Now that I’ve explained to you how important it is to use association, I can tell you how it was that I finally cracked what Creighton Carvello was doing. I realized I needed to stop making lists and stop searching outside myself for the answers, and instead tap into some of that wonderful creativity that was bubbling away inside me already. You have that same creativity inside you, too, which is why I know that my techniques can transform your memory just as they did mine.
So, how did I memorize my first deck of cards? I started by staring at individual cards to see if they reminded me of something familiar – an object or person from my life. For example, I looked at the Jack of Hearts and the face reminded me of my uncle. The 5 Spades looked to me like a hand held out with four fingers and thumb. The 10 Diamonds reminded me of the door to 10 Downing Street (Diamonds reminded me of money or wealth and 10 Downing Street is where the Prime Minister looks after the UK’s prosperity; also the address cued the abbreviation for the card: “10 D”). To memorize these three cards in sequence, I linked the people and objects together – in exactly the same way that you learned to link the unconnected words in the last exercise. I imagined my uncle (Jack of Hearts) using his fist (5 Spades) to knock on the door of Number 10 (10 Diamonds).
Over the course of many hours, I slowly but surely gave every card in the deck a new identity, until finally I had coded each with its own unique association. I shuffled the deck and set to work.
The first full deck took just under half an hour to link together into a story. I had my uncle flying through clouds and firing oranges from a hammock that was dripping with honey. Jack Nicklaus (a golfer, so my King of Clubs) was hoovering up a pair of ducks (2 Hearts, because 2 is represented by ducks in the number–shape system – see pp.82–4 – and the Hearts reminded me of little upturned beaks), which were spitting at a snowman (8 Diamonds – the snowman is the number–shape for 8 and I imagined icicles hanging round his neck like diamonds). At the end of this rather exhausting Alice-in-Wonderland epic, I held the deck face down and prepared to recall each card in turn, revealing its true identity as I did so. I managed 41 of the 52 cards in sequence. Not bad for a first attempt!
I had made a good start – but it wasn’t faultless and no matter how efficiently I used my story system, the thought of emulating Carvello’s memory still seemed beyond reach. He had memorized a deck in only 2 minutes 59 seconds, and for me to get up to speed, especially to complete the feat in three minutes or less, seemed impossible. I wasn’t put off, though – I was sure that complete success must lie around the corner. My obvious, measurable improvements made me even more determined to refine the system until the perfect strategy for memorizing finally came to me.
As I continued experimenting and practising memorizing cards using my story method, I noticed that I was able to string together short sequences of cards, but then I would hit a weak link in the chain and a card would slip through. Let me explain by giving you specific examples of my card codes from those early days and some sense of how I came up with the codes:
6 Diamonds/An aeroplane (Because the number 6 is similar in shape to the jet engine beneath the wing of a plane and flying is an expensive way to travel, which fits with the idea of Diamonds being associated with wealth or money.)
4 Diamonds/Cash (I imagined this card as a collection of four £1 coins sitting neatly in a square.)
5 Clubs/My dog (My Aunt’s dog was called Sally and an “S” looks like a “5”. It was my Aunt’s Jack Russell that inspired me to get my own dog later on in life; I chose Clubs because a club is a weapon and Jack Russells make good ratters.)
8 Hearts/A cloud (Because an “8” reminds me of bubbly, white clouds and Hearts are similarly cloud-like to me.)
4 Spades/My car (Because the four gives me four wheels and the Spades remind me of my tyres.)
3 Spades/A forest (Because Spades are tree-shaped and because three rhymes with tree.)
The logic I applied was that card codes could fall into one of three categories: people and animals; modes of transport; and places. I adopted codes for all the cards in a deck simply by writing down all the card names, deciding on the code for each card, writing it next to the card name – and then learning each pairing. This sounds laborious, and I suppose in a sense it was, but there were certain automatic associations I made (such as 7 Diamonds as James Bond 007 in the film Diamonds are Forever and 9 Clubs as Ni(nine)ck Faldo, the golfer) to speed up the overall process. Besides, I stayed motivated because I knew that once I’d learned the codes, they would bring me ever closer to my goal of matching (perhaps even beating!) Carvello.
I then used the Link Method, creating stories by linking together my codes for each card in the correct sequence. Understandably, perhaps, I found that some sequences were easier to memorize than others. For example, let’s say the first five cards were 3 Spades, 5 Clubs, 4 Diamonds, 6 Diamonds and 8 Hearts. I would picture the forest and in it my dog would be barking at some cash. A plane would land to collect the cash and fly into the clouds. The story had some sense of sequence and logic, so I could memorize it easily. However, any slight alterations in a sequence could cause me problems.
Let’s say instead the order was 6 Diamonds, 3 Spades, 5 Clubs, 8 Hearts, 4 Diamonds. This time I would imagine a plane flying into the forest where my dog is barking. However, my dog now has to fly up into the cloud where there is some cash. The link between my dog and the cloud becomes tenuous – it lacks any believable logic, and this makes it a weakness in the chain.
But trying to hold on to logic wasn’t my only problem. Not only were the links in my chains of association fragile at times, I was expending heaps of mental energy working out crazy leaps and dashes from one scene to another. It was exhausting, time consuming and not foolproof. And then – at last – I had that “Eureka!” moment: I finally understood that I was using all the right ingredients, but in the wrong permutations. I suddenly realized that instead of designating certain cards to represent certain places, if I used a predetermined location and then made every card an object, animal or person, I could place those images at consecutive stops within that location. In that way, as long as the stops followed a natural order, and the link between each card and its location was strong enough, I would surely memorize and recall the sequence perfectly. And there it was, my Holy Grail of memory systems: “The Journey Method”.
A moment of clarity is an amazing thing. You must have experienced it at some point in your life, too. When I realized where I’d been going wrong, and – most importantly – how to fix it, I had a stratospheric surge in self-belief, like the alchemist turning common elements into gold. It was all the incentive I needed to practise hard, working at deck after deck of cards, until my memory could do the same and more as Creighton Carvello. It’s this self-belief that I think transformed me – far more than codes or decks of cards – and taught me that anything is achievable with a will and a way, something my schooldays had singularly failed to do.