How to Develop a Brilliant Memory Week by Week: 50 Proven Ways to Enhance Your Memory Skills

I loved this book so much, and I will tell you why, but because I have read so many other books and spent time applying the techniques I will say that This book could be better. The pro's of this book are that it is essentially a list of techniques that if you memorize you can apply quickly to whatever your learning. I'm in college so having this list memorized has been very helpful. But the author could have done much better and here is why.There were many chapters that seemed like repeats or basically useless. For instance:--Chapter 15 on peoples names is not the best. I still connect nothing to facial features, the chapter failed to get me to do such a feat. And the names process is more difficult than it needs to be. The author recommends putting a face in a place, but it is better to look at the name first because you can always look at them twice and silently work their face into your memory. So the name Chris with a crystal, or Gary with a berry is much quicker than what the author has you do. Better to get a quick link to name and then do some secondary process afterword.--Chapter 19 is also poorly done. The author reccomends you picture different words in different countries based on the gender. So for Spanish La(feminine) and El(masculine) go in seperate countries. The problem is two fold, one is that there are two forumlas "Omas" "aCionDad" that tells you the male vs. female for the majority of the words. The second issue is that it's easier to memorize simple words using a two images. So a grocery "cart" and a "match(for fire) are pictured. And now you have a link to the word Partido=game or match. That's much quicker and easier.--Chapter 22 on declarative memory is completely useless as it just tells you that extra effort and focus helps you to remember faster. It tells you touse the journey method. That is a waste of space.---A final note on the Dominic System. This took me a month to learn, and in the end I only use the P in the PAO. Maybe I'll incorporate more, but for now I will only use the Person. For those wondering what it is.... It's just a way to remember number easier. People instead of numbers are used and it works very well, but will take you forever to learn if your not using it.So I paid 7$ for this book. And the author delivered even though there are some issues. This is not a book to shake a stick at, it's just a book that isn't perfect. And if you told me I could speed up my memory and shave 5-6hrs a week off my study time for 7$, I would never say that it was a bad deal. This book delivers and for that it gets 5 stars all day every day. Some of my criticisms come from the view point of a college student who is already experienced in mnemonics. I'd buy it and run through the practices if I were you.

MR.O'BRIEN'S MEMORY BOOK IS THE BEST. I BOUGHT IT FOR ME AND HAVE GIVEN 4 AS GIFTS TO FAMILY AND FRIENDS. LEARN THE TECHNIQUES, THEY ARE THE LATEST AND MOST EFFECTIVE, DUE TO TRIAL AND ERROR IN COMPETITION. APPLY THE TECHNIQUES-ALL THE TIME. IT IS CHALLENGING AT FIRST, BUT AFTER A MONTH OR TWO OF APPLYING HIS TECHNIQUES, THEY BECOME EASIER AND YOUR MEMORY CAPACITY INCREASES BY AT LEAST 300%. WELL WORTH THE TIME AND EFFORT BECAUSE IT WORKS! THIS BOOK IS INCREDIBLY EFFECTIVE, ALMOST MIRACULOUS. LIKE A 110 LB. WEAKLING BECOMING A BODYBUILDER. LEARNING AND PRACTICE WILL DO IT USING THESE MOST EFFECTIVE MEMORY TECHNIQUES TODAY. JUST DO IT! YOU WILL NOT BE SORRY.

A great arsernal of tips to help you remember a whole host of useful information for your day to day life.Simple and straight forward instructions, that are fun to implement and very effective.

Wish I would had this when I was a teenager. Life would have been different. Things that I can remember with little amount of effort is amazing. I am a visual learner to the T and never thought of using my imagination to remember things that I couldn’t picture in my head like numbers and list of words.

Good book, walks through consecutive exercises to build your memory. Buy a notebook early to track your progress as it can be difficult to assemble all the paper pieces around your desk. Part of the reason I bought the book in the first place...

This little gem is packed with all sorts of tricks to make short-term memory a snap. And let's face it, short-term is mostly what we use. After we've bought the groceries, how much longer do we need to remember that shopping list? This is not to say you can't stretch some memorized facts to a much longer term, like to the end of the school year for that final exam, or retaining seldom-seen people's names for as long as you work for that big company.The book is a fresh take, with new ideas, on the older memory books sold by Harry Lorayne (who built upon a history of two thousand years of memory techniques). At the heart of it, though, you're still using your imagination and wild, absurd, comical images to relate a fact you need to memorize to a place, an event, a number, or something called "memory of loci" (such as rooms in your house, etc.). Kudos to Dominic for bringing the latter back after the Middle Ages suppressed it.Dominic adds some fresh ideas to the established ways, or reintroduces methods that Harry and those before him didn't mention. An example of the former: How I Wish I Could Enumerate Pi Easily (3.1415926, the number of letters in each word). Or the latter, as an extended acronym: Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain (ROYGBIV, colors in the rainbow). For the music majors among us, Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle (learn some music theory if you don't understand that).One place where the book is seriously in error is section 44, Binary Numbers. Dominic does the obvious, turning triplets into base 10 numbers. Unfortunately, he apparently has never written a computer program, nor even just a small script. His numbers are SERIOUSLY WRONG. If you don't know binary, don't worry. For the rest of us, encountering this section is like driving down the highway at high speed then suddenly throwing the tranny into Park. Something akin to a controlled crash, and it is seriously distracting. Dominic writes: 000=0 001=1 011=2 111=3 110=4 100=5 010=6 101=7. I think most of us will recognize that 0 and 1 are correct, but 2 through 7 are something from Behind the Looking Glass that Alice must have lent to Dominic. I used a lot of white-out on these pages and elsewhere that reference them.Though not "wrong," Dominic flies in the face of centuries, sometimes millenia, in other sections. For days of the week, he uses Sun-Sat values of 1,2,3,4,5,6,0. Mathematicians have for centuries used 0,1,2,3,4,5,6. Dominic's premise remains intact, but his make-your-own-road reinvention requires us to forget what we've learned since childhood, ignore what the world has used for hundreds of years, and learn a new ordinal system for days of the week. Yes, I did some serious editing of this section to bring his written work and ideas inline with the customary ordinal system.The same can be said for his numeral mnemonics. He has his own phonetic choice, the Dominic System, where 0=O 1=A 2=B 3=C 4=D 5=E 6=S 7=G 8=H 9=N. I have to take serious exception to his choices, not because he's thrown away the centuries-old Mnemonic Major System, but because his system does not permit the full phonetic sounds of the Engish language to be used. Where is L and F/V, for example? We can't contrive the words LoVe, ViaL (PHiaL), ViLe, eViL or LoVeLy using his choice of phonetics. There's no M, N or R. Also we have 3=C and 6=S, so either we have an ambiguous choice for S/Z sounds, or the 3=C should actually be 3=K (K, CH and hard C as in cookie). True, I would have to unlearn what I already know, what millions of people know, and drop the Major System to adopt Dominic's, but with such weakness apparent in his choices, why would I? It was too much effort to edit his text in these chapters, so I just took the high points (which are very good, by the way), and applied them to the the de facto standard used for centuries.Would I recommend the book? If you haven't been taught any memory techniques or ordinal sets, or studied these on your own, then yes! Certainly! The books is fresh and modern and has great ideas for tricks you can use (assuming you're willing to go at this as a paid-for course and set aside time each week to concentrate on it).If you now other de facto standards, examples of which I've given above, then my recommendation is "maybe." I enjoyed it and learned a good number of tricks. But I stumbled a great deal in many sections, so much so that I found myself arguing with Dominic in my mind rather than concentrating on what I was reading. It took a great deal of effort to get to the end. Worth my time, but maddening all the same.