I think it would be fair to say that I have a compulsive personality. The Journey Method had given me the means by which to memorize a deck of cards just like Creighton Carvello. However, I’d also by then seen Creighton Carvello’s name in the Guinness World Records book for memorizing six decks of cards. If I could match his single-deck feat, then surely I, too, could memorize six decks or more and get my own name into print. In other words, once I’d created the Journey Method, I clearly wasn’t going to rest until I’d beaten Carvello’s record. All I needed to do was to increase the number of routes I used so that I could deal with multiple decks. For example, to memorize six decks of shuffled cards I needed six routes each of 52 stages. Easy!
Within three or four hours I’d managed to master routes around three golf courses, two of my childhood houses and the town of Hastings in East Sussex, where I once worked. (Incidentally, if you’re not a golfer, you may have been wondering how three golf courses can be distinctive enough to provide good routes for memorization. I don’t really have an explanation for that, except to say that if you are a golfer, you’ll understand! Each course has its idiosyncratic stops and undulations, and if you play them enough – as I confess I once did – each is wonderfully unique.) I used these routes to memorize six decks of cards – with no errors.
My repeated attempts to refine the system with the goal of getting into the record books, apart from proving to myself that I could be the best, made me realize that in order to achieve great feats of memorization I needed to have a bank of journeys that I could draw upon at will. Over the years I’ve not only refined and perfected the Journey Method, I’ve also added to the bank of journeys I use. At first, while I was developing the system and then during the years when I competed at the World Memory Championships, I added several new routes a year, but since I took a break from competition, I’ve added maybe one 52-stage route annually. Now, I have a collection of 70 routes each of 52 stages that I use again and again. Some I reserve exclusively to tag together to memorize massive amounts of data in competitions; some I save for specific tasks, such as to memorize a to-do list, or the key points of a presentation.
To give you an idea of the sorts of locations I choose, my top 20 routes – that is, the routes that I know best and that have proved most successful for memorization – comprise three golf courses, six houses, five hotels, three towns, two schools and a church. These are all places that I know really well and they already have a memory footprint in my mind. I number them from one to 20 and if I need to use more than one of them for a particular memorization, I always use them in the same order, from one to 20. There are no hard-and-fast rules for deciding which locations will make your best memory journeys – choosing the journeys you’ll use to store information is entirely a personal matter, but I do have some top tips that I hope will help to make your own memory journey bank a truly successful one.
Even once I had my bank of journeys, getting my name into print didn’t happen overnight. My first attempt to make the record books was in 1988, when I memorized six decks shuffled into each other with only a single sighting of each card. I made no errors ... but then later that year fellow Brit Jonathan Hancock topped me by memorizing seven decks.
More determined than ever, on June 11, 1989, I memorized 25 decks with four errors, but even that wasn’t enough. And then, finally, on July 22, 1990, I did it. I memorized 35 decks of cards with only two errors and entered the Guinness World Records book (1991 edition).
I can remember being on holiday and rushing into a shop to buy a copy of the book on its launch day. My excitement was at an all-time high. This was going to change my life! More important, though, was that seeing my name in print confirmed in my own mind that perhaps I wasn’t as empty-headed as I’d always been told I was at school. With self-confidence and determination, perhaps there was nothing that my memory couldn’t achieve.
Today, although that original record has been broken, I’ve had several other entries in Guinness. My journeys are so much second nature to me now that not only have I made the record books for numbers of cards memorized, but also for the speed of my memorizations. In 1996, on the UK show Recordbreakers, I memorized a single deck in just 38.29 seconds and, in fact, I hold the current world record for number of cards memorized: 54 decks, following a single sighting of each card, with only eight errors, which I achieved in May 2002.
Apart from enabling you to concentrate on the items you need to memorize, rather than on the route of the journey itself, knowing the journey seamlessly is one of the keys to shaving off seconds in the process of memorization (and it’s the reason that I’ve made the record books for speed; see box, opposite). Forest walks I often take with my dog, homes I’ve lived in, towns and villages I’ve lived in for years, and so on, all provide me with perfect journey material. I know all my journeys so well – forwards and backwards – that travelling from one stop to the next has become virtually automatic. Instead of mentally watching myself walk step after step along the journey, I appear to travel in a series of snapshots – it’s like a slideshow in my mind. However, don’t expect this to happen immediately. When you start out, you might need to “walk” your way through your journeys, but eventually you’ll be able to zip magically from one place to another – as long as your journeys are second nature to you.
This is connected to the first top tip, but it’s important enough to warrant a mention of its own. When I start a memorization, I place myself at the first stop on my journey and I take a few seconds to get a sense of where I am. I soak up the atmosphere around me, and I slip back in time to try to recapture the emotions I felt in that place. In effect, I trick my brain into believing that I’m there again, standing at that very place – the more real I can make it, the more likely it is that my memorizations will stick. Journeys that take you to places that have or have had meaning in your life, so that they are rich with emotion and significance, will make the best journeys for successful memorization. Many of my favourite journeys are set within places where I’ve felt particularly happy.
Design your routes so that the stops are varied and interesting and appear in a variety of locations. I often have students who think that a familiar train journey makes a great memory journey. However, they soon find that once they’ve stopped at three or four stations, the route itself can become complicated to remember – after a while, one train station begins to look like another.
I once set a group of students the challenge of memorizing the main stories on each page of a newspaper. Using their initial routes, the students struggled to recall more than the first three or four headlines – and then I showed them how more interesting journeys would dramatically improve their recall. I was running the course in a castle, which made a fantastic setting for a series of interesting stops – so, taking to our feet, we actually walked a route and memorized as we went along. We discussed the first headline in the lecture room; then we moved to another room with a table that had a chess set laid out on it and there we reviewed page two. In the dining room, I showed everyone photos and stories from the third page. Our journey took us around the castle, into the garden – at each stage reviewing the next page in the newspaper – until finally we came to the car park where we looked at and talked about the last page. When we returned to the lecture room, to everyone’s delight, by mentally walking the route the group recalled one or more items of news from every page.
In and out of rooms and buildings, and across paths, rivers and fields, each journey in your bank should have stages that are as distinct from one another as possible. Changes of scenery and transitions between inside and outside keep me alert and focused and stop me becoming complacent about where I am.
I find that some journeys work better in the memorization of specific things. For example, generally I find journeys based on open spaces are ideal for memorizing speeches and names. To memorize a speech I use the layout of a golf course. It’s a personal thing, but I feel less restricted using outside locations for speeches – I have plenty of space to lay down mnemonic images, some of which might be complicated and require several associations in one place (for example, if I have a quotation to memorize). Similarly, I use one of my favourite countryside walks to memorize names, because some names, particularly those with three or four syllables, require me to link together several images (which all have to be stored at one stop) for just that one piece of information. If I have lots of space around each stop in my journey, I have space to place the combination of images without them feeling confined, awkward or illogical.
On the other hand, when I memorize playing cards, I use one image per playing card (or pair of playing cards – more of this later), and I use one image for pairs of numbers (again, we’ll come to this). So, for playing cards and numbers, interior settings, where a single image can be attached to a single position, work perfectly well. Of course, such choices are deeply personal – you’ll know what works best for you.
Every time I travel a journey, I see the snapshot of each place from exactly the same vantage point I have always used. For example, when I arrive at the travel agent stop on one of my journeys, I always stand just inside the door looking at the adverts on the wall; when I arrive at the level crossing, I always stand in the middle of it, looking up the road. I peer through the window of the clothes shop – I never go inside to look out. Consistency in the viewpoints each time I use a particular journey speeds up the process of moving from stage to stage, so it’s important that your chosen journeys provide stages that have good, instinctive vantage points, so that you don’t find yourself wanting to change them each time you use that route.