d just go to that date and kind of “walk” forward or backward through the days until the date felt correct. I don’t know the exact number of dates that I can pinpoint to one of these figures but it’s probably in the mid-200s. I’ve thought about just making a peg system for days and filling in the blanks and just using celeb/historical figure associations for dates but it wasn’t something I was going to work on so close to the event. Hilariously enough, 3 of the birthdays were my niece, sister, and best friends birthdays. For the year I just did either 1 or 2 for the millenium, skipped the century number, and then filled in the last 2 numbers. So if they were born in 1979 I’d use my image for 197 which is Tupac Shakur, 2001 it would be 201 which would be an extravagant birds nest.
For things like the cars I would usually have some association that just sticks with me and I would just remember the anecdote about the model of car and color. The car answer I had was a 1958 Lincoln Continental in sequoia green, and I immediately thought of the episode of Friends when Ross and Rachel were deciding which names they would NOT name their child, and Ross said “next thing you’ll do is name our child Sequoia” so I imagined the speaker going to get the keys to his dream car from Ross and Rachel.
I think all the other categories I just imagined that food at the location that was reserved for food.
I hope I explained that well enough, it sounds all over the place but I believe that if you’re really confident a silly association like my friend with the Steph jersey will stick I just decide right then that’s what I’m banking on and go straight to the next thing to focus on.
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Great reply, @Upendi. Thanks for the detail and your thinking process!
Doug
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Sure, I could add that. Is it part of the new Tea Party Guests event?
Yes @Josh , the employment date has a day now. Thank you!
Ahhh, yes…that 1958 Lincoln Continental was SEQUOYA green. 
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Sorry for the delay, I’m just getting to this now.
If anyone here is interested in using it for training, could you take a look at the current format and let me know if there are any details in the format that should be changed?
For example:
- Does the birthday need a birth time?
- The the employment date need to include the day of the month?
- There shouldn’t be a phone number there? Their website shows a phone number.
- Any other changes?
This is the sample data on the official website, but I don’t know if it’s current:
Name (first, middle, last): Rebekah Lynn Hughey
Date of Birth (month, date, year): August 26, 1976
Residence (city, state, zip code): Pittsburgh, PA 15212
Phone number: 919-225-1146
Pet (type, color, name): black tarantula Sweetie
Favorite 3 hobbies: watching baseball, writing, playing bridge
Favorite car (year, make/model, color): 2019 Audi Q5 white
Favorite 3 foods: peas, Brussels sprouts, Primanti sandwiches
It changes year to year but the most robust format youd want to look for is the 2021 format. Thatlist was very exhaustive, 2022 had less information per guest but more guests. Hope this helps.
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If anyone knows all the fields that might possibly occur (and the most useful ways to print them on the screen), I could make a settings box where people could choose which items to include.
Like right now, the program is generating the telephone numbers, but that data just isn’t being printed to the screen. Things like that could toggled be a checkbox in the settings, if it would be useful to anyone.
Here’s an example of an autogenerated round of guests from my spreadsheet using the 2021 USAMC format. Guests 1.pdf - Google Drive it’s open for viewing have fun with it.
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Thanks, I updated the page:
- employment now includes a day of the month
- phone number is back (because it was listed on the USAMC website).
- gender was moved to a small letter on the top right, so people can use it if they need it.
If anyone wants things to display differently, let me know. I could make a settings box that allows some fields to be hidden, and/or add new fields.
Based on a request, I made a small edit so that appending ?format=usamc to the URL removes the phone numbers:
- Includes phone numbers: https://artofmemory.com/tools/people/
- Removes phone numbers: https://artofmemory.com/tools/people/?format=usamc
More information is on the page.
If anyone needs other changes to the script, let me know.