M2M Day 4: My first full memorization attempt, and other timed experiments
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 introduced the Pers0n-Action-Object (PAO) memory system, which is the system that nearly every Grand Master of Memory uses when they compete. So, barring any major innovations while training, this is the system I’ll use to break the 2-minute mark.
As a quick refresher of PAO, every three cards in the deck are converted into a single image of a person applying an action to an object. The image is constructed by combining the person from the first card, the action from the second card, and the object from the third card. Once this image is created, it’s stored along a mental journey through my childhood house (called my Mind Palace), ready for recall.
Since I originally learned how to memorize cards only using the simplified system (in which each card is visualized as a person and memorized in its own location), I’ve spent the past three days developing my PAO system.
In particular, I’ve created actions and objects for all the cards. I’ve also started timing myself while completing a variety of tasks, in order to set baselines and help uncover areas that require the most focused training.
Seven timed experiments (before I try to memorize)
1. Flipping through the deck
I started off just by flipping through the deck as fast as I can, while making sure I consciously saw every card. This only took me 10.68 seconds, suggesting that there are no physical constraints on my sub-2-minute time.
This was not very surprising, but something I wanted to document.
2. Mentally reciting all the cards
Next, I flipped through the deck again as fast I as I can, but this time mentally speaking the name of every card. This took me 29.01 seconds.
This nearly 3x difference between seeing the cards and mentally reciting them is most likely due to my subvocalization of the card names (i.e. ‘The Four of Hearts’). Subvocalization is the process of “saying words in your head” and is the main reason people read slowly. Eliminating subvocalization is super important to the art of Speed Reading, and, I also suspect, to the art of Speed Cards.
I wanted to test out my Subvocalization Theory with the next two trials.
3. Mentally reciting all the people
This time I flipped through the deck, and instead of subvocalizing the card name, I subvocalized the name of the corresponding person. This took me 54.82 seconds, which unsurprisingly means that my mental mapping between cards and names isn’t yet instantaneous (or even close).
4. Mentally visualizing all the people
With this pass, I was ready to make a profound point.
My hope was to flip through the deck, only mentally visualizing the person, without subvocalizing their name, and demonstrate that this approach is indeed much faster (just like speed reading).
Sadly, I can’t make that point because it took me 1:01.83 minutes, 7 seconds longer than the previous pass. Basically, even though I was attempting not to, I still needed to subvocalize for most cards before I could actually visualize the person.
I suspect eliminating subvocalization is one of the most important pieces to my training. After all, my memory system only requires the visuals for recall, rendering subvocalization a useless crutch and a major waste of time.
Although subvocalization will boost my numbers earlier on (since it’s more comfortable now), it’s important that I force myself to forgo the temptation. Sure, I’ll be slower right now and won’t seem immediately as impressive, but that’s okay. At the end of the month, I’ll be happy that I had the discipline.
5. Mentally visualizing all the actions
Ugh. When flipping through the cards and trying to visualize all the associated actions (i.e. the A in PAO), it took me 1:59.70 minutes. Basically, twice as long as visualizing people.
This makes sense, since I’m still heavily relying on the person-association to determine the action, but I was hoping it wouldn’t be this bad.
I guess I need more practice.
6. Mentally visualizing all the objects
Same story as above. It took me 2:02.21 minutes to visualize all the objects, while flipping through the deck. Not great.
7. Mentally visualizing the person-action-object groups
Putting all the encoding pieces together, I flipped through the deck creating 3-card images in correspondence with PAO (but not yet placing these images in my Mind Palace).
This took me 2:16.51 minutes, which is actually fairly promising. Assuming that I can place these images in my Mind Palace while constructing them, I’m already basically at 2 minutes.
With that said, because I wasn’t constructing them in my Mind Palace, all the images I created during this pass were very weak and most likely unrecallable. So, my above assumption is questionable.
To test this assumption, I now attempt my first full memorization.
My first full memorization attempt
The Procedure
The official procedure for Speed Cards is a bit different than what you might expect. In competition, memory competitors start with two decks of cards: One deck is shuffled (to be memorized) and the other is in new-deck order.
When the timer starts, the memory competitor picks up the shuffled deck and memorizes it. When they finish, they place that deck down, stopping the first timer and starting the second timer. During this next period, the competitor has 5 minutes to reorder the second deck to match the order of the memorized deck.
Once the second deck is arranged, both decks are put side-by-side, and the cards of each deck are flipped over together. If all the cards match, the memorization was successful.
The memorization time is based on the time recorded during the first timer (i.e. during memorization), but if the 5 minutes runs out during the recall period, the memorization is unsuccessful.
This is the procedure I am going to use during my more formal practice sessions. Although, I’ll consider the challenge a success even if my recall time runs over five minutes.
My first attempt
Here’s a video of my first attempt, which I’ve trimmed down because the entire video is very long and very boring.
It took me 6:18:16 minutes to memorize the deck, which isn’t horrible. Already a major improvement on the 20-minute memorization I completed two years ago (the last attempt before this one).
Most of this improvement can be attributed to the change in memorization systems, from the simple system to PAO.
The 7:58:06 recall time isn’t quite as promising. I didn’t even realize this was going to be a problem (it needs to be less than 5 minutes in an official competition). However, I’m not explicitly measuring recall time as part of this challenge’s success criteria, so this performance is passable.
I’m also not super pleased that I mixed up two pairs of cards: The King of Heart & The Six of Clubs, and The Queen of Club & The Two of Hearts.
Nevertheless, my confidence level is still at 90%. I’m making solid progress.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
