M2M Day 9: Aggressively pushing my pace to reveal my less-obvious weaknesses
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.
I’ve been practicing with the metronome on very slow speeds, as part of my gradual progression towards a sub-2-minute time.
However, out of curiosity today, I decided I would crank the metronome all the way up to 36 BPM (faster than a 2-minute memorization), and see how I fared.
Interestingly, there were many 3-card groups that I had no problem memorizing, and a handful of others that I struggled to encode when the time pressure was on.
Working with the metronome at this faster pace, I was able to uncover some of the weaknesses in my system that I just didn’t notice at the slower speeds.
For example, the Four of Spade gets encoded as baseball player Darryl Strawberry, whose baseball card I had as a kid, but whose face isn’t visually burned into my brain. At the faster speeds, I’m having trouble quickly conjuring up an image of Darryl Strawberry, so I just changed his person image to Derek Jeter, who I can visualize much more quickly.
Similarly, I found that I was having trouble recalling Cameron Diaz, so I changed her person image to Princess Fiona from Shrek, which I’ve found to be much more visually memorable.
In some cases, I found at the higher speeds, certain actions and objects weren’t easily encoded or recalled. For example, Jimi Hendrix’s (the Jack of Hearts) object is an electric guitar, while Eric Clapton’s (the Five of Clubs) is an acoustic guitar. At higher speeds, I didn’t seem to have time to encode the differences between these guitars, so I opted to change Eric Clapton’s object to something completely different.
In this way, I updated about 15% of my PAO system to be more easily encoded or recalled at speeds closer to two minutes.
I really should have optimized my system like this even earlier (probably two days ago), but I was dealing with the Mind Palace crisis then. Still, I’m happy I did this now, rather than in a week or two.
Tomorrow, I’ll see how this newly-optimized system fares.
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