A few months ago I stumbled upon a used book fair in a town I was visiting on my travels in New Zealand. One of the books that “winked” at me on the shelf of the 1$ books had the title “The Memory Book“.
I picked it up out of curiosity and quickly started catching some scientific facts that intrigued me like:
- Every little thing that we have ever seen, read, smelt, and heard, is forever in our brains. We REMEMBER everything. What we are struggling with is the RECALLING which is something that can be improved with practice.
- Our brain has 150 billion cells, called neurons, which means there are more from these guys than all the stars in our galaxy. We can never remember “too much” so that we run out of “memory space” or even close to that even over 15 lifetimes.
- To further reinforce the point above, a study in Stanford University found out that the average person today only uses 2% (!!) of his brain’s capabilities. Other studies say numbers of about 10%.
- By using certain simple techniques, we can improve our memory by 500% easily. THAT’s where it got me.
- Studying while listening to low-volume instrumental music at around 60 bpm is proven to make you remember at least 20% more material!
Damn. I immediately started thinking about how this can help me with music! I came up with these 3 huge things it can help me with:
- Memorizing song’s lyrics and widening my repertoire easily. I told myself “This book might be able to teach me easily how to memorize songs lyrics”.
- Memorizing all the chord progressions of all the songs I want. Again – building my repertoire will be way more fun and easier.
- Remember all the different keys to be able to improvise better and work my way through music theory with less effort. This one is especially important for other instruments like a flute where you do not have a “scale positions/boxes” cheat sheets to guide you easily through the fretboard without knowing which notes you are hitting but also for guitar if you want to get to the next level of improvising and see more than the scale boxes.
- Finally succeeding at memorizing all the fretboard notes, something I have been struggling with for a long time.
I bought the book. Off course. And read it slowly over the next month while taking notes and trying the new techniques it offers.
Three months later, I am glad to say that it did help me immensely with my memory and since I have read it I have learned way more songs than what I usually do in such a time period and with much less effort thanks to what I learned in the book. I am grateful that I found it. Also – slowly but carefully I memorized the entire
Also – slowly but carefully I memorized the entire circle of 4ths and 5ths and now I can immediately recall any given degree of any given major or minor key which is incredibly helpful and frees up my thinking while improvising and playing lead guitar to focus solely on the music itself and not on struggling with recalling notes. Same with finally being able to recall all the fretboard notes, most of them in an instant which helps me a lot with playing lead guitar improv.
A lot of the techniques are around visualization and they are easy to use and will also help you with studying and remembering anything else in life, so it is very useful if you are in college but also for everyday stuff. For example – forgetting new people’s names is a thing of the past for me now…
Can’t believe it? Go ahead by clicking on the book’s image and read other people’s testimonials and reviews. This shit works.
This is by no means a magic book, but it is a very effective bunch of techniques that are guaranteed to get your memory much better as long as you use them. It works for me so I recommend that for everybody else as well. Apparently there’s a whole genre of books about memory and this one seems to be the most popular (the one I read is a close second) so it might even be better but I did not read it myself yet so I cannot recommend it.
This book and related books about memory can give you some great benefits for your music, so for a couple of dollars, you’ve got nothing to lose.
This book and related books about memory can give you some great benefits for your music, so for a couple of dollars, you’ve got nothing to lose. Highly recommended for everyone and especially for musicians!
Thanks for reading! Have fun and please let me know in the comments if “The Memory Book” or similar books had helped you.
