Of benefit to anyone seeking to remember a scrap of information for more than a couple of minutes.
An Australian “memory champion” offers some tricks of the trade.
The human brain processes huge amounts of sensory data every day, only some of which gets lodged in it for future access. This can be a problem when trying to remember, say, the name of a person—for which reason cultures from around the world have developed memory-training regimens. “A highly trained memory was greatly admired in the classical Greco-Roman era,” writes Kelly (The Memory Code: The Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Other Ancient Monuments, 2017). “Not only was it useful in politics and speech making, it was also a terrific way to show off.” So it was that the Roman philosopher Seneca lined up 100 students, had each recite a line of poetry, and then repeated the lines in order—and then backward. Kelly examines the techniques employed to perform such prodigious feats, among them the “memory palace,” a mental construct made up of rooms, pieces of furniture, and such that are then populated with facts and figures. The author writes that she has more than 1,000 such locations—and other memory experts have many more. Among the other techniques that she discusses are "visual alphabets in the shapes of animals and humans,” narrative scrolls that develop character-rich stories to aid memory, ingenious mnemonic devices, memorizing long sequences of numbers by means of attaching sounds to them, and perhaps the most useful brain-as-muscle exercise by which one should review a piece of information five times over three months in order to move it into long-term memory. Kelly’s book takes a gee-whiz approach to a scholarly body of literature that includes Frances Yates’ classic books on Renaissance memory studies and recent works of neuroscience such as Daniel Levitin’s The Organized Mind, but the narrative covers the ground well and entertains as it travels.
Of benefit to anyone seeking to remember a scrap of information for more than a couple of minutes.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64-313324-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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