Unlike my ancient predecessor, this Tullius hasn't had his hands chopped off. With hands attached I offer my thoughts on philosophy, religion, politics, and whatever else I find worth mentioning. I'm conservative religiously and politically (with libertarian leanings). I value reason and freedom but also traditions and "Oldthink." I relish being on the wrong side of history when history is wrong--part of a philosopher's job is to be unpopular. (Views given here may not represent my employers')
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
A Book I Just Read
Very entertaining and well written. Josh recounts his year preparing for the U.S. memory competition, his interviews with competitors and scientists having to do with memory, and gives the reader a brief history of memorization in education. If you want to learn how to profoundly increase your memory, this is a good book with which to start. It should be required reading for people in the profession of educating children, even better, the classics he mentions which lay out the fascinating memory techniques almost all of us have forgotten.
Labels:
book review,
books,
memory
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An excellent book, no doubt. Was amazed at how much work the imagination has to do in order to memorize well. Seems to me that exercising one's memory requires much more than that one simple faculty. It's an aid to creative thinking and may as well enhance critical reasoning skills as well.
ReplyDeleteI particularly enjoyed his attempt (to my mind, successful) to teach the reader how to (e.g.) memorize a simple shopping list. I went along with him, and did make myself do as he suggested. That's been several months back, and I'm pretty sure I could recite that grocery list without a problem.
Ditto with the shopping list. My one question is what to make of people who cannot picture things in their mind but think purely abstractly. The memory palace would not work, but still, such people have memories.
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