M2M Day 20: Why am I breathing so heavily? And other answers

This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For November, my goal is to memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards in less than 2 minutes.

Yesterday, I shared a video where I memorized a deck of cards in 2:02 (two seconds short of my target time).

Today, I thought I’d answer a few question I received about the video.

Yesterday’s video

Why are you breathing so heavily in the beginning?

For the first 30 seconds of the video, I shuffle the deck while taking a few very big deep breaths. This isn’t for dramatic effect.

Instead, I’m trying to calm myself down, so I can memorize with a clear head (I completed another, slightly less successful memorization just before this video started). I didn’t even realize I was taking such heavy breaths until I watched the video back.

For the last 10 seconds of this getting in the zone period (i.e. from 0:20–0:30), I sit there, staring blankly at the table. During this time, I’m mentally traveling through the Mind Palace I plan to use, making sure it’s clear in my mind.

In this video, I actually tried two Mind Palaces before I decided on the second.

Why were you going so slow at the end? You could have definitely broken two minutes!

At 1:55 into my memorization, I only have four cards left to memorize. Since I typically practice with one-deck recall (where I recall the cards out of the same deck in which I memorized them, from first to last), to encode these four cards, I memorized one 3-card PAO group and then one card on its own in my Mind Palace.

However, in this case, I could have easily taken those five seconds to look at the cards, just commit them to short-term memory, and then immediately pull them out of the blue recall deck before I forgot.

Instead, I took the two extra seconds to save them to long-term memory, forcing me to just miss my target time.

It’s pretty clear why I made this mistake:

1. I wasn’t using a timer. Instead, I was memorizing as fast as I could and planned to add the digital timer in post. So, I didn’t realize how close I was. Otherwise, I would have used the short-term memory trick.
2. I started thinking about the time. When I got to the last four cards, I started wondering how much time had elapsed. This is very bad. As soon as I start thinking about something other than the cards themselves, I’m in trouble. In this case, I started thinking about the time, temporarily getting distracted from memorization, and forgetting about my short-term memory trick (instead, falling back into my well-practiced habit).

What’s going through your mind during recall?

I’ll write about my recall thought-process in a longer post another day, but I do want to point out one interesting thing that happened during this particular session.

At 8:53 in the video, I only have three cards left to recall (before reassembling the deck). When I get to these three cards, I can’t seem to figure out how they go together.

I realize that I actually made a mistake during memorization. I memorized the first PAO group as Adam Sandler throwing (like a baseball pitch) eggs out of the window, instead of Adam Sandler hitting (also like a baseball pitch) eggs out of the window with a baseball bat.

That’s what I get for having two baseball related actions.

Anyway, at this point in the video, I realize I made a mistake memorizing the second card, and correct the mistake, leading to the perfect recall.

Read the next post. Read the previous post.

Max Deutsch is an obsessive learner, product builder, guinea pig for Month to Master, and founder at Openmind.

If you want to follow along with Max’s year-long accelerated learning project, make sure to follow this Medium account.