The idea is extremely simple. You just memorize the order that colors appear. That is it. Sounds easy, right? That is what I thought too.
It would probably be easy if we were only talking about basic colors. Red, blue, green, yellow, purple, orange, and so on. Most people can create images for those pretty easily.
But once you start using different shades of colors, the difficulty jumps like crazy.
The hardest part is not just memorizing the colors. The hardest part is that the colors almost feel like they change depending on what they are next to.
During memorization, you might see four colors together and your brain judges each color based on the colors around it. One color might look dark because it is next to a lighter color. Another might look bright because it is next to a duller one.
Then recall starts. Now all the colors are mixed into a color bank, sitting next to completely different colors. And suddenly the color you thought you memorized does not look the same anymore.
That is what makes this event so crazy to me! I promise the similar colors are different. i used some math to make sure there is a visual difference between the colors.
The information is technically the same, but your perception of it changes because the surrounding colors changed.
I have memorized abstract images, cow patterns, books, keys that go to doors, and plenty of other weird information. But colors might honestly be the hardest information I have ever tried to memorize.
With most memory events, even if the information is abstract, the target still feels stable. An image is an image. A word is a word. A number is a number. With this, the color can feel different between memorization and recall even though it is the exact same color.
If I only memorize a few colors at a time, I do not know how those shades compare to all the other shades in the trial. I might call one color “dark blue,” but later realize there were three other blues that were darker, lighter, or just slightly different.
But if I try to study all the colors first, that also does not fully solve it, because once recall comes, the colors are mixed up and sitting next to different colors anyway. So now I am trying to figure out how to create a reliable system for something that changes based on context.
With a small amount of colors, I can kind of brute force it. I can make images for the colors: light blue, dark green, pale pink, burnt orange, and so on. But once the amount gets higher, everything starts breaking down. The comparisons get confusing. And suddenly I am questioning colors I was confident about during memorization.
Try this event out and let me know what you think:
https://blitzmemory.com/app/event/colors/standard
Let me know what strategy you come up with, because this might genuinely be the hardest memory event I have ever created! I want to know how to beat this event haha