Review: Great techniques to improve your memory!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 15, 2012
In today's world, when so much information is flowing from all around us and we realize it's almost impossible to keep track of everything we find out or need to remember, this book might just help us learn how to deal with all the madness. I can say I'm satisfied with my capacity of memorizing the important things, but I've always wanted to understand better how memory actually works and to try some techniques to improve my memory. I bet anyone would like to know how it was possible for the Ancient people to memorize entire literary of works by heart! Well, guess what? This book not only explains the method in very simple words, but it also assures the reader that anyone can apply it.Where this book excels is that it's structured in such a way that the reader can learn about memory and how to improve it step by step. The author starts by talking a bit about memory and insists that anyone can sharpen it if they set their mind to it: "Memory is made, not born. Like any muscle, the more you exercise it, the better it gets." He chose to explain the techniques in simple, clear words and concentrate on the goal of making them accessible to those who want to try them. What you should expect from this book is to learn about methods you actually understand and be able to remember in order to apply them whenever you decide to practice your memory skills.The author goes through well-known techniques, such as Repetition and Attention, also discussing how your belief about your memory can affect it, and the foods you need to eat or avoid eating in order to increase your capacity of memorizing. From the fifth chapter he starts to describe the methods you can use in order to memorize almost anything. Associations, Clusters, Visualization, Taking Notes... all these techniques can be practiced and combined to fit your own needs.My personal favorite is "The Loci Method". As I told you in the beginning of my review, I've always wanted to know how the Ancient people managed to memorize incredibly long texts. I was surprised to find out that the method they used is actually pretty simple and easy to apply by anyone who is willing to put some effort into it. Basically, this method combines association with visualization: if you want to remember a lengthy story or a speech, all you have to do is associate each thought of the story/ speech to a certain part of your home. While performing a mental tour of your own house, you will immediately remember the exact part of the story you have connected to the places you're "visiting". It might sound complicated at first, but that's just because I can't explain it as clearly as the author does in this book. My advice is to grab the book and take your time with reading it and analyzing all the techniques. You might be surprised at how many new things you will learn from it.