Moonwalking With Einstein (20 page)

It was easy enough to explain to people that I was living with my parents to save a few bucks while I cut my teeth as a writer. But what I was doing in their basement, with pages of random numbers taped to the walls and old high school yearbooks (purchased at flea markets) cracked open on the floor, was, if not downright shameful, at least something to lie about.

When my father would visit me in the basement to ask if I’d like to putt with him for a few minutes, I’d quickly hide the page of numbers I was memorizing and pretend to be diligently at work on something else, like an article that some publication might compensate me for with a check that might in turn be handed over to a landlord. Sometimes I’d take off my earmuffs and memory goggles and turn around to discover that my father had been standing in the doorway, just watching me.

If Ericsson was my professor
, Ed had taken on the role of yogi and manager. He set a schedule for me for the next four months, with benchmarks I was supposed to meet along the way, and a strict regimen of half an hour of practice each morning, plus two five-minute booster sessions in the afternoon. A computer program tested me and kept detailed records of my mistakes, so that we could analyze them later. I e-mailed my times to Ed every few days, and he would write back with suggestions about how I could improve.

Eventually, I decided I needed to go back to the Mill Farm to get some more face time with my coach. I scheduled my return trip to England to coincide with Ed’s twenty-fifth birthday party, an epic affair that he had been talking up since I had first visited England for the World Memory Championship.

Ed’s party was held in the Milf’s old stone barn, which Ed had spent the better part of a week converting into an experimental vessel for his philosophy of parties. “I’m trying to find a framework for manipulating conversation, space, movement, mood, and expectation so that I can see how they influence one another,” he told me. “In order to track all these parameters, I treat people not as volitional entities but as automata—particles really—which bounce around the party. And as host of the party, I take seriously my responsibility of bouncing them around in the best possible manner.”

Glittery textiles hung from the rafters to the floor, dividing the barn into a collection of small rooms. The only way in or out was through a network of tunnels, which could be navigated only by slithering on one’s belly. The space under the grand piano was turned into a fort, and a circle was formed around the fireplace out of a collection of raggedy couches that had been stacked on top of tables.

“The people who actually get through the tunnel networks have been through an adventure. They have had to struggle a tiny bit, and therefore upon arrival, they feel a sense of gratitude, relief, and accomplishment, and are committed to the project of having a good experience, with the most possible vigor and imagination. I think your memory training is extremely similar to this. Although it sounds silly to say ‘No pain, no gain,’ it’s true. One has to hurt, to go through a period of stress, a period of self-doubt, a period of confusion. And then out of that mess can flow the richest tapestries.”

I crawled behind him through a ten-foot-long pitch-black tunnel and emerged into a room filled neck-deep with balloons. Each room, he explained, was supposed to function like a chamber of a memory palace. His party was designed to be maximally memorable.

“Too often one is just left in a haze about what happened at a party because it’s a single, undifferentiated space,” he said. “One of the advantages of this kind of setup is that the experiences in each room get kept in each room, and are isolated from other experiences. One leaves the party with a beautiful repertoire of events, upon which one can dwell during old and middle age.”

In order to facilitate social interaction, Ed felt it was critical that partygoers not be able to recognize one another. Ben Pridmore, who had taken a four-hour train ride down from Derby, wore a black cape and a terrifying mask of a mohawked man-eater he called Grunch. Lukas Amsüss (recovered from his fire-breathing fiasco), who flew in from Vienna just for the party, arrived wearing a nineteenth-century Austrian military uniform with a sash and medals. One of Ed’s old friends from Oxford wore a full-body tiger suit. Another showed up in blackface and dreadlocks. Ed wore a curly wig, a dress, pantyhose, and a generously apportioned bra. In recognition of my being the only Yank at the party, I had my face painted like Captain America.

The highlight of the evening was the card-off. Shortly before midnight, Ed gathered his fifty or so guests in the basement of the barn and announced that in honor of his quarter-century of existence, two of the greatest card memorizers of all time were going to go head-to-head in competition. Ben, still wearing his black cape but no longer his Grunch mask, perched on a beanbag at one end of a long table littered with empty plastic sangria cups and the skeletal remains of an entire lamb that had been spit-roasted over a backyard bonfire. Lukas sat down at the other end of the table in his Austrian military uniform.

“First, I’d like to give the assembled here a few details about these two individuals’ capacities to remember packs of cards,” Ed announced. “Lukas was one of the first people in the world to break the forty-second barrier for a pack of cards. For a long time in the memory community, which comprises eleven people, this was regarded as the four-minute mile. He busted that mark and busted it again, and was once upon a time the world champion in speed cards. He is also one of the founding members of a distinguished society of memorizers known as the KL7. Of course, his terrific memory would be much better if he weren’t perennially drunk,” Ed said hyperbolically. Lukas lifted his plastic cup and nodded it in Ed’s direction. “You see, Lukas introduced me to an amusing and useful machine that he built with his engineering friends in Vienna, which allows you to drink four glasses of beer in less than three seconds. It’s got a valve mechanism they had to purchase off an aerospace company. Unfortunately, Lukas has used it a bit too much recently. He hasn’t memorized a deck of cards in almost a year. However, the last time he did it, he recorded a time of 35.1 seconds.”

Ed turned to Ben. “Pridmore here holds the current world record in cards, at 31.03 seconds. And he’s British.” This elicited a round of rowdy cheers from the guests. “Ben has also learned twenty-seven packs of cards in an hour—which is just, frankly, unnecessary.”

Ben unfolded his arms and spoke up. “Lukas and I have been talking, and we’ve been thinking that since Ed is ranked seventeenth in the world—”

“You mock me,” Ed protested. He didn’t know that a handful of young Germans had recently passed him in the international rankings.

“We’ve decided we will not compete unless he can tell us the name of every person in this room.”

There were more rowdy cheers, which Ed tried to quiet. He made it about a quarter of the way around the room before getting stumped by a friend of a friend, whom he claimed never to have met. He asked for silence, invited two guests to shuffle the packs of cards, and then handed them to Lukas and Ben. A stopwatch was set. They each had a minute.

Barely a half dozen cards were flipped over before it became clear that Lukas, who had been keeping his head upright only with concerted vigilance, was in no condition to use his higher cognitive faculties. He laid the deck back down on the table and sheepishly announced, “At least I am still ahead of Ed in the international rankings.”

Ed forcefully nudged Lukas out of the way and took his seat. “On the occasion of my twenty-fifth birthday, it gives me great pleasure to say that one of the competitors in my showcase event is too drunk to compete and I am going to have to take over!” The decks were reshuffled and the stopwatch reset. “Now, Pridmore, would you calm down, please?”

After a minute of hushed memorization, Ben and Ed took turns announcing cards from memory while a self-appointed judge checked to see that they were correct.

Ed: “Jack of clubs.” Cheers.

Ben: “Two of diamonds.” Boos.

Ed: “Nine of clubs.” Cheers.

Ben: “Four of spades.” Boos.

Ed: “Five of spades.” Cheers.

Ben: “Ace of spades.” Boos.

About forty cards into the deck, Ben shook his head and put his hands down on the table. “That’s enough for me.”

Ed leaped up from his seat, his breasts slapping his chin. “I knew Ben Pridmore would go too fast! I knew it! He crashes and burns, that guy!”

“How many times have you won the world championship?” Ben responded, with more bite in his voice than I’d ever heard before.

“Shall we clarify our record in one-on-one competition, Ben?”

“You realize losing was my birthday present to you.”

As Ed circled the room exchanging high fives and embracing his female guests, Ben slunk back into his bean bag and petted his cape. One of Ed’s inebriated Oxford chums, suitably impressed with Ben’s performance in spite of his loss, came up to Ben and handed him a short stack of credit cards. He told Ben that if he could memorize them he was welcome to use them.

After the card-off, the party migrated outside to a bonfire that had been built in the clearing, where a drunken tribal hora lasted into the morning. When I finally went to sleep just before sunrise, Ed and Ben were still sitting around the kitchen table, reeling off the most entertainingly bizarre binary number combinations they could think of.

After sleeping off our hangovers
, Ed and I spent the next afternoon huddled in training around the kitchen table. I’d come to him with three particular problems I needed his help with, the most pressing of which was that I was consistently mixing up my images. When you’re memorizing a deck of cards, there isn’t enough time to form images with all the detail and richness that the
Ad Herrennium
calls for. You’re moving so fast that usually you can only get the equivalent of a passing glance. In fact, more than anything else, the art of memory is learning how little of an image you need to see to make it memorable. It was only by analyzing the data I was keeping that I realized that I’d been consistently confusing the seven of diamonds—Lance Armstrong riding his bicycle—with the seven of spades—a jockey riding a racehorse. Something about the verb “riding” in those two very different contexts was causing me cognitive hiccups.

I asked Ed what I was supposed to do about that. “Don’t try to see the whole image,” he said. “You don’t need to. Just focus on one salient element of whatever it is you’re trying to visualize. If it’s your girlfriend, make sure that before all else, you see her smile. Practice studying the whiteness of her teeth, the way her lips crease. The other details will make her more memorable, but the smile will be the key. Sometimes a stab of blue that smells of oysters might be all the recall you get from some particular image, but if you know your system well, you should be able to translate that back again. Often, when you’re really gunning for it, the only traces left by a speedily sighted pack of cards will be a series of emotions with no visual content whatsoever. Your other option is to change the images, so they’re not so similar—not so mundane.”

I closed my eyes and tried to visualize Lance Armstrong pedaling up a steep hill. I made a special point of focusing on the way his reflective sunglasses turned blue and green as they moved through sunlight. Then I thought about the jockey and decided he would be much more distinct as a pony-riding midget with a sombrero. That little adjustment probably shaved two seconds off my time.

“Good stuff with the cards,” Ed said when I showed my latest spreadsheet. “It’s just a matter of five or so more hours of practice before the images are totally automatic. I’ve no doubt the American record in speed cards will be child’s play. I weep for joy!”

Of course, for all the reanalysis and rejiggering that makes deliberate practice deliberate, Ed warned me that there was always a risk of overthinking things in memory sport, since every change to your mnemonic system leaves behind a trace that can come back to haunt you in competition. And if there’s one thing a mental athlete wants desperately to avoid, it’s for a single card or number to trigger multiple images on game day.

Another problem I’d discovered in my practice sessions was that my card images were fading too quickly. By the time I’d get to the end of a deck or string of numbers, the images from the beginning had become faint ghosts. I mentioned this to Ed.

“Well, you’ve got to get to know your images better,” was his response. “Starting tonight, take a suit at a time and really spend meditative time with each character. Ask yourself what they look, feel, smell, taste, and sound like; how they walk; the cut of their clothes; their social attitude; their sexual preferences; their propensity to gratuitous violence. After having got this kind of feel for them, try to let it all happen at once—feel the full fat force of their physical and social characteristics all at once in imaginative broadband, and then imagine them going about your house doing everyday things, so you get used to them being so rich and dense even in normal situations. That way, when they do come up in a packet of cards, they should always be offering up some salient characteristic that will stick to their surroundings.”

I needed Ed’s help with one other problem. Following the recommendations of Peter of Ravenna and the
Ad Herennium
, my collection of PAO images included a handful of titillating acts that are still illegal in a few Southern states, and a handful of others that probably ought to be. And since memorizing a deck of cards with the PAO system requires recombining prememorized images to create novel memorable images, it invariably meant inserting family members into scenes so raunchy I feared I was upgrading my memory at the expense of tormenting my subconscious. The indecent acts my own grandmother has had to commit in the service of my remembering the eight of hearts are truly unspeakable (if not, as I might have previously guessed, unimaginable).