Memorizing Cow Patterns For Chinese Game Show

You might think you have learned some pretty weird stuff but for a game show I did in China, I had to memorize cow patterns! You never wake up and tell yourself, "Today is a good day to memorize useless cow patterns!" Well this is what I had to do for a couple of weeks haha Hear about my memory challenge and the joy of memorizing cow patterns!

The challenge was I had to memorize a hundred cow patterns. Yes, cow patterns haha I had to memorize the black and white spots, but the cow patterns were on six puzzle pieces that belonged to each cow. A total of 600 cow puzzle pieces. I wasn't use to memorizing material in puzzle form. There's an event called abstract images where you have to memorize these black and white splotches.

Kind of like what the psychiatrist shows when giving you a psych test like the TV shows. What do you see here in this black and white spot? You see an elephant. Creating pictures from the abstract images is how I memorize them. My problem is for these abstract images I always saw a fish, birds and ship. I was applying this techniques to the cow patterns, but it was a little bit harder because I had a hundred different cows and sometimes the pieces were very similar.

For example: You might have one puzzle piece for cow A and was all black. Then for cow C, D, and E you had all black pieces too. How do I make an image for a all black piece? I can't just have the exact same image for these different cow pieces because I'm going to mix them all up. I also noticed these pictures have dirt on the cow or maybe poo.

This was a problem too because what if on the game show for part of the challenge where they bring live cows on stage, the cows got cleaned. The dirt and poo would be gone messing up my images I created. I had to start somewhere so I decided to memorize the different puzzle pieces by creating an image for each piece, but then connect all the images together from top left to bottom right.

I mentally said the piece would be numbered 1-6 with the top left being 1 and the bottom right being 6. I would have one big story out of all the pieces for a cow pattern. There was a tag number for each cow that I had to remember which is easy because I can just my number system. How I memorized everything was to create a memory palace where I placed my image numbers for the tag number and the story I created for the puzzle pieces. I did this whole process for 100 cow patterns!

Memorize the patterns took 2 weeks of my life which is kind of sad haha How my challenge worked was there were two parts to it. The first part was when they brought three cows on stage, and I had to identify the tags numbers of the cows by looking at the side of the cows. I would see the pattern which would trigger the story and the location.

I would be able to decode my number images into the tag number. It didn't really work out like I planned because one of the cows in cage turned around and showed the side of the cow I didn't memorized. I told myself I have never seen this cow in my life haha

My competitor recalled all the cows in like 34 seconds, but I was thrown off by the cow turning around so I skipped the cow and moved on to the others. I went back to the turned cow, but I couldn't figure out what was happening. I even got to the point where I was going to turn to the producer and say, "What the Hell is going on here!" But the cow handlers turned the cow back around. My confidence was shot when all this happened.

I missed one of the cows on recall and not even the cow that turned around haha The second part of the challenge was when a celebrity judge picked a tag number, and we had to find the six puzzle pieces out of the 600 puzzle pieces that belonged specifically to the one cow. All the puzzle pieces where broken into the different pieces and were placed in these huge walls. When I saw the tag number, I jumped to the location and saw the story I created.

I then went to the walls looking for the images I was seeing on my head. I was going from top left to bottom right, but I didn't want to point and of the pieced I found out because my competitor was trying to find the exact same puzzle pieces.

I had to memorize the coordinates to the puzzle pieces because I needed to write it down. We both had our written answers down but of course, they needed to be all dramatic in the reveal haha It turned out, we both got all the pieces correctly, but I was kind of sad because I lost my challenge due to missing a cow in the first part. Even though I lost, it was a great experience because it really did push my memory to a whole new level. Trying to think of ways to memorize something I never thought I had to memorize haha

Also, I spent 2 days at a cow farm getting footage for the game show... 2 DAYS! Who goes to China and visits a cow farm. I was out of the farm for 8 hours each day plus it was freezing. After 5 minutes of petting and looking at cows, there is not much more you can do, but I had 8 hours for 2 days of interacting with the cows haha Till this day, I don't like cows very much!

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