Of benefit to anyone seeking to remember a scrap of information for more than a couple of minutes.
An Australian “memory champion” offers some tricks of the trade.
The human brain processes huge amounts of sensory data every day, only some of which gets lodged in it for future access. This can be a problem when trying to remember, say, the name of a person—for which reason cultures from around the world have developed memory-training regimens. “A highly trained memory was greatly admired in the classical Greco-Roman era,” writes Kelly (The Memory Code: The Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Other Ancient Monuments, 2017). “Not only was it useful in politics and speech making, it was also a terrific way to show off.” So it was that the Roman philosopher Seneca lined up 100 students, had each recite a line of poetry, and then repeated the lines in order—and then backward. Kelly examines the techniques employed to perform such prodigious feats, among them the “memory palace,” a mental construct made up of rooms, pieces of furniture, and such that are then populated with facts and figures. The author writes that she has more than 1,000 such locations—and other memory experts have many more. Among the other techniques that she discusses are "visual alphabets in the shapes of animals and humans,” narrative scrolls that develop character-rich stories to aid memory, ingenious mnemonic devices, memorizing long sequences of numbers by means of attaching sounds to them, and perhaps the most useful brain-as-muscle exercise by which one should review a piece of information five times over three months in order to move it into long-term memory. Kelly’s book takes a gee-whiz approach to a scholarly body of literature that includes Frances Yates’ classic books on Renaissance memory studies and recent works of neuroscience such as Daniel Levitin’s The Organized Mind, but the narrative covers the ground well and entertains as it travels.
Of benefit to anyone seeking to remember a scrap of information for more than a couple of minutes.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64-313324-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
A lively and well-written survey, spiced up with incidents from recent headlines.
It isn’t only computers that have memory problems. Just ask anyone over a certain age—or take a look at this entertaining new book.
As the title indicates, Schachter (Psychology/Harvard Univ.) describes seven generic failings to which everyone’s memory is prone. Transience is the loss of details over time; everyone remembers last night’s dinner better than that of a week ago, and that of a year ago is often entirely forgotten. Absentmindedness is the familiar inability to remember where you left your car keys or whether you took your medicine. One of the most frustrating is blocking (the “it’s right on the tip of my tongue”) phenomenon, in which a familiar word or name refuses to emerge from memory (often coming back in the middle of the night). Also common is misattribution, for example crediting Sean Connery for a role played by some other actor. Suggestibility is the tendency to adopt and hold onto false memories suggested by some other outside influence (such as a leading question) or to recall feeling at the time of a past event an emotion only experienced much later. A variety of biases lead us to reconstruct the past to match current beliefs, or to place ourselves at the center of events in which we were minor participants. Finally, there is persistence, the inability to forget even years later some traumatic event such as a rejection or a faux pas. For each of these traits, the author suggests causes as well as potential remedies: gingko biloba for transience, for example. In a summary chapter, Schacter argues that each of these failures is in fact an aspect of some positive trait without which memory would be far less valuable.
A lively and well-written survey, spiced up with incidents from recent headlines.Pub Date: May 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-04019-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
To exorcise the demons of irrationality, turn to this rigorous—if overzealous—study of everyday logic. Cognitive illusions—like optical illusions—hold us in their thrall, says Piattelli-Palmarini (Cognitive Science/Institute San Raffaele, Milan). But theoretical breakthroughs in cognitive science provide revolutionary new avenues for thought. Addressing everyone who wants to make more rational decisions, Piattelli- Palmarini unveils the ``discovery'' of the ``cognitive unconscious.'' This term, with its nod to Freud, refers to the reflexive patterns of reasoning in which we engage unreflectively, even though counterintuitive but logically correct thinking would serve us better. Asked, for instance, which outcome is more likely in a coin flip, ``heads-heads-heads'' or ``heads-tails-heads- tails,'' most people use incorrect logic to conclude that the latter is more likely (in fact, ``the longer the sequence, the less probable it is''). Piattelli-Palmarini explores the ``tunnels'' of cognitive illusion, showing how familiar problems, (drawn from the realms of medicine, demography, economics, and gambling) flummox most people. Then he corrects common misapprehensions, mapping the rational terrain that lies outside these tunnels, even making an arcane but crucial fact about statistics clear to the general reader. By revealing how most respondents err in, for instance, guessing someone's profession based on a personality profile, Piattelli-Palmarini rigorously defines the rules of probability and deduction. Some will object that what he calls ``irrationality'' is itself a function of the abstraction of such problems, but he vigorously defends cognitive science against such arguments. Perhaps less defensible is his pretense that its ideas represent a revolutionary breakthrough; the issues he raises are, after all, part of a 2,000-year-old philosophical debate. Whether or not his grand claims are justified, as a primer for problem-solvers, this book has great merit.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-471-58126-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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