The book cover itself says its not another "mind power" book.. with boring technical and mostly impractical and sometimes with petty techniques which I already posses..
Author Foer takes us a journey which he takes to win the American memory championship by sprinkling some of the techniques he used to remember different stuff. Certainly the book is not for learning new memory techniques as the author just gives a glimpse and feel of those techniques, its upto the reader to dig-deeper those sprinkled techniques. Rather the book is successful in being interesting, funny and informative. Since Im reading the Malcolm Gladwell series, MWE narration comes closer to Outliers. And some of the information is there in both the books, which makes me think both Foer or Gladwell are originator of the original idea (like the 10,000 hrs deliberate work) they are just aggregators and presenters of existing facts..
Memory palace - eventhough this is a technique we all use to keep things in memory, we can deliberately build memory palaces (with the places we know well) for certain group of things. This is helpful to me in preserving things to do, passwords and some numbers. the trick is to assign weird images/persons or persons doing weird things.
remembering cards - the POA method seems to be very effective (person Object Activity). For each card in the deck assign a personality doing some action on an object
A-spade - Rajnikanth wearing a coolers
2-spade - Kamal kissing a girl
3-spade - vijay dancing on a table
4-spade - Ajith raising his red-shirts collar
And when you get a 3 card combination we can create a mental image of POA
Ajith dancing with a girl represents 4-spade,3-spade,2-spade..
Its hard to remember the image for each card, but once it is assigned with practice its possible to remember atleast 10 cards I think !!
remembering numbers - this can be done with the same technique above by assigning a image to each 2 digit combination (this is hard I think but possible with deliberate practise)
extreme peoples -
Other interesting part is about a man who forgets the breakfast he had 5 mins back and some info on the famous Rain man. The interesting information is our time will seems longer if you have more memories about the time-period. Like the vacations, the job changes, important events and successful events
Role of memory in education -
I feel education needs some memory to analyze the data.. the future is of-course how effectively we analyze the data, but memory also plays a part it seems..
Overall interesting read other than boring self-improvement books which always portraits an ideal personality (which in reality cant exists)
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