Memorising a deck of cards

The last week or so I've began to dip my toes into the waters of memorising a deck of cards.  Each card is now represented by a person, whether they are real or fictional and it is now a matter of automatically associating the card with the person.  I carry about with me a deck of cards, shuffle it and then test myself to see if I can remember which person the random card happens to be. It's difficult going, some characters were automatically chosen, it was like I had made no effort in making them who they were, but others had to be thought about. Sometimes I even changed the characters because they didn't quite match and even now I'm not entirely happy with the odd one here or there.  But the more I shuffle those cards and the more I test myself the easier it gets, at some point it will become more fluent and I'll not sit there looking at a card and searching my mind of who it is suppose to be.  Sometimes I try to elaborate the individual when this happens. For example the two of diamonds.  Diamonds represents wealthy people and twos are fictional female characters.  I've picked this card to be Trinity from the Matrix movies. Then I think about it Trinity used to wear a black leather tight suit, so perhaps she should of been a bad ass from the Clubs suit.  However, she played a good character and the wealthy bit relates to her style, she pulls it off.  Lets just say she's not as common as shite.  So there I sat looking at the two of diamonds wondering who the hell I allocated to this card and eventually had to refer to my notes. Now I try to see Trinity with diamond ear rings, except these are red diamonds, and she has one on each ear.  The image has stuck a little better since this happened. I've wondered it may be necessary to do a little more research into each of the 52 characters I've used and this interest will in itself cement the card face to the character.  This is of course the first part of the exercise.

The next part of the exercise may be to create 52 points via the method of loci.  So today I've been out on a long walk, a walk I have taken many times before, but this time as I walked along I took photos with my camera phone.  The battery lost a lot of power and I didn't finish the walk but did take about 300 pictures.  This doesn't mean I have 300 significant loci points, it does mean I have 300 images to source from my walk. Some pictures are of the same places from different angles.  This is going to pose a dilemma.  If the final walk ends up with more than 52 loci points then it will be excessive to me needs but could be useful at some other time. The walk is not redundant, it's just the need for a specific journey which has only 52 data points to reference.  There is also the addition of creating markers which are significant points in the journey.  How often are these put in place? As I'm dealing with a pack of cards should there just be 4 sets of 13, or should they be more frequent? I got no idea.  There's a bit of guess work going on here. So the walk is unfinished, I still don't have a set 52 point journey although I do have an earlier 26 point journey which helped me learn the Phonetic alphabet. But what does this all mean as well?

I am hoping this research can be used in some other way, by using mnemonic methods I am able to generalise them to other stuff. Especially work related, even for instance ingraining the days of the week for a number of years would be useful.  All what's needed is to know the Sunday each month falls on see Higbee's book (Your memory how it works and  how to improve it). Knowing Monday dates just happens to be important to my work at the Fish Factory.  Remembering official and important circulars would be of particular use as well, but it's not a matter of just knowing stuff it is also being able to interpret and understand the stuff I know.  This is where having a sound knowledge and use of mnemonics comes into play, because you can then go over items you've remembered and analyse them without of actually having the material in front of you.  It is just there in your head

Taking the day off, taking a long walk, enjoying the sun did me no end of good today. Now if only I could recall a deck of cards.  It's going to happen, it's just a matter of time now.

Early days as a mnemonist

Although the subject of memory has come up throughout my life, I've never really properly dipped my toes into the waters. To in effect make the effort and really work out what is going on with this mnemonic thing and see if it works. It works but it also fails, the failures though I put down to my own understanding. It's early days and like a muscle being used it has to be exercised, the more I exercise it the better it gets. Except of course for my left arm and should which really are screwed up while I await an appointment with an MRI machine, courtesy of the NHS.  There are times when creating mnemonic images are difficult, when I do get an image then it is necessary to glue the thing together because it is a paired associate task.  For example, I learnt in one exercise that the capital of the Bahamas was Nassau.  The image I set in my mind was of lots of little bananas dropping out of a nose and it worked.  However, in trying to think of a mnemonic for the capital of Fiji which is Suva, I kept thinking of a fig on a tree and of it dropping onto a Sofa.  However, when testing myself there was contamination with another item.  In recall I came up with Sofia, which is the capital of Bulgaria.  The image of a fig falling on a sofa was not working, and meant I needed to unlearn this and use an alternative, but it's not quite working.  I just changed the image and now try to think of a fig falling ontop of the head of someone called Sue who was saying the word "go" and in French go is the word "va."  It's still not working and I need to scrap the image and start again.

There is no doubt now as I  practice exercises from a book by Dominic O'Brien the important ingredient is effort and continuous practice. Mnemonics I've found are composed of multiple techniques and each set of techniques is used to help remember a different subject. Be in numbers, faces or capital cities.  They do in instances overlap each other however they are not always easy.  Patience and a quite room helps, as does good concentration. It is early days, very early and it's been several evenings trying to conjure up personalities for a deck of cards.  This is another of my ongoing exercises to try and achieve, i.e. learning the order of a deck of cards, the goal being once able, to try and do it under a minute.  The world record is 21 seconds, which is mind blowingly fast. 

I have tried to explain to others these feats are not by super human beings they are the use of methods which are thousands of years old, but it may appear the individual is very smart.  My memory is a rusty tool because my imagination has not had such demands on it before and now it is getting a bit of work out.  It's good. What is good though is getting it right and reinforcing this over and over again.  I also have at hand some useless facts which have stuck in my head from the earlier part of O'Brien's book, such as an ant having 5 noses, Australia 7 states and recently the capital of Estonia being Tallinn, which I have tried to make as the image of a stone ear being thrown at the tall doors of an inn.  There sure are some weird images floating around in my head right now that's for sure.