Books on memory are not just for the party-trick seekers and C-Grade students with A-grade ambitions, many of use skate through life heavily dependent upon the many devices, both written and electronic, to allow us to keep track of our busy schedules. What would we all do without these iPads, cell phones, electronic diaries, Post-it notes, shopping lists written on the back envelopes etc…? Well if we wanted to, quite a lot actually.
Books on memory improvement can help anyone; from simple little memory tasks such as a shopping list, to complex memory enhancement techniques. Not many people have a use for remembering the value of Pi to nineteen thousand decimal places, that’s for savants and Guinness World Record attempters – Many people do however have a use for remembering what they are supposed to be doing tomorrow, or maybe a telephone number that was given in haste, that’s where books on memory improvement can really help out.
Here are a few books I located on Amazon that have good reviews:
Moonwalking with Einstein
This book called Moonwalking with Einstein has sold many copies on Amazon and seems to have one of the highest ratings with reviers.
Here are some of their thoughts:
“Moonwalking with Einstein goes far beyond remembering the names of acqaintances. It can help make your daily life easier, aiding you when you try to find lost items – or keep them from getting lost in the first place- and actually train you to find ways to improve your memory.”
“I’d learned a mnemonic device to aid memorization decades ago while in college, and found it to be helpful, but for some reason I’d abandoned the technique once I graduated. But Moonwalking with Einstein expands the mnemonic technique I learned back then by use of something of which I’d never heard: the “Memory Palace.” The Memory Palace exploits our inherent skill for remembering images and spatial locations, harnesses these two abilities we all posses in abundance, and relates them to the memorization of numbers, lists and assortments of other difficult to remember items. The amazing thing is that the Memory Palace not only makes memorization easy, it also makes it fun.”
The Memory Book
Here is another one of the memory books that seems to have very good ratings on Amazon. Go to their main site for more reviews, but I’ll put down a couple of their responses below:
“This book has all the memory techniques that are typically taught in memory courses and other memory books. Even if they are sometimes introduced by other names, all of the techniques are variants and combinations of word-substitution (mostly used for foreign words, but also people’s names and words that can’t easily be pictured), link, peg, loci (sometimes called Roman Room technique) and phonetic (letter for number substitution) systems. The book is mostly re-hashed information that has been presented earlier (even by Lorayne himself), but the writing style makes it a book worth keeping.”
“I have always considered my memory to be rather poor. But after using the VERY SIMPLE techniques in this book, I am capable of memorizing things many people would deem near impossible, with minimal effort. The first exercise listed ten words: Airplane, tree, envelope, earring, bucket, sing, basketball, salami, nose, and star. Then provided a child-like way to not only remember all ten words but also in the sequence in which they were presented. Some might, at first glance, think that’s simple, but try it without a method! I had them memorized in about fifteen minutes and now they seem to be permanently etched in my brain; that was over a week ago and I just wrote them in this review from memory! The next exercise was a list of thirty words, most of which were complex and I had never seen before. That might impress some people, but these methods have real practical applications.”
Keep in mind that there are some bad reviews aswell; they are not all positive. So make sure to check them out yourself.
More on Memory
The long haul
There are several different types of memory; sensory, short-term and long-term. Of these 3 types, it is possible to improve both long- and short-term memory by utilizing proven memory enhancement methods. Sensory memory cannot be trained or improved due to its nature. Sensory memory in contrast to short-term memory is where the brain receives sensory input, and within about 12 milliseconds makes a memory decision, the capacity of which is defined in everybody by their brain structure and cannot be altered. Short-term memory, in contrast, is where the brain is allowed to repeat or structure a sensory input, whereby practice can make these memories more robust. So the real difference between them is the amount of time the subject is exposed to the sensory input and allowed to assimilate information; so you cannot improve your skills at turning over playing cards in a deck for a glimpse at each card, then another and so on, and trying to improve the number that you can recall correctly afterwards. About ten is good for most people. Practicing this type of memory over and over will not produce any measurable improvement.
Short-term
Short-term memory can be improved greatly though. Given the same deck of cards, and time to study the sequence it is possible to remember the sequence of the whole deck with some practice and some clever memory techniques. This kind of memory improvement does not just suit those who like to do party tricks. It’s quite conceivable that that long shopping list that you painstakingly write could be committed to memory quite simply by using some fairly simple memory techniques. Short-term memory is the most common memory that we use from day-to-day and enhancing it can have quite a positive Impact on daily life. There’s nothing more exciting thing being reminded that you’ve forgotten something and remembering to program your iPad is just the tip of the iceberg. Improving short-term memory will automatically mean improving your long-term memory, although the 2 memories are stored differently in the brain.
Remember to pick up the kids…
Training the brain to store information more effectively can make a huge difference to how we work interact socially and how well we are educated. For those who just need a little help, books on memory can prevent all those embarrassing lapses – you can make forgetting that important appointment, grocery item, or even to pick up the kids after school, a thing of the past… Just a memory.