Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-30638141-20170210013803/@comment-98.24.209.203-20170223141305

Part of the reason I began playing Seekers Notes was to work on shortterm memory, due to a past TBI. I never did any cheats, for lack of a better term, in AC. As it became more difficult, I had to try new techniques to improve my memory so I could simply do the exercise in the time allowed. I failed a lot, but then my wins were more often than my fails. It wouldn't work for everyone, but here's what I did:

I made up a name for each item and over multiple times of playing AC, memorized the names for each item. I just quit playing SN, but off the top of my head, I recall the items in AC such as the perfume bottle, lantern, pocketwatch, apple, violin... if there was an item I didn't know what it was, I just came up with some term that made sense to myself so that I least I knew what I was talking/thinking about, even if no one else did. :) Because of time constraints, I would shorten terms often. For example, the perfume bottle simply became known to me as "pinky", because it was pink, and I knew that "pinky" was the pink perfume bottle.

As I pressed each card, I said aloud the term for that card. I picked a pattern and stuck with it - I started at the lower right corner, then worked my way to the left. At the end of the bottom row, I would go to the far right of the second row from the bottom, and so on. I did try different attack methods, but this is the pattern that I ended up sticking with because I knew that best and could build my memory on this pattern the best. I think the key is just to pick a pattern of uncovering the cards and stick with that pattern each time you play.

Each time I uncovered a card that matched a card I had uncovered already, I would click its match before the card I just uncovered had time to turn back face down. Because I was saying the terms aloud, it was much easier to recall exactly which spot the match was in. Sometimes if I wasn't sure, I could count in my head how many words ago was that item, then count back in the cards to that place, then click it. It sounds like a cumbersome process, but once practiced, was very fluid for me. I felt like a memory maniac! Sometimes I was not sure how many cards back was a match, but I would remember that that item was right next to or after another item because I could replay my voice in my head of what I had just said aloud moments ago. Most of the time, I did not need to use time clock as aid, even at Virtuoso level. I never needed the spyglass aid... I tried it a couple times, but it actually confused me more than doing the memory journey method.

I hope this helps!

Twighlah