I think it’s fair to say that the Journey Method was to change my life – but in its earliest forms it was far from perfect. Once I’d had my moment of clarity, I tested my theory about placement by mapping out a journey that consisted of 20 distinct stops. I knew it had to be a journey that was completely familiar to me (I didn’t want to have to spend time thinking about what the next stop was) and I also knew that I’d have to make the links between the card codes and the stops on the journey really strong. So, it seemed natural to make my first journey a walk through the village where I lived. Here are the first five stages:
| STAGE 1 | Front gate |
| STAGE 2 | Next-door neighbour’s house |
| STAGE 3 | Bus stop |
| STAGE 4 | Shop |
| STAGE 5 | Car park |
Then I set about recoding the cards that I’d originally imagined as places so that they were now objects, because otherwise I’d have to pair up two locations and I knew this would become confusing. The 3 Spades, for example, had to change from a forest to a log; the 8 Hearts, which had been a rather vague and forgettable cloud, became me (for no reason other than the fact that I had always found this a hard card to memorize – making it represent me provided an association that is particularly strong, because I can so completely imagine how I would respond to any given situation). With a fixed route and a specific object code for each card, all I had to do was picture each code (card) at its appropriate position along the journey.
Let’s say the first five cards I turn up are: 6 Diamonds, 3 Spades, 5 Clubs, 8 Hearts, 4 Diamonds. This is how I memorize them using the first five stops on my memory journey:
• I imagine an aeroplane (6 Diamonds) parked at my front gate.
• Outside my next-door neighbour’s house there’s a log (3 Spades) leaning against the fence.
• At the bus stop my dog (5 Clubs) jumps up and down barking at the traffic going by.
• Inside the shop I see myself (8 Hearts) buying a newspaper.
• In the car park there’s a bundle of cash (4 Diamonds) in a parking space.
This time my mind couldn’t get confused about the order, because the journey gave me the order effortlessly. My test run of 20 cards proved a complete success – I didn’t make a single error. So, I scaled up: I extended the route so that it went from my gate, through the village, around a pub, across the cricket pitch, along a path with beautiful views to a bowling green, until I had a journey of 52 stages – just right for a whole deck of cards.
After a few more practices at mentally walking my 52-stage route without trying to memorize anything along it, it was time to trial the full deck. Would my promising strategy hold up to my greatest challenge? Yes! I managed to recall all 52 cards with no errors in less than ten minutes. At this point I knew that I could conceivably make a challenge for Creighton Carvello’s 2 minutes 59 seconds – it was just a matter of time.
Perfect as my method was for a single deck, I found that some of the associations I made were so strong that when I tried to repeat the feat, I got ghostly “double” images of previous sequences, and my brain became confused as to which of the images was right for that sequence. The answer was simple: I needed more than one journey. I devised six journeys altogether, using them in rotation, so that by the time I came back to one I’d used before, the memory of the cards I’d memorized on it last time had faded.
The settings for my various journeys had to be sufficiently familiar, stimulating and interesting that I would remember the stages I picked out along them without any trouble at all. I’m a keen golfer, so the natural choices for me were a couple of my favourite golf courses, as well as houses (indoor journeys work just as well, as long as the route around the location is logical, and comes easily to you) and towns or villages that I’ve lived in.
A process of natural selection took place as, by trial and error, I filtered out routes that didn’t work. For example, if the stages along the routes were too uniform in character, I found that they weren’t memorable enough. I devised one journey made up of 52 shops in a town. But it didn’t work, because I had to try too hard to remember the sequence of shops and I had trouble distinguishing one shop from another in my mind’s eye. Fairly quickly I came to the conclusion that variety and contrast in the stages themselves and in my interaction with them are among the keys to a successful journey. Typically, if I base a route around a town, I find myself moving in different ways in or around stops. I make sure I travel in and out of buildings, I might go over a wall or across a stream or river. I might pop into a telephone kiosk, or stop to look at a menu in a restaurant and then wander off to look at a statue, and so on. The journey is interesting and sticks in my mind effortlessly. And once I’ve been through it a few times, I don’t have to think about recalling it – I can mentally walk through on autopilot and use it to provide hooks for me to hang information on.
People often ask me whether or not I regularly update my routes to account for changes in the landscape. The answer is no. Once the routes are hard-wired they provide a track that automatically guides me from stage to stage. Updating causes disruption. In fact, I even avoid returning to old routes, if I can – I don’t want to know if shops change their usage, houses are pulled down or telephone boxes are removed. I prefer to remember and use the routes just as they were.
There was one other element to my system that wasn’t yet foolproof – there were certain card codes that were a bit unpredictable, a few that I kept forgetting. I realized that cards represented by people rather than objects were the easiest to recall. People can interact with the stops on my journey; they have feelings and emotions that can turn an abstract scene into something calamitous, joyous, hilarious and so on. Injecting emotion into my memorizations made them instantly more memorable. So, it was time to turn all my card codes into people (and a couple of favourite animals).
Remember the 3 Spades? First, I coded it as a forest, then a log, and then in my final round of refinement it became Malcolm, the man who used to supply me with logs for my fire. The 6 Diamonds, once an aeroplane, became Tim, a friend who used to work for an airline. So, I set to work feverishly refining my codes until I arrived at a cast-list of characters that would leave a lasting impression on my memory. They aren’t all people I’ve known – there are plenty of famous faces in there, too. The 3 Hearts, for example, is the Beverley Sisters (a singing trio from the 1950s ’60s), while the King of Clubs is no longer Jack Nicklaus, but Adolf Hitler (Clubs makes me think of aggressors). Thirty years on, now that my master race of unforgettable card characters is in place, I rarely alter the codes, because I have no need. And there’s one card that’s very special, because it’s never been altered: I’m proud to say that the 5 Clubs to this day is my dear old dog.