Systems: pegs and PAO
A hundred fixed images, one per number, plus the person-action-object system. It is the infrastructure everything else stands on: built once, used forever. The app walks you through building it.
digit span
Memory: the techniques used in competition
These are not party tricks. They are three old tools — peg system, major system, palace — that take an afternoon to learn and months to automate. The app handles the second part.
The tools
Major system
Turns digits into consonants and consonants into words. A card number stops being noise and becomes a scene.
Flashcards with spaced repetition
Every system has its deck, and spaced repetition picks what is due today: what you are about to forget, and nothing else. Items you save while reading a book land here too.
Drilling to automatic
Recognise each item before the clock runs out. What you miss goes to a failed queue that keeps coming back until it comes without thinking. That is the gap between knowing the technique and having it.
Memory palaces
Routes through places you already know, one stop per item, with text and a photo if you want. Built inside, and walked like any other drill.
Memorisation by discipline
Memorise → recall → score, across the 10 competition disciplines: long and speed digits, binaries, cards, speed cards, words, names and faces, dates, abstract images and spoken numbers.
Digit span
The classic measure: how many numbers in a row you hold in one go, forwards and backwards. The length rises and falls on its own. It is the thermometer of this pillar.
N-Back
Single, dual, triple and quad, with position, audio, colour and shape channels. Pure working memory.
Spoken numbers and dates
Digits dictated one by one that you hold in order, and historic events paired with their year. Two classic championship events.
Verbatim text
Memorise a passage word for word: you study it, it hides, and you fill the gaps from a word bank.
Applied Memory
For remembering your life, not decks of cards
The competition disciplines are the gym. Applied Memory is what you wanted the gym for: 13 categories with the material already prepared to drop into your system.
Personal details and daily life
Document numbers, plates, birthdays, the shopping list — the things currently living in your phone notes.
Digital security
Long passwords and codes you can rebuild in your head instead of reusing the same one everywhere.
Health and emergencies
Medication, doses, allergies, phone numbers and protocols. The things you want when you cannot look at a screen.
Study and work
Exam syllabi, vocabulary, professional facts, personal finances. This is where most people start.
Culture and games
History, geography, works — and the sporting memory of anyone who plays cards or chess.
It all joins the same review
Whichever category you pick, the items end up in your system and get scheduled by the same spaced repetition as everything else.
01
The Path: from zero to mental athlete
The Memory Path starts with the core — how your memory works, the eye, the spark, the anchor — and from there opens the disciplines, which train in parallel. Each lesson mixes one idea with drills, and each unit ends in a test.
02
The Ladder: rungs at competition targets
Each of the 10 disciplines has 8 rungs with a concrete target — so many digits in so much time, so many cards, so many names — and a minimum accuracy to call it mastered. Each rung starts by reviewing your system and one palace, and only then puts you to memorise: automating is the hard part, which is why it takes two thirds of the session.
Fifteen minutes. Today.
The first number you'll see is your own, untrained. It's the only one you need to start comparing yourself to yourself.
The standalone drills are free. The Paths have a 14-day trial.