22 June 2024

Speed memory

I moved to London when I was 10 years old – without knowing any English. I had indeed started learning German as my first foreign language at school in France. I was however thrown in the deep end of the pool by being sent to St Philip’s, a British public school (which, despite what the terminology implies, is a fee-charging private school) in South Kensington.

At that age, it was still relatively easy to learn a new language, even if my accent would actually only improve at university and during my career (and only after paying close attention to the words I was mispronouncing). My competitive spirit certainly hadn’t softened. So when Mr Payne, a Maths teacher who hung around the school without many teaching responsibilities (I never knew why), offered £5 to whomever would be the fastest in reciting multiplication tables, I knew I would strive to win. And I did.

Cue to today. I’m still as competitive as ever, which wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me. Whether it’s beach volleyball or finding locations from photos, I will constantly pay attention to my mistakes – and those of others – to improve my skills. So naturally when I came across the US memory champion Nelson Dellis, I had to try memorising a deck of cards as fast as possible. It initially didn’t go well.

Despite using the Person-Action-Object system and a memory palace, I barely managed to remember all 52 shuffled cards within… 20 minutes. Of note, the record by Nelson Dellis was around, then below, 60 seconds! The main difficulty was for me to develop the reflex association of each card to its mnemotechnic connection e.g. the Ace of Hearts corresponds to the sentence, “my mother finds shells” (because she loves finding cute shells on any beach she walks on). If you’re curious, Hearts correspond to people in my family, Diamonds to friends, Spades to scientists, musicians and athletes, while Clubs refer to heads of state in history. My memory palace consists of the path I take from the moment I wake up to reaching my place of work.

With time and practice (as always for any “sport”), I managed to trim my time down to 15 then 10 minutes, and I’m now standing below 5 minutes at 4 minutes and 35 seconds. I’d love to be able to go below 4 minutes, perhaps even below 3 minutes (update in early August 2024: I managed to get below 4 minutes!). This may require me to opt for a seemingly faster phonetic 2-card system, but I’m not quite certain I’m ready to change the system I painstakingly developed and try to remember. Still, and even if I’m hoping this memory challenge is good for my ageing brain, my 3-minute target would be a (very) far cry from the world record of 13 seconds!

In the video below (to be posted as soon as I edit it), you can see me in one of my previous attempts, when I was hovering around the 5 to 6 minute mark.

There’s something really mind-blowing about the number of uniquely different ways a deck of 52 cards can be sorted. The formula is simply 52 x 51 x 50 x … x 3 x 2 which is obviously factorial 52!. The fascinating part is when one tries to write down the resulting number: 8 x 10^67, so that’s 8 followed by 67 zeros! To put this in perspective, the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Big Bang is 4 x 10^17… so yeah, it’s huge! The only number that may be bigger is the total number of atoms in the universe, estimated at something around 10^82… which is the same number as the total unique combinations of a deck of 60 cards. I guess I’ll have to practise my memory on 60 cards then!

PS: the thumbnail photo for this article is a photo I took in San Francisco’s Chinatown in January 2008.