Where were we?” — Three Cards Deep

Developing Your Working Short-Term Memory

TL;DR — Remembering the top three cards in a deck can help you remember why you went into the kitchen.

You know the issue. You got up and went into another room for… for what?

What was it?

It’s a short-term memory issue. You just did not keep track of the plan that you had a moment ago. Why? Because something else got on top.

This little game is a way to develop the short-term memory of what you were doing before the last couple of things got put on the stack.

All you need is a deck of cards.

Easiest: One Card

Put one card face up. Say it is the Queen of Diamonds.

What card is at the bottom of the stack?

Easy: it is the same single card as is on the top of the stack, The Queen of Diamonds.

This is your goal, your home, where you want to get back to. The cards on top will be distractions.

Easy: Two Cards.

Put another card on top of the stack, say the Four of Spades.

What card is on top? The Four of Spades.

What card is on the bottom? Umm, the Queen of Diamonds? Right!

This is like the case in which you were going to the kitchen for a glass of orange water, and the phone rang. The card on the bottom was “kitchen for water.” On top of it the surprising world placed another card — “phone rang.”

The stack is “Phone Rang” on top of “Go for Water.” We deal with “Phone Rang” and it is off the stack. What is now showing? “Go for water.”

A Little Harder: Three Cards

Why harder? Because one needs to keep track of not one but two unseen cards, and their order.

A third card is dealt, to make a stack of three. Let us say the Jack of Diamonds.

Three Cards represents the original home-we-want-to-get-back-to plus a distraction, and a bother on top of that. Maximum distraction.

The stack is now:

— Jack of Diamonds on top and visible.
— Four of Spades in the middle and less visible
— Queen of Diamonds on the bottom and less visible

But we can remember them, can’t we? The red-diamond Jack with his blade is on top, and quite visible. Discard it, and the Four of Spades with its somber rectangle of sharpness (spades are “swords” in many old decks) is revealed. And if we take away that card, the Red Queen of Diamonds is there, holding her flower.

Three Life Activities

A moment ago we were going to the kitchen for orange water (one card) when the phone rang (a second card on top of the quest for orange-water). In that conversation we find we need to look up research on short term memory[i] and that is our third card.

Instead of three playing cards, we now have three activities. On the bottom, getting water. In the middle, answering the phone. On top, looking up “short-term memory.”

But Why Three? (detours into science and history)

We have all heard that “seven plus or minus two” chunks can be kept in current memory[ii]

More recent research suggests that “four” is the effective number of chunks that can be kept in short-term memory.[iii]

Here we use three items rather than four to allow some room — to avoid taking our memory to its limits. Most of us should be able to hold three items in our working memory at one time — and to recall what sequence they were in.

Recalling Their Order

Frances Yates wrote in her The Art of Memory[iv] of the “memory palace” practice for recalling information, a method that reaches back at least to classical times. One uses a familiar environment, and associates each item with a location in that environment.

Research in Australia[v] has shown an Aboriginal technique that is even more effective (and likely much older). One uses the memory-palace technique of associating each item with a place. In addition, one builds a story about the journey through these locations.

One might see the Jack of Diamonds spiking research articles on his sword after four sharpened spades holding telephones blocked him from the kitchen where the Queen of Diamonds was watering her flowers…

As we lay aside the research, the first card disappears. Goodbye, Jack. As we hang up the phone call, the second card disappears. Sheathe the four swords. And there revealed is what we sought: water from the Queen of Diamonds.

Where were we and what were we doing?

We set out to find a memory method for recalling what we were doing.

— The first method involved remembering three cards.
— The next step had us recall three life-situations, an original and two interruptions.
— Then we made a story leading from the latest distraction back to what we were doing, using images and narrative.

And we are home, and we know why we came.

Footnotes

[i] Thank you Wikipedia for being so very available.

[ii] [Miller, G. A. (1956). “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information”. Psychological Review. 63 (2): 81–97.[http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Miller/]

[iii] Cowan, Nelson. “The Magical Number 4 in Short-Term Memory: A Reconsideration of Mental Storage Capacity.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, no. 1 (2001): 87–114. doi:10.1017/S0140525X01003922.

[iv] Frances Yates, The Art of Memory University of Chicago Press (first published 1966)

[v] Reser D, Simmons M, Johns E, Ghaly A, Quayle M, Dordevic AL, et al. (2021) Australian Aboriginal techniques for memorization: Translation into a medical and allied health education setting. PLoS ONE 16(5): e0251710. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0251710