20190822 ~ The Patrick Byrne Interviews

Could be.
It just seemed very much like a parlor trick, or the kind of ability one can learn to do. I have seen courses in this stuff, and if I remember correctly (!), the trick to recalling a long list of items was to imagine something very familiar to you, like your house. Each room in your house is assigned a consecutive number, e.g., from 1 to 30 (including bathrooms, attic, garage, closets, etc.).
The numbering should not be random, but should begin at the front of the house and move toward the back, or from the top to the bottom, or from the bottom to the top, but not random.
Once your numbering is in place, and you can visualize each ‘room’, and each room has its own number, then you can begin the ‘trick’, i.e., memorizing a list of items… or cards, for that matter.
Each card would be assigned to a ‘room’ in your mental ‘house’. So ‘Ace of Spades’ is on the front porch. ‘King of Diamonds’ is in the front hall. Two of Clubs is in the bathroom off the front hall. You visualize each one, in order, according to the order or number assignment you have given the ‘rooms’ in your mental house.
When it is time to recall the list of cards, you go through each of the ‘rooms’ in your mental ‘house’, and because you visualized each card IN its own room, and because the rooms are already numbered, you can ‘recall’ all of the cards in the same order as you looked at them.
It has been a long time since I paid attention to this stuff, so I’m sure I have some of the details wrong, but there are well-researched and effective methods of quickly storing ‘data’ in the human mind in such a way that it can be easily accessed at a later time, simply by organizing your memory into some kind of database, as opposed to random access.
From my very much non-expert observation, it appeared (to me) that he was using some kind of memory trick to do what he did.
I am also predisposed to being skeptical — because deception is so ubiquitous… 😁