Pegasus Books Memory Craft

Un livre pareil à nul autre sur le sujet de la mémoire. Et pratique avec çà ! Un "eye opener" sur des sujets historiques (comme les manuscrits médiévaux) et ethnographique (les techniques de mémorisation des peuples "sans écriture"). L'auteur a essayé toutes les techniques décrites et donne des conseils pratiques. Idéal pour les créatifs qui se régaleront à fabriquer leur memory board, leur bâton de mémoire voir leur quippu. Un régal de lecture et une mine d'informations inédites. Un formidable "motivateur" pour mettre son cerveau à l'ouvrage, quel que soit son age, et sans avoir peur des quantités de données qu'on aimerait bien mémoriser. Tout y est.

This is a fantastic book! My sister (who is in medical school) recommended this book as she was looking for ways to help remember the massive amount of information she was studying in preparation for exams. I am a University teacher so I'm always curious about tools students use to help them in their studies. I read the book in a couple of days because a bunch of light bulbs went off in my mind about how I could apply her research (for my teaching, to help my students, and also for my own personal use) and wanted to ingest it as quickly as possible!The book is written in a very personal way, almost as a travelogue. She shows us how she came to each mnemonic strategy and how she uncovered their individual histories. My main take away is that humans have been using different strategies to remember names, places, events, cultural histories, etc, for thousands of years, and that learning these methods was essentially an important part of every person's education, regardless of culture, up until very, very recently. Why have we stopped learning and teaching these techniques that proved so useful for most of human civilization?!For all those reasons, this book was well worth the price and my time. It really opened my eyes and made me want to do more research on a topic that I had virtually no interest in whatsoever when I began. A minor criticism however would be that the book isn't particularly useful for anyone who already knows about this history and is looking for step-by-step instruction on how to use the techniques. She does explain how she does it through anecdotes and there are some very helpful lists in the notes, but I wouldn't say the strategies are laid out in a way that would make quick reference easy or even possible.

Read it at the library but needed to own it.

This is a thorough review of the history and theories of memory. Dr. Lynne Kelly adds to the field of mnemonics by presenting the results of her personal academic research within the area of cultures that have no recorded archival information, in the classical Western sense of the word. As she has won international acclaim as a memory champion, she deserves a further hearing from a modern perspective.Especially interesting for me as a reader was her scouting report from a memory competition: Indeed, to combat noise and distraction, she observed memory competitors wearing sound-deadening headsets. (Not a bad suggestion for serious students of any stripe who must stay in the world and study but are seriously hampered by family, friends and pets, at the worst possible times! I found it helps, folks! True it! :-) )To develop focus, I also liked her idea about saying sentences backwards, which helps me --believe it or not-- with driving foreign language studies more attentively and profoundly. While a variation on the exercise of recalling the alphabet backwards aloud or counting back from 100 by twos and threes, this actually attacks the task at hand. Superb!Dr. Kelly's book is a welcome addition to my library. Check her website out, too. She's the real deal! Cheers from the states!

Lynne Kelly's Memory Craft is practical, informative, and revolutionary, Not only does she discuss memory strategies, but also provides you with the history behind them and the amazing feats you can pull of using them. Joshua Foer's book, Moonwalking with Einstein, was a great autobiographical account of one man's inspiring foray into the world of memory competitions, but it was sorely lacking in explanation on how to use memory strategies. Kelly, however, discusses a wide range of techniques to remember things better in all the detail you need to get started, and she tells you her amazing accomplishments using them. For example, she uses two blocks around her house to lay out an outline of all of history starting 4600 million years ago! She even includes a full list of all the methods in an appendix, including their names, where they can be found in the book, and what they are used for. If you were to implement all of these memory tricks into your life, it would revolutionize how you lived it.