Your Complete Guide to Building a Memory Palace

by Graham Best, Loralea Butikofer (Editor)

Do you want to leverage your memory by over 700%? (Yes! Seriously!) See dramatic results in one evening by building a Memory Palace. Start using this powerful memory system immediately. Fun, easy, packed with entertaining activities and illustrations, this is the memory improvement book for you. Since memory training is visual, short videos are included to enhance your learning experience. The videos also contain BONUS material to ensure you get maximum benefit from the book. Everyone can benefit by learning how to build a Memory Palace. Business persons— gain that competitive edge and unleash confidence with a trained memory. Students— children and adults! This strategy is fun and can easily be applied to learning history, a language, memorizing technical terminology and much more! Seniors— protect your brain’s power with this simple mind training. You’ll see a dramatic short-term memory boost. This book will guide you step-by-step to build your own Memory Palace.

Genres: Nonfiction, Self Help

134 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 31, 2019

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful and helpful introduction to memory palaces.

Hypothesis: Memory Palaces Improve Long-Term Memory And Recollection.
Evidence: I started reading this book on Oct 16. I finished reading it on Oct 25. One of the early practice "palaces" was warning signs of diabetes. I still remember them easily: frequent/increased urination; unexpected weight loss; increased thirst; pain and numbness in the feet; increased hunger; frequent infections; blurred vision.
Evidence: I've never been able to recall any entire list/group no matter how familiar or how small. I can't name all 50 US states even though i know them all. If there are 8 Academy Award best picture nominees, i can recall 7 at most. I can never name all 7 Dwarfs. And if Holly asks me to get 3 things from the grocery store, i remember to get only 2! But thanks to Mr Best's tutelage, i can name all 7 Dwarfs on demand and i can list all 27 members of the European Union in alphabetical order: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cypress, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden.*

Create a mental map of a place or route with distinct and discreet locations along the way. See yourself moving from one location to the other. If you want/need to remember 10 things, then your palace/path should have at most 10 locations. Now create one reminder/placeholder with as much sensory info as possible (see, smell, taste, touch, hear) for each item at each location. See yourself moving from one location to the next, but this time experiencing each reminder.

Two things about this process that i think Mr Best could improve in this book. Discuss the importance of revisiting memory palaces, ie, repeatedly interacting with and reinforcing the placeholders so they remain permanently memorable. And please at least mention that 😳explicit😜 and 😳outlandish😜 images make the best placeholders. (Joshua Foer wasn't afraid to get dirty in Moonwalking with Einstein by sharing the graphic images that enabled him to memorize an entire deck of cards in 1 minute and 40 seconds.) Nobody else ever needs to know what you're imagining when you remember, for example, the Netherlands. If you make it sleazy, you'll make it easy.

Literally anyone can implement this technique. Give yourself more time than you'd like to give it, but trust that more practice should yield more efficiency.

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Maybe the interwebs is the 😏Best place for learning this stuff nowadays, but i plan to read books. Any other suggestions?
• Memory Craft by Lynne Kelly
• Make It Stick by Peter Brown
• Unlimited Memory by Kevin Horsley


*Note to self: Ask Holly to teach you the 50 states song, dammit!

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty straightforward nuts-and-bolts user guide to building a memory palace. I was already using that technique, but it introduced me to new ways to learn stuff, but also to better use that weird, non-exactly existing place I had built in my mind (google Hemeroscopium house, it's kind of like that).

These are mostly exercises and you'll have to find your own rhythm and your own spin off them, but they work and they work pretty fast. I still remember everything from the first exercise in the book.

[Mac · Rating 3 out of 5]

Because I was already familiar with the memory palace technique, Graham Best's Your Complete Guide to Building a Memory Palace provided no aha! moments for me. That said, Best's book served as a helpful refresher, and his filing cabinet analogy is a good rationale for why the memory palace is necessary if you want to remember something.

Your Complete Guide also teaches how a memory palace can be expanded beyond the obvious like your home to the scenes you see as you drive your car to town or even to your car itself. And in addition to the exercises in the book, Best provides a useful practice suggestion--memorizing the song titles on a CD or Apple playlist.

Overall, Your Complete Guide is a practical book. I can't say if the book delivers on its title of being "complete;" however, there's plenty here to work with and learn from.

[Klavs Sedlenieks · Rating 5 out of 5]

You have to take this small book (less than 100 pages with lots of pictures) for what it is: a practical guide of how to remember things by using the memory palace technique. The book does not beat around the bush, no irrelevant texts, it is all straightforward and practice-oriented. It takes the reader by the hand, gives examples and allows you to start practicing. In this genre the book is excellent. It has minor faults (Cyprus spelled as Cypres, Holland instead of The Netherlands) but these are non-essential. If you wandered how it would be possible to permanently remember eg all EU countries spending about 10 minutes for that, start with this book.

[Matt B · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a real shame they don't teach these techniques in school. Some of this is common sense of things I've arrived at on my own over the years but there's still plenty I wish I had known about much earlier in life.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short and good content

A lot of examples. I would like to see some exercises and more data.but it is a nice to the point book

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book

This book shows you the process of building memory palaces and how to keep items (even the intangible ) in memory. Short, sweet and exciting! Could not put the book down, and was able to memorize all the examples with the authors methods effortlessly. (: