Your Memory: How It Works And How To Improve It [Paperback]

WHAT CAN BE LEARNT FROM THE BOOK? Using the effective study techniques and mnemonic techniques from the book, you can make effective use of your memory and will not forget things as easily as you used to. You can learn a whole year's calendar by remembering only a 12 digit number. You can learn the value of "pi" up to as many digits as you want to. You can learn a list of up to 100 or more items on a list. You can put all the telephone numbers of your relatives and friends in your head. You might not have to carry your PDA, provided you use your PDA solely for information retrieval.

WHAT'S THE BOTTOM LINE? No memory book will improve your short term memory from 7 items to 7+ items, provided you are a normal person. All memory books contain techniques to make effective memory usage - do not expect to remember what you were doing yesterday at, say 2.27 PM studying all the memory books in the world and applying all the mnemonic techniques in the world. If you want something like that, travel into the future and get electronic chips implanted in your brain. This book does not contain enough examples on application of the mnemonic techniques. I suggest you get Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas's "The Memory Book" in addition to this book for more applications and examples of the mnemonic techniques.

Personally, between the two books, I prefer Higbee's book because of his thorough examination of memory, its history, case studies, analogies, and anecdotes. I find it to be inspiring to see its great applications and that most people benefit greatly from these techniques. This style helped me to retain enthsiasm to learn and yet was written in a plain and often humorous style.

"The Memory Book" has its own benefits. It lays everything out in easy to understand instructions and lists a few dorky "party tricks" you can do with some of the techniques (though who's really going to entertain friends with "memory feats"?). Lorayne and Lucas do offer something not offerred in Higbee's book: short chapters dedicated to using memory techniques for specific tasks such as learning music, stock symbols, sports plays, or locations. These chapters make up a small portion of the book and could easily be read off the shelf at a local bookstore.

To sum up, both books offer up basically the same exact memory techniques. It's up to your own learning style to decide which one you prefer.

This book offers a nice medium ground. It offers information on the various types of memories and current scientific research into memory and then follows up with several types of techniques to enable you to remember different things. The advantage to this book is that since it gives you both pieces information in a concise, integrated work it provides you with the framework to design and/or adjust the techniques to your personal needs.

The book does not offer any new mnemonic techniques or any groundbreaking work in that area. However, I found that by understanding how the techniques work and how to work with them I was able to adapt the systems and/or use multiple systems to quickly memorize material that had been problematic before.

The book covers basic systems from the common Loci system that is quick and easy to learn to the much more flexible and complex phonic system that requires much more study and practice to use effectively. While these are not new, a work that details the manner in which they work and encourages you to adapt the system to your needs is new. This is definitely one of the best single books that I have read on the subject and was immediately useful.

The only thing that I did not like about the book was the great multitude of references to other works, systems, and detailed applications of the system to various specific situations. The references are not a problem in themselves as they do not break up the flow of the book and are summarized at the end of the book in an easy to read fashion. The problem is that while they point out where information came from they do not point out where to get your hands on the information. This has not been a problem for me in the past as I have generally not really cared to follow up to the original source of footnotes and references. But this book was so well done that I found myself often wanting to follow up with the references and not able to locate them. For example, in Chapter 12 he mentions a book and a game that contain 1,200 Bible verses set out with mnemonic devices to help learn them and where they are located in the Bible. After a couple of examples to whet your appetite the only information in the reference material related to the footnote is where the book can be purchased. Not even a mention of the book's name if one should desire to purchase it. No mention of the game name nor where one might find it. Of course it may not be too difficult to locate if you had a name for the game or book or anything else other than just the publisher.