Humorous, scientific and thought provoking ... I liked it a lot! Joshua Foer (the author) is a journalist who happened to cover the US Memory Championships for Slate magazine and then spent the next year of his life training to be a contestant in that same event. The book covers his adventures and training during the year leading up to his entry in the US Championships. I tried one of the techniques he explains for remembering words and I can still recall the list of words ... and that was a few days ago! (Garlic, cottage cheese, salmon, wine, the socks ... and I'm not great at remembering so I impressed myself.)

But I think what made the book more interesting was that it's not just about his training. He gives arguments for and against memorizing and discusses how human memories were put to use in classical times before we created external storage through writing, post-it notes and computers. There was a lot of food for thought ... one idea to consider is the connection between memory and creativity. Also, amazing to note that there was a book written about memory training between 86 and 82 B.C.
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The good news is that anyone can train their memory to do amazing party tricks. The bad news is that remembering the small daily details like where you left your keys would take much too much attention & time using these techniques ( )

A fascinating read about improving your memory and memory championships. The brain is pretty incredible.

We remember things in context. The more associative hooks something has the more embedded it gets into the network of things you already know and the more likely it is to be remembered. The brain is better at remembering if there are visual cues / images. Chunking can also assist (e.g. 0291852719 vs 029 185 2719).

Use spacial memory to remember things (i.e. memory palaces). An example:
1. Think of your family home, an area you are intimately familiar with.
2. Place the objects you want to remember at locations along a route in the home (start at driveway then front step etc).
2a Remember each object multi-sensory (location, sounds, smells). Deeply process image. Try and make it amusing (this makes it more vivid).
3. Retrace steps.
4. If you retrace steps again later in the day, in a week or will even further ingrain this into memory.

Remembering numbers can be done with the Major system created by Johann Winckelmann through replacing numbers with phonetic sounds that can then be constructed as a word freely interdispersed with vowels (i.e. 0 as S, 1 as T or D, 2 N, 3 M, 4 R, 5 L, 6 Sh or Ch, 7 K or G, 8 F or V, 9 P or B), therefore 32 could be man, 86 a fish, 7879 a coffee cup which you can then place in your memory palace.

A mindmap can be considered a type of memory place that helps you organise ideas into common areas.

I personally would have preferred a book that jumped straight into techniques to adopt as opposed to a book talking about the great memory of numerous people, memory championships and our physiology. Chapters 5 and 8 are where I found the most practical content.

3.5/5 ( )

Foer became interested in people who participate in competitive memorization contests, and when those people told him that anyone can do it, he put that idea to the test and spent a year learning advanced memorization techniques and successfully competing in memorization tournaments.

I read this because I was interested in learning some memorization techniques myself. The book does discuss some of the techniques in detail, but it also spends a lot of time talking about the people who participate in memory championships, the history of the competitions, and Foer's own experiences. That was all reasonably interesting, but wasn't the information I was really looking for.

If you're interested in memorization techniques, I think Mary Carruther's Book of Memory is far more interesting. ( )

not sure what category to put this in. ( )