Eye of the tiger

Okay, I've decided to get serious about memory training again. I know I said I was thinking of dropping the whole memory thing for a while, but in the end I've concluded that life is basically meaningless without long periods of sitting at a desk, memorising 1s and 0s. And all that talk about money yesterday probably helped, too. So I've resolved to seize this momentary enthusiasm and force myself back into a training schedule.

So, today I did three packs of speed cards before work, 15 rows of abstract images using my handy-dandy Excel abstract-image-shuffle-o-matic on my lunch break, and 468 decimal digits and 1500 binary this evening, all in as fast a time as possible. And I even checked my recall to see how many I'd got right, which is a tedious process but useful for motivation purposes when I see how much I've improved. I could of course circumvent this marking process by doing my memory training on the computer, but I prefer to work with pen and paper. There's less temptation to click onto the internet, for one thing.

And now I'm intending to do the same routine every day for the rest of the week. This is, according to my long experience of memory training, much too heavy a schedule which will lead to bad results by the end of the week as I start to burn out, but I think it would be a good thing to do for a few days, just to get my brain up and running properly again. And given the times I've recorded today, I can expect to see some quick improvements if I keep up the schedule. I'll post my times and scores nightly on my blog, so that a) everyone can know to nag me if I fail to post anything and b) all my rivals can see what kind of form I'm in and try to do better.

Today's results - speed cards in 28.75, 36.68 and 29.61 seconds. All correct, but all three of those, even the awful 36-seconds one, were me trying to go as fast as possible. This is the kind of slowing-down that I suffer when I haven't done any training for months.

Abstract images in 3:57.04 - not too bad a time at all, I aim for an ideal of three and a half minutes. One mistake where I didn't notice that there were two identical textures on a row and had to guess.

468 decimals in 6:09.56 - which is dreadful. Five minutes is the time I normally try for with this one. 452 digits correct, or a score of 328 in championship scoring (including 20 points lost for one extremely careless wrong digit written down after I'd memorised it correctly). I can do better, but that's not bad. If I keep to my training schedule, I would expect to see the time get better and the scores get worse, then when I get down to around the five-minute mark, the number of numbers I remember will gradually start going up.

1500 binaries in 10:11.38 - atrocious. Eight minutes is the time I have in my head as 'good' for this exercise, but there was a time when I was doing closer to seven very consistently. Hopefully some fast improvement to come here, too. A score of 1415 in the recall (one careless memorising mistake when I used an image that nicely fitted the story I was telling, rather than the one-digit-different image that I should have used instead, and the final image in the final row was one I couldn't remember, as it very often is, for some reason).

Improvements to come tomorrow. I don't know if I'll have the time to do the cards first thing, because I start work early on Tuesdays so I can take a long lunch and do my reading-volunteer thing, but I'll fit them in somewhere.