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.