How to Remember Anything: The Total Proven Memory Retention System

by Dean Vaughn

The Only Book of Its Kind―Build Memory Power Whether You're 8 or 80

Dean Vaughn's How to Remember Anything is a remarkable system for harnessing your brain's capacity for memory. Vaughn's user-friendly ten-step system goes beyond the drills and repetitions many of us learned as children by tapping into the power of sight and hearing. Visualizations, sound-alike words, and odd juxtapositions of objects (the more illogical the better) are some of the elements of Vaughn's sure-fire program to remember and retain everything from the names of the presidents of the United States to birthdays and appointments. Millions of individuals have benefited from this remarkable, proven memory system. You will too!

How to Remember Anything will help you remember:

* names and faces
* vocabulary and world languages
* where you put things
* numbers, reports and meeting agendas
* appointments, birthdays and anniversaries
* your schedule and things to do
* how to speak in public without notes
* geography, geometry
* ANYTHING!

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published April 17, 2007

Reviews

[Tissy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh, kinda worked. Interesting but nothing amazing.

[Max Rohde · Rating 3 out of 5]

How to Remember Anything sticks to the objectives set out by the author; to provide a to-the-point and practical reference to common memory techniques. I am sure there are plenty of other books around that have the same or similar content - but How to Remember Anything still offers a nice and quick overview of some common techniques.

Here some notable ones:

- The cube system involves assigning a number to each corner (odd) and walls (even) of a room one is familiar with, and then placing memory images into these locations. For instance to remember a shopping list with wine and avocados, one may imagine in location 1 of the room (a corner since 1 is odd) a person-sized shimming wine bottle, while seeing on the wall next to it (location 2) a waterfall of avocados.
- Audionyms can be used for abstract concepts. To turn an abstract concept into a memory image, try to find a similar sounding word and then use that as a stand-in of the concept. For instance, to remember liberty, imagine a library, etc.
- Association relies on linking something which we already know with something we want to remember. For instance, when seeing a person we would like to remember their name. Key here is to create mental images for both what we already know and what we want to remember. Once these images are created, we can link these images. Vaughn suggests that the images should be linked in a way that is as illogical and impossible. For instance, if my images are an airplane and a rose, I could image an airport transporting roses (possible) or an airplane creating a contrail of roses (impossible).
- The Major System for remembering numbers (interestingly not referenced by Vaughn by that name but instead as the Number Code). In this common memory technique numbers are linked to consonants. Lists of numbers are converted into words by chaining multiple consonants together with vowels and half-vowels. These words should ideally be powerful memory images. For instance the number 1 is associated with the consonant 't' and the number 0 is associated with the consonant 's'. We could just create the word/image 'toes' to remember the number 10. It is actually quite difficult to come up with words using these rules, thus most practitioners of this memory technique will memorise the words for at least the numbers between 00 and 99.

There are further techniques described in the book but I think the above seemed the most useful to me in terms of being relatively straightforward. Note similar techniques are described in many other books on memory, such as The Art of Memory by Frances Yates and Moonwalking with Einstein by Josh Foer.

[Debbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was ok. Had some great ideas, but was hard for me to read. I liked a few of the ideas as relating what you're remembering to different places in a room. Also, seemed like a lot more steps to remember then the actual thing you were needing to remember, but that may show why my memory is as it is!

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the book that got me started on learning more about memory techniques back in 2010. The skeptical me was subsequently converted by this newfound religion as I strived to uncover the limits of our memory by experimenting with more means of learning apart from the traditional rote memorisation.

[J]

Of the four memory technique books I've read, three are about the same (and all good). This is one of the three. If you're looking for something with more theory, explanation, and results of scientific studies, try Higbee's Your Memory.

[Evan Knight · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is like no other memory book I have read

[Powell Randolph · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best memory books I have read. I use his systems probably every day.

[Nguyễn Văn · Rating 4 out of 5]

adadads

[Longinus · Rating 4 out of 5]

in NL

[Regine Rivera]

Good