My journey of memorising a deck of 52 shuffled cards

A few years back, I wanted to read a book about memory and found the best-selling book “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything” an ideal choice. I won’t go into too much detail about the book which is a great read, if you don’t trust me, trust Bill Gates, who called the book “absolutely phenomenal”. But let me give you a brief sequence of events from the author and journalist of the book, Joshua Foer:

• It starts by observing the extraordinary accomplishments of mental athletes at a memory championship.
• Foer meets Tony Buzan, the trim 67-year-old English self-help guru who founded the World Memory Championships in 1991 and who insists the brain is “like a muscle”: exercise it and it gets stronger.
• Foer learns the art of memory training.
• He practices his memory muscles for 1 year with help of a shambling 24-year-old from Oxford who becomes his mentor.
• He then finds himself in the finals of the US Memory Championships, alongside ‘mental athletes’ who could memorise the precise order of ten shuffled decks of cards in under an hour.

If you’re interested, here’s a nice review on the book.

My thoughts after reading book