So after an awesome two days in Yosemite I arrived in Los Angeles again for the 2015 first Memo Games event organised by Florien Delle.  It was a nice change from the normal WMC standard memory competitions and there was zero pressure to do better than my previous scores given it was the first ever event so it seemed like a perfect fit for a holiday competition.

The events were great fun, not least because they were new and quite creative, but also because they were a little closer to the type of things it might actually be useful to remember in the real world (Business cards, passwords etc).  What was even more exciting for me personally was that I found I could actually create systems on the fly to memorise a bunch of information I’d previously never even considered attempting to memorise.

Having been doing memory competitions for a couple of years now it has long been my primary purpose to gain some real life practical benefit to my training.  This event gave me the first glimpse of the real possibility that I’d actually become usefully creative enough, with enough systems, experience and speed to do this on the fly.

In my day to day world, things just happen so quickly that it rarely seems practical to try and create a network, memorise some data, or try and come up with a system on the fly.  I’ve made small efforts to build in habits to use number memorisation routinely throughout the day, remember peoples names, and create some useful little ‘working networks’ which I’d setup specifically for the day to day stuff but none of this really seemed to breach any threshold of noticeable change.  Yesterday was the first time this realisation actually came through that some of the training had actually paid off.

I’m now committed to creating some more ad-hoc useful life networks which I can use day to day for things and I’m going to practice experimenting with placing things in a room while I’m having a conversation with someone to see if this can become useful.

Thanks again to Florien Delle for the organising of such an awesome event.

Phill

http://www.memogames.org/