Fourteen. Unlimited Memory by Kevin Horsley
2014, TCK Publishing, 189 pages. Written in English, read in English.
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I have to say that I was ultimately disappointed with what this book actually had to offer, but in retrospect I may have been disappointed because my expectations of the book were too high. I was fantasising of radically changing my recall abilities and be able to remember whole books after reading them once. This book falls a bit short than fulfilling that promise.
“Unlimited Memory” provides, in my opinion, a limited set of techniques that you can use to improve your memory. Most of them revolve around tying information that you want to retain, to other information that is easier to recall; making sure that you are triggering more than one sensory area (for example, tying dry facts to visual cues); and creating some reference between different bits of data in order for each of them to trigger the other.
I think that the main reason I was disappointed with the book, is that it didn’t feel like there was a system put in place to help me improve my memory. There were just those several techniques, organised by way of similarity and not necessarily as building blocks to a new or improved skill. There was also a lot of book “real estate” dedicated to trying to convince me that I can improve my memory, that I shouldn’t give up, etc. — but if I’ve picked up this book, and am intending to read it through, there’s really no need for this repetitive persuasion.
In summary, I’ve found some of the techniques mentioned in the book useful, and some, for the time being, too cumbersome to practice. But I may return to this book in order to gain a few more techniques that may help me with this, and other, projects. However limited the book is, it still helped me improve the way I approach reading other books.
