This book is logical, honest, and practical.

Logical
Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas explain why memory techniques work and how they simply build on the way our minds already work.

Honest
From the very beginning readers are told memory systems take work, but they are possible and within everyone's reach. Like all good things, it takes effort.

Practical
The memory systems described in this book can be applied to remembering to-do lists, dates, names, places, events, phone numbers, etc. Who wouldn't like to remember those things better?

The book is a great tool for development of system memory.

Classic book about memory systems! It's full of examples, the system is easy to learn and apply. But I'm French so I'll have to adapt it a little bit

This book could be half the length it is but it is INCREDIBLY effective. I’ve been naming the presidents in order every night since reading about peg words. I highly recommend literally that chapter and the imagining numbers chapter and the rest is basically just examples.

نتائج هذا الكتاب-بعد التطبيق- فورية..!!

I've read several books on memorization techniques and other more broad books about the brain, memory and how it works. This is probably the most practical one I've come across so far. Very easy to read, covers a lot of different techniques and has many examples for each technique. You won't become an expert overnight, you still have to practice the different methods in the book, but this is by far the most comprehensive book I've come across. It will cover the basics such as memory palace, peg system, and Major System (memorizing numbers using letters and sounds) and also goes into both abstract and practical applications (you're typical memorizing a deck of cards, which is useless outside of impressing people or memory competitions; to memorizing peoples names, foreign language vocab, etc., which are more practical day to day). Some of the practical applications are a bit outdated in this day and age where we have a smartphone glued to our hand and Siri or Google Home to ask it anything; however, they are still cool to learn how to do (e.g. memorizing phone numbers, birthdays, knowing what day any date of the year is, memorizing day to day tasks and shopping lists, etc.). It's refreshing sometimes to know something off top of your head without pulling out your phone to check.

From what I remember it also gets into some broad tips and techniques for studying new material and textbooks (very practical for your typical university or college student). However, if you're more interested in studying techniques I would recommend A Mind For Numbers by Barbara Oakely.

I don’t remember much of it. Just playing lol. The book started okay. The ideas in it are what really make it stand out, unfortunately it seems that the ideas are repeated quite a bit, just applied in different ways. Most of the end I just skimmed, only really reading the first one/two pages of the chapter to understand the new application.

There are some people out there with great memories and excellent interpersonal skills. We've all probably met someone like this.... They seem to remember your name, your face, and little details about your life and past conversations way more than the average person. And we all LOVE being around these people. They make us feel important and valued, because it could be a year since you've seen them (and you only met them once), and they will recall specific details about your life and ask about them ("How is your grandmother doing? Last time we talked, she had just fallen and broken her hip. I hope she is doing ok.").

I totally want to be one of those people. This realization hit me all the more in the past few months as I have acquired the gradual realization that I am vey much a half-way wife, mom, and working professional. I get so consumed in work in the morning that I'll walk upstairs for lunch with my family and ask, "How was your morning? Did you have fun at the park?" But my mind is still 99% on work. My husband will answer and I won't even hear him, nor remember that I even asked the question in the first place. Five minutes later, I ask the same dumb question and my husband will look at me like, "What?" I recongize that in order to be a more meaningful person in this world, I've got to change that half-invested side of my attitude. If I am in a conversation, I need to be 100% focused and committed to that conversation, to that person. I need to let those around me know that when they tell me something, I am listening, I genuinely care, and I will remember.

Hence this book! It is full of excellent exercises to strengthen your memory, to become one of those great people who make others feel so valued...all becuase of an acute awareness and a strong memory.

I'm still in the middle of the book, but I am truly invested into trying everything so that I can improve. The book is great becuase it provides little exercises to help you see immediate progress. You want to know my grocery list from TWO WEEKS ago? I decided to venture out to the store with no list in hand just to try myself out:
- sugar
- vanilla
- hot dog buns
- bread
- basting brush
- floss
- prescription
- waffles
- aluminum foil
- face wash

Not quite changing the world with my memory yet, but I'm hoping this will help. Next time we have a conversation, I promise I'll remember!

I couldn't finish this book.

The information is helpful, but by the fifth chapter, it gets extremely repetitive. It was like pulling teeth for me to actually sit down and read a page or two. Once you understand their main tricks to memorizing, you can basically apply them to any area of your life. I'd like to use them more often, but it does take some practice and time to form these habits.

It almost feels unfair to give this book 4 stars instead of 5, since it's probably one of the most useful books I've ever read and easily the book I've most often gifted to others. But I hope the reason will become clear in this review.

This is a basic primer to the easier techniques in mnemonics, and will allow you to learn a great deal about how to memorize large quantities of information, pretty much about any topic, with a little bit of creativity. The techniques they cover are the Link, Substitute Word, Major, and Peg systems, as well as some other useful applications like names/faces, playing cards, locations, etc.

My main gripe with this book is that there's a breathtaking lack of information in it, and instead mostly focuses on several (i.e. 10+) ways to apply the same tools to different topics. It's pretty strange and makes me question exactly what kind of audience the authors were writing for. The book is written at around a third grade level, but includes stuff like chapters titled "Teaching your children", and the book has an extreme amount of hand-holding that made me end up flipping past several pages saying "yeah I get it, yeah I get it, yeah I get it". There's also a surprising amount in here that just seems really dumb and impractical, clearly shoved in here to brag about how flexible these systems are (e.g. you can "cure absentmindedness" by "linking every action you ever do to the next action you do", separate chapters for appointments/dates/birthdays/sports stats etc which all should have just been in the number-memorization section but inexplicably got their own chapters)

That said, this can be a pretty good thing as well, in some ways. I genuinely believe, after reading this twice, that if you are an average person and spend more than 2 hours practicing the things in this book and end up unable to memorize a deck of cards in order, then you are either lying about how hard you tried, or you have aphantasia. I was originally going to add "or you're a dimwit" but upon reading it I'm entirely confident that I could teach these techniques to most average seven year olds - that's literally how easy they are.

That said, mostly for my own usage, I'm going to summarize most of the content in this book below, along with some misc. notes of my own. It turned out to be a little over a page and a half in a medium-size moleskine notebook, just for perspective on my gripes with the filler content.

Notes:

You can memorize any information, so long as that information is associated with other information that you already know.
The Link: if you think of an object, and you think of another object, and then make a really absurd picture in your head that connects the two together, you can memorize lists of pretty much arbitrary length. (Example: if you have the list of n objects [fish, basketball, tree, king...] you can imagine a fish playing basketball, then a basketball with giant trees growing out of it, then of a fat king swinging from a tree like a chimp, then a king...) After creating a link, it's easy to just travel through the images until the end, and it's also easy to travel the images backwards, so you pretty much have the whole list memorized quite well.

The link systems best uses are for lists of things, as well as things in order. Some good tricks for creating good images are substitution (imagine one thing replacing another), proportion (imagine one thing the size of the other, generally not the same size, thing), exaggeration (cartoonishly crazy images of the things you're imagining), and action (thing doing a thing). Not listed, and particularly useful as well, is disgust (create some horrible, mangled, offensive image in your head) which is understandable to leave out given the tone of the book but deserves mention due to being, probably, the easiest way to create images that stick (source: Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein).

Substitute Word: A complement to the link. For more abstract thoughts that are hard to literally imagine, come up with something silly that reminds you of that thought (e.g. Minnesota -> mini soda). This is pretty straightforward and done by almost every student in the United States, but it takes some practice to come up with really good ones that stick (you'll frequently run into "what the heck does mini soda stand for??" errors if your substitutes aren't good).

Some Applications:
Memorizing speeches - don't memorize word for word, memorize the focal idea of each sentence and then just talk in the correct order.
Foreign Language Vocabulary - come up with crazy phrases that remind you of the word
Names and Faces - use sub. word for their names and link that to some outstanding feature on their face. If you can't think of something outstanding (very rare) then just pick some arbitrary feature (e.g. nose) and if the next time you see them nothing stands out then you can just remember that. (there's a list of hundreds of substitute words for common names in here which points towards my filler gripe...)
Reminders - Put something extremely out of place and link that thing to what you want to remember, and when you see that again and think "why is this so out of place" you'll remember what you are trying to remember.

The Major System: Memorizing numbers seems really hard, but if you memorize a short list of phonetic associations you'll be able to convert numbers to words that can link easily. Good for telephone numbers or digits of pi, I suppose.

1 - t/d (t has one down stroke)
2 - n (n has two down strokes)
3 - m (m has three down strokes)
4 - r ("four" ends in r)
5 - L (if you hold out your left hand you'll make an L, your hand has 5 fingers)
6 - J/sh/ch/soft g (J and 6 begin with a similar stroke if you mirror one of them)
7 - k/hard c and g (K can kind of be drawn with two 7s if you have a weird tail with the k)
8 - f/v/ph (cursive f looks like an 8)
9 - p/b (p and 9 are mirrorish images)
0 - z/s/soft c ("Zero" starts with Z)

you can break down pretty much any word to it's phonetic components (i.e. silent letters aren't used, etc), and with this system you can convert pretty much any word into a number quite easily (components -> 7392210). Converting a number into a word is a little bit harder and it's a bit like playing a word game ("hmm, what's a word that I can turn 33 into with two m's and no other consonants... oh, how about 'Mom'"). I don't think the mnemonics for these are particularly good but there's only ten of them so memorizing them isn't that hard with some practice. Being good at memorizing numbers ends up just being an exercise in finding cute words from the consonants and then linking them together.

People use a similar system when blindsolving Rubik's Cubes, which turns the cube into a sequence of numbers and then applies algorithms to delete certain numbers, with the endpoint being there being no more numbers left. It's surprisingly straightforward and not-crazy!

The Peg System: These ideas are all and good for memorizing stuff in order, but if you need to quickly grab things by their location (e.g. "who was the 26th president of the United States") then you can just have words associated with those positions. The ones in the book are done via major system but there's a bunch of these out here with rhymes or just brute force.

1 - tie
2 - Noah
3 - Ms
4 - Rye
5 - Law
6 - shoe
7 - cow
8 - ivy
9 - bee
10/0 - toes

There's a whole list from 11-99 in here iirc but it strikes me as a bit more practical (albeit a bit slower) to just have 10 words for each digit (e.g. a set of 1s words, a set of 10s words, a set of 100s words) and to just link those things together (the nice thing about this is that you can literally do it from left to right and stop yourself if you only need a vaguely correct answer really quickly).

That said there's some very serious memory people out there that have enormously long peg words lists memorized so perhaps this might be less practical than I thought.

Playing Cards: Aw man this is one of my favorites

You can do this pretty easily by generating a word for each card by starting it with a C/H/S/D sound (club, heart, spade, diamond) and then putting the remaining words in by major system (Ace = 1, numbers = numbers, 10 = 0, JQK = 11,12,13). You'll get a list of 52 unique words, and you just have to link them together towards a shuffled deck.

imo you should create your own list of words for these instead of relying on the books', and if you want to break from the major system pattern that's perfectly fine so long as you end up being able to remember it easily.

Not mentioned, but worth noting for speed is PAO (person, action, object) where you create three lists of 52 words each, and then use them to flip over three cards at a time and memorize the cards in 3-card chunks. This is much faster and easier to remember (reduces image count from 52 to 18) but obviously requires a bit more up-front memorization (156 links).

You can use this to also remember which cards have been removed by "mutilating" the image associated with the card when it gets drawn. This way, to check which cards are remaining, you can just run through your cards list and pick out which ones aren't mangled in some way. If you need to do this a different way each time, then use a consistent mangling method for each hand/round (e.g. this hand everything removed gets burned, this hand everything removed gets crushed, this one ripped apart, etc etc).

The rest of the book: In general you can probably notice a pattern that you can pretty much apply these ideas to anything that you find a consistent and creative way to convert into numbers. You can memorize locations, for example, by creating a simple 2D grid and memorize the location on this grid (good for something like the periodic table, or locations of towns, or something). Anything you can encode into numbers you can easily memorize (end of world war II was 09/02/1945 which just becomes 09021945 which you know how to memorize already).

Being good at memorization really just means being practiced and being able to quickly come up with good images - the people fastest at memory competitions are really just able to create absurd images and quickly find ways to link them together, which is the hard part about this that quite literally just comes with practice. Memorizing something quickly is quite a task that takes a good amount of practice, but memorizing something slowly, i.e. a deck of cards in ~30 minutes, is something so easy that it's almost laughably trivial (it's quite like solving a rubik's cube, which to many is the impressive part, vs. solving a rubik's cube in 7 seconds, which impresses everyone, including people that can solve rubik's cubes).

Overall I'd personally recommend that you should not only read this book, but actually own it and regularly practice the things in it. Being able to memorize effectively is too useful to not do, and this book will show just how easy it really is.

Not what I was looking for

The main theme of this book is based on association and awareness. The author uses three basic systems of Link, Substitute Word, and the Peg System. The techniques seem fascinating but, in my opinion, take a long time to learn and to implement. This is not for those readers who are looking to improve their memory effort easily. This book must be read and studied repeatedly and can be used as reference book.