Self-Help : Your Memory How It Works and How to Improve It
Harvard Medical School Guide to Achieving Optimal Memory (Harvard Medical School Guides) | 
 | 80% Recommended by our customers.
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- ISBN13: 9781569246290
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 Memories Are Made of This...
Kenneth Higbee, P.H.D., who teaches courses he developed on memory improvement, can help you improve your memory. Your Memory: How it Works & How To Improve It offers the foundation and basic principles.
Does it work?
Absolutely, if you apply the techniques and have the motivation to apply it.
I had read Tony Buzan's Use Your Perfect MemoryUse Your Perfect Memory: Dramatic New Techniques for Improving Your Memory; Third Edition (Plume) years ago and also recommend.
Personally, I have always had a good memory. I have intrinsically used the techniques in this book and find them to be accurate. Stress disrupts attention and thwarts memory which is where this book can help you concentrate and file the info correctly in the first place.
I found Your Memory: How it Works & How To Improve It edifying and entertaining at times and this book will teach you how we forget, how your memory works and refutes the 10 myths of memory. Limitations of Mnemonics and standard systems like the Loci and the Peg systems.
Recommend!!!
Title says it all.
This volume is neatly summarized by its own subtitle. The book is implicitly divided into two parts, the first documenting what we know about factors affecting memory, and the second explaining specific techniques for improving recall. Although written to a lay audience, Higbee remains solidly scientific in separating myth from reality. The book is dotted with footnotes throughout, containing a total of 30 pages of citations. Well organized with copious forward and backward references, the book is of value whether used as a textbook, a reference, or a casual cover-to-cover read.
The first part of the book ("How it works") does not delve into the function of nerve cells, the mind-brain mapping, or any such topics of interest to neurologists. Instead, the chapters remain practical, addressing issues such as as photographic memory (it doesn't exist) and what factors affect recall (meaningfulness and organization, among others). At all times Higbee remains realistic; there is no silver bullet to memory, no technique to remember everything forever, and he makes this reality clear from the start. This first half of the book is an interesting read, but it's all prep: You won't get much practical from this section except possibly some tidbits for use at cocktail parties.
The real meat is in the second section ("How to improve it"), which will be of primary interest to most readers. But don't start here; the section is meaningless without the foundations laid previously. Higbee starts with general strategies for study and memorization, then delves into specific mnemonic techniques. Using the simplest of these, the Link system, I was able to memorize a list of 20 random words in about 3 minutes with no other preparation. It's a list of words I can remember to this day. Other techniques are specifically helpful with more everyday types of recall, such as ordinal information, numbers, names and faces, and avoiding absentmindedness. Some of these are easy to pick up while others require considerable effort, but every technique is proven effective by randomized controlled clinical trials.
This is not a book of power, because once you've read it through once or twice you're unlikely to need to refer to it a third time. Instead, however, this book will leave you asking one dramatic question: If these techniques for study and memorization are so powerful (they are) and so widely applicable (they are), why aren't they taught to every student at every grade level? Instead, I somehow managed to make it through 18 years of structured education without any introduction to study skills whatsoever. I am confident that my experience is not unusual, so the real lesson of this book is to adopt these techniques for yourself, and then share them with the young people in your life. They'll remember to thank you later.
Your Memory, How It Works & How To Improve It
The author did an exceptional job at balancing the practical application of memory improvement techniques with the academic (including historical) bases for why they work. The general progression of explaining memory, past studies and principles, to application, back to principles to enhance those applications, was very effective. Examples of practical applications and personal stories heavily sprinkled throughout the book illustrated the potentialities the reader could tap into. Having read other memory books, it does by far the best job of bringing it all together to be the most useful for the reader. Great job! I highly recommend it to anyone, but especially to those with relationships with young school children, who would benefit tremendously from exposure to these memory aids at an early age.
Good
fine quality and was to me within a reasonable amount of time. no complaints here.
An essential tool for learning.
This is a very good book. If you have made it this far, I recommend you purchase it. I recommend this book to friends and family.
The first 1/2 starts slow and boring, but read it anyway.
The 1/2 half is where you get into the techniques, make it there and you're golden.
The beginning of the book is very informative but seemed a tad redundant at parts. This is due to the author trying to reinforce the concept that the techniques taught are not "tricks" or "gimmicks" but rather ways to learn things more naturally and ways to associate information to take advantage of learning correctly. He also addresses at great length the factors which can affect memory.
I read this book as an aid for college. Although my next semester has not arrived, and the books are not available yet I feel as though it will help me.
I paid particular attention to the paired associative learning for foreign language and it has helped me remember words that can be troublesome (for some reason there are words that are just hard to remember, in addition to now being able to easily learn 20 or so vocabulary words for each chapter much more easily, and permanently). I think this will help me excel in my studies.
While the author uses these techniques very frequently, I find myself only using my favorite techniques. However, I have used some of the techniques I didn't think I would use. I had to remember a large number the other day, and can still remember it. (just for kicks it's 011-612-9688-6388 it's the telephone number of a shop in Australia which I purchased a coin from. I would have never been able to do this before I read this book, and this is days later not 5min later.) so needless to say, it may be useful albeit more rarely.
So all in all, very useful. I've loved it so far, but I am still practicing all the techniques. I feel it's worth the effort to learn, especially for young people. I'm going to make my younger sister read it, I feel the concepts would be very helpful for students of all ages. For younger students the parents or teachers would need to read the book and assist the children in learning the techniques, because although the concepts are good for all ages, this book is only for advanced readers.
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