Why does PAO let you memorise faster — what does it compress?

It packs three items into one image: Person of item 1 + Action of item 2 + Object of item 3.

* Why PAO compresses: fusing card triples cuts a 52-card deck from 52 images to ~18. *

Without PAO, three cards = three images at three loci. With PAO, you take just the Person from the first card, the Action from the second, and the Object from the third, and stage them as one scene at one locus. Three cards, one image, one place. Across a 52-card deck that's ~18 images instead of 52 — far fewer things to encode, place, and walk. Compression is the entire competitive advantage.

Go deeper:

• Nelson Dellis — How to memorize a full deck of cards — a 4x champion showing the 3-cards-per-image chunking in practice.