Your Memory : How It Works and How to Improve It (Paperback)

by Kenneth L. Higbee (Author) "For years, claims like these have been made in advertisements for memory-training books and courses..." (more)
Key Phrases: using mnemonics, phonetic keywords, effective visual associations, Meet Your Memory, Working Miracles, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Do you want to stop forgetting appointments, birthdays, and other important dates? Work more efficiently at your job? Study less and get better grades? Remember the names and faces of people you meet? The good news is that it's all possible. Your Memory will help to expand your memory abilities beyond what you thought possible. Dr. Higbee reveals how simple techniques, like the Link, Loci, Peg, and Phonetic systems, can be incorporated into your everyday life and how you can also use these techniques to learn foreign languages faster than you thought possible, remember details you would have otherwise forgotten, and overcome general absentmindedness. Higbee also includes sections on aging and memory and the latest information on the use of mnemonics.

About the Author
Kenneth Higbee, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at Brigham Young University where, among other subjects, he teaches courses he developed on memory improvement. He writes for many professional journals and has lectured and conducted workshops for diverse audiences, including business and professional groups, memory researchers, as well as children, students, and the elderly. He lives in Provo, Utah.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press; 2nd edition (March 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1569246297
• ISBN-13: 978-1569246290
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,140 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

444 of 449 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The complete memory book, August 2, 2000

By	Travis Cottreau (Wellington, New Zealand) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Your Memory: How It Works & How to Improve It (Paperback)

Kenneth Higbee is very direct about his memory book. He writes that he fills in a very specific niche that isn't being filled by current memory books. I think that he is right.

I have recently read 4 other memory books, Kevin Trudeau's "Mega-Memory", Tony Buzan's "Use Your Perfect Memory", Harry Lorayne's "How to Develop a Superpower Memory" and Lorayne and Lucas's "The Memory Book". I have read some of them previously, but intentionally read them over with the intent to compare them to each other and see if there was any difference.

If you are already sold on various memory techniques (pegging, loci etc...) and only want to learn the techniques, it really doesn't matter which book you read, they all contain the same information about the actual techniques. All of them usually have a little history included as well about where the techniques come from and how they developed.

Higbee, however, goes one step further than all the other books. He is aiming this book at students (I'm sure this is a text book for his memory course), educators and intelligent readers. He gives answers to long time questions that are so often asked (what is a photographic memory? Do different systems interfere with each other?, will you forget what you remember? How good are the different techniques? etc...). Higbee answers all of these and more in a clear way with little ambiguity. He provides the latest research and references to medical and psychological journals on how the techniques work, results from various students in his classes and his own experiences. He looks directly at problems with the memory systems and addresses criticism from various sources.

The book left me impressed and addressed all of my questions and even questions that friends asked me after I'd read the book. I was able to answer all of their questions without problems. Also, I found that the extra chapter on study techniques changed how I read textbooks and technical information. In fact, I began reading the rest of his book in the same way that he suggested and found it worked very well for absorbing information.

To summarise, Higbee gives various memnonic techniques that are general enough to use every day, some suggestions on how to use them, references to books that give you even more suggestions and research evidence to back it up. Higbee also warns that these aren't always worth your time. If you are looking for an easy way to get a photographic memory, look elswhere. Most of these techniques take time and effort and some can even hinder your memory if you try to use them and only put only a little time in.

This book is the kind that I recommend to friends and I think every student should probably read at least once. There are tools here that are life changing and worth your time to learn. A simply outstanding book.

135 of 136 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Memory book to Date, June 15, 2001

By	Harold McFarland (Florida) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

There are many books about memory and memory improvement on the marketplace. Most of them tend to fall into one of two categories. Either a treatise on the brain, how memories are formed, the types of memories and the basics of recall or a treatise of memorization techniques that have been used over the centuries. The first type offers great information but very little useful advice for someone seeking to improve their memory. The second type offers lots of techniques that may work in one situation or another but don't give enough information on how they work to allow you to adapt them to your own personal needs.

This book offers a nice medium ground. It offers information on the various types of memories and current scientific research into memory and then follows up with several types of techniques to enable you to remember different things. The advantage to this book is that since it gives you both pieces information in a concise, integrated work it provides you with the framework to design and/or adjust the techniques to your personal needs.

The book does not offer any new mnemonic techniques or any groundbreaking work in that area. However, I found that by understanding how the techniques work and how to work with them I was able to adapt the systems and/or use multiple systems to quickly memorize material that had been problematic before.

The book covers basic systems from the common Loci system that is quick and easy to learn to the much more flexible and complex phonic system that requires much more study and practice to use effectively. While these are not new, a work that details the manner in which they work and encourages you to adapt the system to your needs is new. This is definitely one of the best single books that I have read on the subject and was immediately useful.

The only thing that I did not like about the book was the great multitude of references to other works, systems, and detailed applications of the system to various specific situations. The references are not a problem in themselves as they do not break up the flow of the book and are summarized at the end of the book in an easy to read fashion. The problem is that while they point out where information came from they do not point out where to get your hands on the information. This has not been a problem for me in the past as I have generally not really cared to follow up to the original source of footnotes and references. But this book was so well done that I found myself often wanting to follow up with the references and not able to locate them. For example, in Chapter 12 he mentions a book and a game that contain 1,200 Bible verses set out with mnemonic devices to help learn them and where they are located in the Bible. After a couple of examples to whet your appetite the only information in the reference material related to the footnote is where the book can be purchased. Not even a mention of the book's name if one should desire to purchase it. No mention of the game name nor where one might find it. Of course it may not be too difficult to locate if you had a name for the game or book or anything else other than just the publisher.

41 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best on the market, November 20, 2001

By	obediah (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This book is a comprehensive treatment of useful memory systems. It claims to seek a balance between the "popular" memory books and the archaic, academic memory literature. This is a goal which it successfully achieves.

There are many great things about this book. It covers all the main mnemonic systems. The author provides up to date reviews of relevant literature to comment upon the effectiveness of the systems. He does this in a very clear, easy going style which makes the book enjoyable to read, unlike the hefty academic memory journals. The great thing about this book is that it doesn't hype "Super power memory" or "Photographic memory" or any such nonsense. It teaches you not only the techniques but the way in which to correctly apply techniques. Thus, you know what the mnemonic systems are and when to use them.

To be honest I can't think of anything that I dislike about this book. The author adopts a very no nonsense approach and I can heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about how to improve their memory.