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.

2 comments:

  1. 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.

    I 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.

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  2. 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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