We’ve talked about the serious side of training your memory – the boost to your confidence and self-esteem, the improvements to your creativity, and so on, and we’ve also talked about how you can apply the techniques to make your everyday life easier. However, having an amazing memory is also a lot of fun. Party tricks for your friends are not only a great way to show off your memory power, but also a perfect opportunity to practise. I often go to functions or parties at which I know I’m going to be asked to perform some feat of memory to wow the guests – here are some of my favourite memory tricks, just for fun.
The obvious trick for me to begin with at any party is a card trick. You have to have memorized a deck of cards using the Journey Method before you arrive and you have to resist the urge to ask someone to shuffle (have some quips up your sleeve to bat away any hecklers who want to take the cards from you to mix them up). Take the deck from your pocket and fan it out face down. Ask someone to take a random card from the fanned deck. As they remove the card, take a peek at the card on top of the one they removed. Let’s say, you peek at the Queen of Clubs. Scan your pre-loaded journey to find your character for the Queen of Clubs, then walk one stage further on to find the card that’s been removed from the deck. Announce your answer.
If you get good at this, you can try a variation. Allow someone to cut the deck (cut, but not shuffle!). As long as you take a peek at the new card at the bottom of the deck, you can amaze your audience by telling them that you know what the new top card is – declare it, and let someone else turn it over to gasps of admiration. In theory you can go on reciting card after card, in order, all the way through the deck from this point. All you have to do is start your journey from the position of the new top card, rather than from the original first card in the deck. (If you want to be really convincing, at the start of the trick ask people to keep cutting the deck – as long as you keep track of the bottom card and don’t change the sequence of the cards within each cut, you’ll still be able to recite the cards in order.)
One other card trick is to identify a missing card from the deck. You memorize your deck, as previously, before the party, then with your back turned you ask someone to remove one card from the deck, without disturbing the other cards. They put the card in their pocket, out of your sight. Turn around and ask the person to turn over each card in the deck slowly, one on top of the other, in front of you. In your mind, as the other person deals the cards, you mentally walk through your journey – when you hit the missing card, you’ll know because you’ll be expecting it to appear on the next stage of your journey, but in fact the dealt cards will skip a stage. Don’t reveal your answer until all the cards have been dealt, to prolong the suspense!
People have come to expect me to memorize a deck of cards, or names and faces, but one of my favourite party tricks is a little more unusual. If you want to really baffle your audience, memorize the contents of a book – or at least appear to.
First, I ask my host to give me a book of around 100 pages in length. I take the book, turn over the pages one by one, and after five or six minutes I hand the book back to a guest for safe keeping. I claim that I have read through the entire book and have committed its contents to memory. I ask the guest to come back to me in an hour or so with the book in hand along with anyone who wants to see my memory in action. Later on, I ask the guest to read me the first few lines from a randomly chosen page in the book. The lines are read to me and then I tell the eager guests what page that text falls on.
How is it done? Well, as I turn over the pages when I’m given the book, I memorize a single word on the first line of each page, beginning at page one. I scan the top line on every page to spot a word that I think will easily form a strong, individual image. Using the Journey Method (I need a journey or journeys with as many stages as there are pages in the book), I anchor the images, in order, to the stages along my route. In order for the trick to work, page one of the book has to correspond to stage one on the journey, page two to stage two, and so on, so that I can use the numerical position of the image to give me the page number. During the time the book is with the guest for safe-keeping, I make a quick review of the key words and their corresponding key images, so that I’m confident that I can perform the trick.
Of course, to perform the trick well, you need to know your journeys backwards and forwards and the numerical position of key stages in relation to the other stages of the journey. If you use two 50-stage journeys back to back, to give you the 100 stages, you need to be practised at translating the second set of 50 stages into the higher page numbers.
You don’t need to know the exact numerical position of every stage, though, as long as you have key markers. For example, along the route I generally use for this trick, I know instantly what the 1st, 5th, 11th, 13th, 15th, 21st and 26th stages are. One, 5 and 15 seem logical markers to have, then 11 stands out to me because the two 1s looks like railings, while 13 is “unlucky” and 21 is the “key to the door”, so these stick in my mind, too. Finally, 26 represents the half-way point in a card deck. From these markers I can walk forwards or backwards to the page number I need.
For example, let’s say that I’ve used my preferred book journey, which travels around a village I lived in as a child. It starts from our old house, crosses heathland to a village inn, then leads to a cricket pitch and ends up inside a village hall. There are 100 stages in all. If someone reads the first line of a page at random and I register the word “violin”, the image of the violin immediately pops up in my head at the relevant stage – let’s say it’s propped up against the oak tree that’s my stage shortly before I get to the cricket pitch. I know that the pitch is stage 21 on my journey, and that the tree is two stages before that. If I take two steps back from the cricket pitch, I’m at stage 19. So, the word violin appears on page 19. I’ve worked back two stops from the closest marker, rather than walking forwards through the 19 stages from the beginning of the journey. Voilà! The quicker you can become at coming up with the answer, the more impressive the trick.
Once you get really adept at this, you can post two images at each stage of the journey, so that you can memorize bigger books. However, always make sure that each pair of images interact in the right order. So, if the key words from consecutive pages are “soup” and “frog”, I imagine soup being poured over the frog; but if the order were “frog” then “soup”, I imagine the frog jumping into the soup. The first word from the pair of pages is always the subject and the second is always the object of the image I place along the route. Although this sounds complicated, it didn’t take me long to master – I just had to make sure I’d organized my routes well and had had a bit of practice at the maths involved with placing two images (two pages) at each stage of the journey.
It’s also possible (and perhaps more impressive) to reverse the trick so that I give a summary of what’s on the page if someone gives me the page number. It takes a little more time, because I need to read more of the text on each page to get a sense of the story. Once I have my overview for the page, I code that into a general scene to place along the journey. When someone gives me the page number, I can give a summary of that page’s content.
It takes some practice to become really slick at this, but I promise you it’s worth it for the impact on your delighted audience. Start with just 30 pages or so of a book at first and work up to a whole novel as you gain in confidence and skill.