This is a book on memory and memorization techniques. Well... the book was interesting initially. I thought I would find the secret to memorizing everything I ever wanted to remember. The book does actually live up to that promise, but I found that my desire to memorize everything was... well... not that practical. Memorizing stuff involved spending a lot of effort building up memory muscle and palaces into which one could store stuff. What I really wanted to memorize was code. I work with apps that have thousands of lines of code, and I thought it would be really useful if I could simply glance through it once and remember everything.. Thats part of the reason I started to read the book.
Reading the book however made me realize that I would have to spend a lot of effort trying to associate each line or class with something that was already known. And, I am not sure what to map all that code to, so I would remember it. It looked easier to simply come up with a bunch of class diagrams and refer to that every once in a while instead. And I found that the class diagrams were pretty similar to each other anyway, so I didnt really even have to memorize too many of those.
And so, I stopped reading the book :). After the motivation was gone, the book got boring. I didnt really care about all the different things various people could or could not remember. Or about the techniques that ancient people used. Or the rituals involved in getting elected into some elite memory club. I just stopped, and moved on to other stuff. But who knows, maybe you will find it interesting enough to finish.
Reading the book however made me realize that I would have to spend a lot of effort trying to associate each line or class with something that was already known. And, I am not sure what to map all that code to, so I would remember it. It looked easier to simply come up with a bunch of class diagrams and refer to that every once in a while instead. And I found that the class diagrams were pretty similar to each other anyway, so I didnt really even have to memorize too many of those.
And so, I stopped reading the book :). After the motivation was gone, the book got boring. I didnt really care about all the different things various people could or could not remember. Or about the techniques that ancient people used. Or the rituals involved in getting elected into some elite memory club. I just stopped, and moved on to other stuff. But who knows, maybe you will find it interesting enough to finish.
