Upon the hearty recommendation of my dear husband, I blew through this book in a few days. The subtitle is hard to read here. It is: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. The parts on how "mental athletes" memorize large amounts of information held my attention, while Foer's more personal story of how he prepared for the US Memory Championship felt a little over-indulgent. Therefore those parts were a little easier to skim.
This section on page 203 hammered home an interesting way of thinking about memorization. "In our gross misunderstanding of the function of memory, we thought that memory was operated primarily by rote. In other words, you rammed it in until your head was stuffed with facts. What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with different focus," says Buzan. "The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory."
The question I came away with for myself is, "how can I get my music students to memorize the note names?" I have some ideas that I am going to work on....
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