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To attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes. There are 36 grand masters of memory in the world.

The sport of competitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where every year somebody comes up with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly, and then the rest of the field has to play catch-up.

A deck of cards is built like the purest of hierarchies, with every card a master to those below it, a lackey to those above it.

The best memorizers in the world - who almost all hail from Europe - can memorize a pack of cards in less than a minute. A few have begun to approach the 30-second mark, considered the 'four-minute mile of memory.'

Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.

'Mnemonic' is a play about memory.

I don't get much sense of reward from having discovered how to get the Foo card to coexist with the Bar card.

Like an apparently strict musical form it breaks the five minute whole into its structural parts - a descriptive preamble, the action of taking the cards, the development of the cards' manipulation and the revelation of what has been achieved.

I never want to sort of put all the cards on the table all at once, because that's somehow there's always a journey to go on. There's always something to be revealed, in my mind, about characters.