Your memory
Do you want to stop forgetting appointments, birthdays, and other important dates? Work more efficiently at your job? Study less and get better grades? Remember the names and faces of people you meet? The good news is that it's all possible. Your Memory will help to expand your memory abilities beyond what you thought possible. Dr. Higbee reveals how simple techniques, like the Link, Loci, Peg, and Phonetic systems, can be incorporated into your everyday life and how you can also use these techniques to learn foreign languages faster than you thought possible, remember details you would have otherwise forgotten, and overcome general absentmindedness. Higbee also includes sections on aging and memory and the latest information on the use of mnemonics.
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- Moonwalking with Einstein is a fun book. "Your Memory" by Higbee I read maybe 15-20 years ago and it's more on how to do this kind of stuff. I was able to memorize a deck of cards quite quickly at one point but these techniques require quite a bit of practice to keep.
Also, most of this information is freely available online at this point and there are a ton of resources for finding it probably but I remember it being a pretty useful book at the time.
- I prefer Anki, though I started using Mnemosyne.
Both are good. I created most of the cards I use myself, as I only add what is relevant to me.
There's also a lot of value in learning about how human memory and learning works. Some parts are like learning how to program your brain. Your brain works well with certain data structures. I'd recommend this book for those interested:
https://www.amazon.com/Your-Memory-How-Works-Improve/dp/1569...
- > I'd like to learn more, but there's so much hokum surrounding so called 'memory' techniques it's hard to know where to start.
Check out the book "Your Memory: How it Works and How to Improve It" by Kenneth Higbee. It's written by a professor in psychology and he uses it in his classes. The book has the perfect blend between theory of how memory works and practical skills.
- Speaking from personal experience, that talent itself can also be developed and improved. It's not easy, and can definitely take awhile.
'The Art of Learning' by Josh Waitzkin could be a good start for someone who wants to improve in this area.
Of course, one could also learn how to make their study technique more effective so they don't need to spend 10 hours. See 'Your Memory: How It Works and How To Improve It' by Higbee for that.
- I do like Anki and am currently using it for a couple of different learning activities.
I would suggest you create your own decks with images you find or create yourself rather than downloading existing decks. Memorization is generally improved by this approach (see Higbee, Your Memory : How It Works and How to Improve It).
I also like how Anki has spaced repetition built in nicely.
- SRS seems to be the right answer for increasing the long term recall of just about anything. For main points of a tech paper, you could probably use the link method to associate a strong image for each of the main points in the technical paper and then link them.
Then you could pump those images into your SRS system for review.
You can find info on the web about link methods and recall, or you can just grab Higbee's "Your Memory : How It Works and How to Improve It" from Amazon. I found old copies pretty easily in university libraries as well.
