Welcome to the last day of your training program. Today you’re going to attempt two exercises that will be more challenging than usual.
Day 5, task number 1
Remember those fun random images that you memorized on Day 2? First you memorized 20, then 40, today you’re going to attempt as many as you can in 5 minutes, exactly as if you were taking part in a memory competition. I don’t know how many you will successfully remember, but I wouldn’t be surprised if your score turned out to be above 60, perhaps even approaching 90 or more. Yes I know you won’t ever have to memorize a bunch of random images in real life, but this is still a fun and efficient way to practice focus, creativity and the improvisation of short simple stories, some of the most important skills in any memorizer tool kit.
You can click here if you need to reread my explanations on how to memorize random images. Otherwise just go back to standard-memory.com, start a stopwatch and open the “5 min random images” document. Keep a steady pace, don’t go too fast, try to find the right balance between speed and accuracy. Since here you aren’t trying to get everything right, it’s probably a good strategy to not waste any time reviewing.
Once you’re done, open the corresponding “recall online” page and enter your answers. The way the scoring system works (5 points for a correct row, minus 1 point if there’s a mistake), you’re better off not writing anything on any given row when you have no idea of the correct order. However, you should still try to respond when you’re not sure but you think there’s maybe a 50% chance that your answer will turn out to be correct.
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Day 5, task number 2
A few days ago you memorized 20 words using the first 4 rooms or zones of your improvised memory palace. Then you memorized 20 more words using the next 4 rooms or zones of that memory palace. Today you’re going that same memory palace to memorize no less than 40 words. Are you going to be confused by what you memorized previously in there? Probably not, unless you ignored my wise advice and reviewed too many times. When you aren’t trying to memorize something long-term, you can just reuse the same few places an infinite number of times. Using the same memory palace twice in the same day can be challenging, but otherwise a palace can be used once every two days or even once every day without much or any issue.
- If you need to, you can reread what I wrote on the memorization of random words on Day 2 and Day 3.
- You might want to first spend a minute reviewing the route through those 8 zones of your memory palace.
- When you’re ready to start, click here for your list of 40 words. It’s not mandatory, but if you want to you can start a stopwatch just to see how long you need. A good strategy might be to improvise your images for the first 20 words. Quickly review once. Improvise your images for the next 20 words. Quickly review those once and then quickly review everything one last time before answering. Another commonly used strategy is to, after you’ve stopped the stopwatch and stopped looking at the list, first spend a moment reviewing everything in your mind before writing down your answers. I personally use this strategy quite often for most disciplines except names and faces.
All right! Congratulations on making it this far!
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Here’s some important advice about how you can make better use of your memory in your daily life. The content of that article will be useful even if you decide that you’re not interested anymore in using any technique based on stories or images.
Of course I do encourage to continue to use and improve your new awesome memory skills. Now that you have some basic competence, it’s time to take the training wheels off. Where should you go from now? Most of what you should know about this question appears in some form or another on this page on this messy but very informative page. And here are some additional quality resources you can choose to use to learn about all things related to memory techniques. We do plan to add much more detailed and clearer explanations, but for various reasons this task will have to wait a while for now.
Thank you again! We hope that you will want to test your skills at our next championship or “honorary challenge“. If you don’t, that’s ok, I forgive you… If you do, congratulations for your bravery. Here’s a very helpful page to help you prepare quickly.
Then I’ll explain how to keep improving and how you can start using your new skills in the messy real world.