The memory book
Unleash the hidden power of your mind through Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas's simple, fail-safe memory system, and you can become more effective, more imaginative, and more powerful, at work, at school, in sports and play. Discover how easy it is to: file phone numbers, data, figures, and appointments right in your head; learn foreign words and phrases with ease; read with speed--and greater understanding; shine in the classroom--and shorten study hours; dominate social situations, and more.
Stats for nerds
11recommend
23mentions
16people
2009–2026years
70% recommend30% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Another good resource is The Memory Book[0]. It covers a few different systems that cover different scenarios, such as lists, like in the article, names and numbers. It uses techniques like the article, but also expands on them in interesting ways. If you put the practice time in, it does work!
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Book-Classic-Improving-School/...
- If you like this stuff, I would strongly recommend Harry Lorayne's books (How To Develop a Super Power Memory or The Memory Book).
- If people like these things, I recommend The Memory Book by Harry Lorayne (he's written a few other memory books as well). I read the book and tried its techniques when I was young.
Interestingly, I started doing spaced repetition more recently (2 years ago), and I found it more effective than the method of loci or anything else in his book. Yes, I may remember things using the method of loci days, or even months later, but usually not longer than that. Spaced repetition is a system that forces you to recall things later. Probably one could couple the two, though. Maybe if a SR system forced me to recall something I learned with the method of loci, I would claim the latter to be effective.
I really did like the "phonetic alphabet" method in his book, though. I use it occasionally to remember things for the short-medium term.
- Also would recommend books by Harry Lorayne (The Memory Book is the most well known). I've not yet read Moonwalking with Einstein to see how it compares, but it likely has the same techniques (loci/memory palace, different mnemonics, peg lists, etc).
https://www.amazon.com/Memory-Book-Classic-Improving-School/...
Personally, though, beyond using mnemonics for numbers, I never did master the techniques. I think it's a lot easier if you start at around age 10. By the time you're in your 20's you have a lot of habits around memorizing that you have to unlearn.
- The Memory Book - Fantastic, maybe not always practical unless you have a lot of practice, but extremely useful to at least understand some of the strategies to memorizing strings
Understanding Weatherfax - for an attempted (and failed) circumnavigation
Sail Power
Kon Tiki
Shogun
Art of the Sailor
Business Adventures
Metamorphoses (by Ovid, not Kafka)
Guns, Germs, Steel
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - this book had so many rave reviews. it has a tremendous hook and style for the first 50 pages, but overall I thought it was terrible
Cryptonomicon -- fantastic
Simulacra and simulation -- started, but I need to start over. this is not an easy read...
Predictably Irrational -- another book with great reviews, but reading this book was not time well spent. the author just summarizes psychology experiments with pages of dumbed down explanations and tedious anecdotes
The Alliance -- read this on my last day at my old job, a good reminder on the social contract between you and your employer and how it should be mutually beneficial, lots of boring filler though
Triple your reading speed -- I wanted to take a speed reading course when I was in elementary school, but my dad thought it was a waste of time. I think I really missed out on something, but late is better than never.
Siddhartha -- rereading of one of my favorite books of all time
The Alchemist -- rereading of one of my favorite books of all time
Jazz (by Leveaux)
The Jazz Piano Book
Mastering the Piano
Big Blue Book of bicycle maintenance
Probability (by Pitman) -- its embarassing statistics/probability isn't a required course in many programs
Elements of Statistical Learning
Advanced Analytics with Spark -- feels like this book was published only 80% done
Optimization Models (by Calafiore and El Ghaoui) -- going to finish this is 2016
Functional Programming with Scala -- going to finish this is 2016
Linux Programming Interface -- going to finish this is 2016
Finished 18 books cover to cover in 2015, 6 of which were textbooks/academic texts. Currently have 7 in progress, 2 of which are piano workbooks and 3 are textbooks.
Goal for 2016 is 30 books cover to cover, at least 8 textbooks/academic texts.
- There are a lot of methods that was developed by Harry Lorayne. I recommend to read some of his books (The Memory Book).
