New Personal Best

I was annoyed with myself last night. I've been working far too hard at this memory lark to be making silly mistakes like that so I thought I'd give 80 random digits a crack at lunch time today. I got 100% right in 4mins 1 second which I was really pleased with. Had I been in competition I could have used the last minute to squeeze another 20 digits in I'm sure.

I read through all 80 digits first and then had a second pass at them on a review. I was pleased at how well formed my original images were on my first pass. I would have made mistakes on the recall if I'd only looked at them once, but not many.

I'm so much happier today that I was last night. I really annoyed myself but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. I want to crack 100 digits in 5 mins by the end of this weekend and then I think I'll move on to binary for a bit. I think It's a good idea at the moment for me to be spending time on events in week blocks until I start to get a bit quicker. Then I can mix things up a bit :-)

Numbers practice

I've not practiced numbers for ages, and it shows! Thought I'd go for an easy 80 digits tonight to get back in to the swing of things and only got 74 of them right, which isn't very good at all. Mind you, it's a few more than the 66 I got in WMC.

I know I can do 120+ comfortably when I'm in the right frame of mind. Really forced myself to practice tonight so wasn't in the right mood for it at all. I'm going to lay off the cards for a week or 2 and just practice numbers to see how much better I can get.

I'll crack 120 by the end of next week :-)

Rant

Here is the last few days of my life:

1) Someone drives in to the back of my car and drives off without leaving any insurance details. Total cost to me - £150 insurance job

2) Mac laptop dies and needs to be re-installed

3) Other mac hard drive dies

4) Someone drives in to my girlfriends mums car (that she's borrowing) and drives off

5) We both had a Chinese last night and both feel very sick today.

So I've done no memory training at all which I hate and life just seems to be working against me! Damn to everything I say! On a final note, if the person who keeps driving in to our cars and driving off is a memory person and happens to read this I hope all your dendrites fall our of your arse you evil person!

There, that was all I needed to do :)

Lunch time practice

I memorised 3 packs of cards at lunch today. Results are as follows:

Pack 1 = 2 errors
Pack 2 = 1 error
Pack 3 = No errors!

All from memory, no re-ordering decks at all.

The time was about 40 mins which included re-shuffling the 1 pack I had 3 times and the recall period.

Pleased with the clarity of the images. Worked hard on linking the first card to the location and the second card to the first card. I discovered that almost all of my errors were on the second card of a pair, not the first indicating that I wasn't linking the 2 well so I was easily forgetting the associations. Making a conscious effort to sort that out seems to help a lot.

Random Numbers

Why they don't just put them in order I don't know, but it's an event I need to work hard on until they decide to do that.

I had a very quick look at a sheet of numbers last night and got some good work done on it. I think I'm going to have a go at 5 minutes with no review tonight and see how that goes. I want to find where my natural "breaking point" is. I did a pathetic 66 at WMC and have done 80 in practice the 1 time I've tried it since then but I'm sure I can go in to the early 100's now with no reviews and perhaps up to 150ish with the right strategy.

Another new card technique?

I was messing around with some cards last night and thought of a way that I can review what I've memorised without having to go right back to the start.

As I use the Roman Room method I go in a circle of 10 items in a room, normally putting 2 cards in each location using person/action. If I was to put a single card in each of the 10 locations and then go back to the first location and link a second card to the first one I'm getting a little review of the first card in each location. Also, I could go around again for a third time to the start and see the first 2 cards in their location and link a third card to them getting a nice little review of the first 2 cards in the process. This would allow for 30 cards per Roman Room which would be quite nice.

I've tried it out and it works, although it's a bit strange but could have some good possibilities.

I'm not sure if anyone has done it like this before so I'm going to give it a name................."The Roman Room go round and round 3 times putting cards there each time" or for short.......simply "The Roman Route system"

Let me know what you think!

New personal Best

Well, I'm calling it that because I did a perfect recall apart from reversing the 47th and 48th cards which I got stuck on for ages whilst I was memorising! Did a good time of 3:17 though so I'm pleased with that. All apart from about 10 cards were straight from memory with no working out to be done with another deck which was also very promising.

I'm pleased with that. I'll be under the 3 min barrier very very soon. The images felt (for the most part) very fluid, not much actual thinking to do to get the links etc. so I was a lot more relaxed. Made an effort to REALLY exaggerate the images which helped on some of the cards I've been known to get a bit stuck on in the past.

All in all, heading in the right direction and very happy, especially after my poor attempt last night! We all have bad days I guess.

I think I'm annoyed with my memory!

I practised some cards last night and did a whole deck in 3:25 which would have been a personal best for me, had I not made a complete arse of the recall. I had some huge gaps followed by some moments of absolute clarity.............followed by a gap, followed by clarity! It was very annoying and I came away feeling very frustrated with myself because I know I can go faster than this. Like Dominic says though "there is nothing wrong with my memory, just the way I shot the film!" and he's right. My memory is fine, I just need to get used to shooting a "good movie" in my mind at speeds higher than this and I'll get there.

Strangely enough, on another attempt later that evening I clocked a 3:44 perfect deck which isn't particularly fast, but is consistent with what I have been achieving for the last few weeks. I had perhaps 4 gaps which were easily filled when re-ordering the second deck so was fairly easy. I keep reading about the benefits of making mistakes. It teaches you where your boundaries are and helps push you further so I guess I shouldn't be too upset. In the quest to go faster, I should expect to make mistakes and learn how to get positive future results from them.

I think I'm addicted to memory

Seriously, it's getting really bad now. I've just noticed that almost every phone number I dial I convert the numbers in to images, I practice cards/numbers every lunch time and every evening, I form images for every name I read or hear, most evenings I go through my card images in my head as I'm going to sleep, I use a brain wave balancing machine every other day, I convert number plates of cars in to images and numbers on all road signs................................I think I'm crazy!

I have to say, I do love it though. There is nothing quite like going through a pack of cards and memorising them all. Something very satisfying about getting them all right, always makes me grin :)

My times are coming down and down for everything as well. I've got some acetate sheets of A4 that I'm drawing a grid on in permanent pen so I can print off 1,000 digit sheets and fill in my answers in non permanent pen over and over again.

I need to practice a lot more on the numbers. I'm looking ahead to the WMC this year and trying to work out what I should go for. "As many as you can you idiot!" I hear you cry but hark, tactics must come in to play. I need to go for an achievable number that I can get good scores on, not something so huge that I only end up memorising about 40 digits. I'll have to see how the training goes but I did 400 last year and I hadn't ever practised a number event longer than 10 minutes prior to that which was encouraging. I didn't make any errors either which was even more encouraging!

I really want to do 1,000 digits to get that part of the grand master done but I think I'll need a bit more practice before that. Hopefully have enough time before WMC this year to get it nailed. I know it can be done, but I want to do it a bunch of times before doing it in competition where things always seem to be harder.

And now I ask myself....................why aren't I the world number 1 with all this going on! Perhaps my brain is overloaded and I just need a week off :)

More card practice

I did some practice today with the cards at lunch whilst at work and managed to visualise all images (i.e. pairs of cards) in a whole pack in 1min 40sec. I didn't memorise anything other than the 26 pairs individually but I'm confident I can go under 2 mins for Cambridge this year after this performance. The images were clear and I wasn't rushed. Felt good!

Grand master here we come!

Goin' bak to the old skool, like the old fool........

I practised several decks of cards last night in a way I used to do when I first got started. I pick up a shuffled deck and time myself to see how long it takes to take each individual card and form an image out of it before moving on to the next one. When I stopped doing this I was at about 1min 10 seconds but after about 15 goes last night I was averaging about 40 seconds for the whole deck with my quickest being 38seconds.

This is just the time to form images, not to memorise anything but I think it's good practice and will revisit it perhaps once a week or so. If I can get down to about 40 seconds and be doing my person-action images and not just a single picture then I would be getting very very excited!

Moving house hurts

It's awful, just awful. Moving house has got to be the most stressful thing I've ever done. I'm never going to do it again!

On a plus note, our new place is nice and quiet so I can concentrate better on my memory training. I think I've prepared enough routes for Cambridge already so shouldn't have to re-use anything like I had to at WMC 06.

Did a very comfortable pack of cards yesterday using an ordered deck I put back in the order of the cards I memorised. Felt a lot more confident doing it this way as I had lots of reminders for the 3 blanks I came up against. They were easy to track down as I only had 3 cards left when I'd put the pack in order. I'm going to keep training like that I think and try to get the times down to around 2.5 ish minutes or so for Cambridge.