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[heron]

Anybody ever tried this? It's where you try to memorize the order of a deck of cards as fast as possible, or the most digits in 5 minutes, or the most cards in an hour, or a variety of other things.
I just read the book Moonwalking with Einstein (great book), and decided to give it a shot. I started yesterday, and amazingly I can already memorize the order of 28 cards (Aces to 7's) in around five minutes.
Last week I didn't think that I could ever do that.

I'm using the PAO method, because that was the one described in the most detail in the book.
It works as follows: Each card has a Person, an Action, and an Object associated with it. So, when you flip over three cards, say 3H-7D-5D, you visualize the person of the first card performing the action of the second card onto the object of the third card.
For me, this looks like myself shooting lasers out of my eyes onto a cow. That's hard to forget.
The other thing is that you imagine yourself walking through a building, like your house, and seeing these images. For example, I'd see myself shooting lasers at a cow on my driveway, and then at the front door there would be my band director throwing a saxophone or something.

Anyway, it works pretty well. I think I'll try to get a whole deck down to 4-5 minutes and then maybe turn to digits.

[heron]

I tried to memorize a whole deck today, and I took about 8 minutes.
I had four errors, but I'm satisfied with my first try. I accidentally skipped over what my math teacher was doing to a cup of coffee, forgot that there was a french horn player in the middle of the street enlarging a bowling ball, and mixed up my 2's and 3's and 7's and 8's.

[HiveMindEmulator]

How do you decide what person/action/object to associate with each card?

I usually do something like this to remember phone numbers or confirmation numbers. Usually I just take pairs of numbers as jersey numbers of athletes or various other obvious numerical associations, like years of important historical events, etc.

[shraeye]

That's the hardest part of the system, I think.  If you just crib somebody elses set of "people" "actions" or "objects" they don't have enough meaning to you to have them stick.

I used to fiddle with Rubik's cubes quite frequently (PB: 23 seconds), and played with blindfold-solving them(PB: about 1:47, I lost my exact records during a computer switch ).  There I had colors instead of numbers, so used them to describe an object uwhich followed the needed color pattern.  Then used the objects to build a story, which helped me remember the order to shuffle the pieces around with.

[popsofctown]

I don't see how it'd be fun.  I highly recommend the book though.

[Awaclus]

This sounds extremely weird to me. I remember the order of stuff just by memorizing how the order feels like.

[heron]

I generally picked my associations randomly. Sometimes they are related, but the majority of the time they are not.

[HiveMindEmulator]

I generally picked my associations randomly. Sometimes they are related, but the majority of the time they are not.

So then you need a memory mnemonic to remember the associations...

[popsofctown]

This sounds extremely weird to me. I remember the order of stuff just by memorizing how the order feels like.

Synesthesia?

[shraeye]

I would like to standardize a few things if I were doing this for cards.  Like all
Spades would be American men
Hearts are American women
Diamonds are foreign women
clubs are foreign men.

So that all red cards are female, and the major suits (from bridge) are American while minors are foreign.

I might categorize them further.  Possibly have lettered cards (jack, queen, king, Ace) be politicians/diplomats; 2-6 be people I know, 7-10 be athletes/celebrities.

[zporiri]

I enjoy playing chess blindfolded (against someone who isn't blindfolded). It requires an extreme amount of concentration and I usually have a headache afterwards lol, but I really enjoy it. I can hold my own until the end game when there aren't many pieces on the board. I found that it's harder to keep track of a few pieces because I usually remember where the pieces are in reference to other pieces.

[shraeye]

I would like to standardize a few things if I were doing this for cards.  Like all
Spades would be American men
Hearts are American women
Diamonds are foreign women
clubs are foreign men.

So that all red cards are female, and the major suits (from bridge) are American while minors are foreign.

I might categorize them further.  Possibly have lettered cards (jack, queen, king, Ace) be politicians/diplomats; 2-6 be people I know, 7-10 be athletes/celebrities.

For the people at least. 

Then I'd have a similar breakdown for actions based on categories (violent actions for clubs, obviously; not sure how to do the others)

Haven't even started thinking about objects.  The more I think about this, the more I want to give it a try.

[heron]

I generally picked my associations randomly. Sometimes they are related, but the majority of the time they are not.

So then you need a memory mnemonic to remember the associations...

Well, I can take as much time as I want to memorize my associations, (and in fact, I already have them memorized) so I don't absolutely need a mnemonic for them. Also, if I get good enough to do this quickly, my associations will become second nature anyway.
I can see how a system like shraeye's could be helpful when starting however, especially if you were making a large PAO like 000-999. Some people use things like the Major System (where each digit is a consonant sound, e.g. 175=TKL=tickle or something) to formalize their associations.

[Awaclus]

This sounds extremely weird to me. I remember the order of stuff just by memorizing how the order feels like.

Synesthesia?

No, I don't mean the orders actually and literally FEEL like something to me, it's just that certain numbers, melodies, firework displays, drum setups and orders of cards in a deck are like warm and comfortable, others are energetic and heavy, others are freezing and dark, others are unsettling and creepy. No, I'm not gonna post a link to a creepy firework display, but my current drum setup is slightly unsettling.

For example, I can order the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 0 in different ways and describe how those orders feel like.

8251396704 - a boring order
2034956718 - a nice order
3476921580 - a clever order
9206157834 - a cold order
1564932807 - a heavy order

Does any of this make any sense?

[Ozle]

Hey! One of those is my phone number!

[Axxle]

This sounds extremely weird to me. I remember the order of stuff just by memorizing how the order feels like.

Synesthesia?

No, I don't mean the orders actually and literally FEEL like something to me, it's just that certain numbers, melodies, firework displays, drum setups and orders of cards in a deck are like warm and comfortable, others are energetic and heavy, others are freezing and dark, others are unsettling and creepy. No, I'm not gonna post a link to a creepy firework display, but my current drum setup is slightly unsettling.

For example, I can order the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 0 in different ways and describe how those orders feel like.

8251396704 - a boring order
2034956718 - a nice order
3476921580 - a clever order
9206157834 - a cold order
1564932807 - a heavy order

Does any of this make any sense?

Synesthesia?

[Awaclus]

Synesthesia?

I'm not admitting anything!

[popsofctown]

It sounds a lot like your describing a form of synesthesia, Awaclus.

[theory]

Specifically, Ordinal linguistic personification:

Ordinal-linguistic personification (OLP, or personification for short) is a form of synesthesia in which ordered sequences, such as ordinal numbers, days, months and letters are associated with personalities (Simner & Hubbard 2006).

[Awaclus]

It sounds a lot like your describing a form of synesthesia, Awaclus.

I still don't think I have a neurological condition, I'm just basically expanding this and this concept to everything. And also it takes a lot of effort to describe the impression I get from a phone number, for example, in words; after all, there are no words for those so I have to use words that are meant to describe something else and then it gets inaccurate.

[eHalcyon]

It sounds a lot like your describing a form of synesthesia, Awaclus.

I still don't think I have a neurological condition, I'm just basically expanding this and this concept to everything. And also it takes a lot of effort to describe the impression I get from a phone number, for example, in words; after all, there are no words for those so I have to use words that are meant to describe something else and then it gets inaccurate.

Colour theory of warm vs. cool is very intuitive for most people because it's based on actual light conditions.  Orange is like the sun, it is warm.  Grey-blue is like a cool overcast day.  Easy.

The saxophone sounds are a little more difficult for me.  Can't say much about that.

But your number descriptions?  Completely unintuitive.  All those orders that you differentiate as "boring" or "clever" or "cold" or "heavy"... I don't see that at all, and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people would not see it either.  The orders are just random and applying concepts like "cold" or "heavy" to a string of numbers makes no sense at all to me.  That you just naturally feel those descriptions for orders is really neat... and it really probably is a form of synesthesia, even though you didn't realize it.  And that's cool!

[Qvist]

Wow, I never heard of synesthesia before. I did some research and this is really interesting.


I agree with everyone else here and the link theory posted seems to describe exactly what Awaclus showed in his post.

[Awaclus]

But your number descriptions?  Completely unintuitive.  All those orders that you differentiate as "boring" or "clever" or "cold" or "heavy"... I don't see that at all, and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people would not see it either.  The orders are just random and applying concepts like "cold" or "heavy" to a string of numbers makes no sense at all to me.  That you just naturally feel those descriptions for orders is really neat... and it really probably is a form of synesthesia, even though you didn't realize it.  And that's cool!

The orders aren't random, I spent like 30 minutes arranging and re-arranging the numbers so that they would be describable with words as much as possible. They were a result of my own inspiration, and that's why it was easy for me to describe them. But this number: 6415131409310 (I currently see it in a juice can on my table), I can't describe the impression I have, because the number isn't designed to have a clear atmosphere on it.

It's the same thing with music (obviously, because music after all is just numbers): this song, for example, is sad.

[Kirian]

It sounds a lot like your describing a form of synesthesia, Awaclus.

I still don't think I have a neurological condition, I'm just basically expanding this and this concept to everything. And also it takes a lot of effort to describe the impression I get from a phone number, for example, in words; after all, there are no words for those so I have to use words that are meant to describe something else and then it gets inaccurate.

Synesthesia is not a neurological condition except in the sense that, say, the ability to play Dominion is a neurological condition.  What you are describing is quite plainly synesthesia.

[theory]

I agree.  If you are concerned about the "stigma", I mean, it's not really a stigma.  You aren't crazy or defective.  It's not a neurological disorder.  Your brain is just wired differently from most people, ergo, you have a "neurological condition".  No different than how being left-handed is sort of a "neurological condition".