At the World Memory Championships, top competitors memorize the order of 20 shuffled decks of cards in an hour and more than 500 random digits in 15 minutes, among other events. Think you have what it takes? Believe it or not, almost everybody has the capability to perform such amazing feats.
Competitive memorizers don’t necessarily have “better memories” than the rest of us; instead, they learn and perfect a variety of mnemonics (memory aids) to improve their ability to quickly learn and recall just about anything. One of the most useful and widely used mnemonics is the memory palace, a place or series of places in your mind where you can store information that you need to remember.
With time and practice, anyone can build a memory palace, and they are useful for far more than just memory competitions and trivia. Here’s how to build your own.
Wikihow (thanks, Blueberrymuffin)
I dont need to remember that many decks of cards … At times I remember too much (of other things, more useufll in daily life) . Yes, too much .. it’s not always a good thing to remember all things. Too little neither.
A good trick is .. remember the things you take serious …
Those people who remember that many deck of cards probably wont do good in memorizing normal things or take way too much time as they will need a system …. even for a few things … ehehe …
I’ve been building a memory palace (actually a bit of a street of them) for a couple of years since reading Derren Brown’s book. I must say it is the most useful thing I think I’ve ever done for myself. I still find it tricky to add in useful things (my visual memory still seems quite weak), but I find I’ve got places with great memories stuck in there – which is a nice place to imagine being when listening to an iPod or reading on the bus – why be on a bus when you can be on a beach in glorious sunshine?
I’ve found memory palaces fairly good as well, but I don’t always need to remember huge lists of things. For language, simple keyword association mnemonics are usually enough (because you’re not remembering a list, just an association.) Our website provides language mnemonics, feel free to have a look.
The method might be thousands of years old but there’s now a new ( 2-3 years old) tool available for creating the Journey variation of Memory Palaces – Google Street View.
Pick a town that’s covered. Pick a suitably long road (or any other journey you fancy) and you can travel out and back along it virtually picking and learning locations along it.