The Memory Book - The classic guide to improving your memory at work, at school and at play



By Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas (1974)

Over the past couple of years,  a few friends and I have had a go at our local pub quiz.  Overall, it's been entertaining, despite the repeated losses and the fact that it has occurred to me that, deprived of Google, I might have a few issues in the memory department. 

In this regard, I'm definitely not as bad as some. I am, for example, broadly capable of retaining the thrust of the question long enough to know what sort of category of answer we should be aiming for. This is not something that can necessarily be assumed - witness a disgruntled quizzer reporting that his team-mate had responded to the question:

"To which country is this song connected?"

with the answer:

"Chicken nuggets. Put it down.  It's CHICKEN NUGGETS! CH..ICK..EN NUG..GETS!"

There was also a lot of finger stabbing apparently.

 My issues with memory are by no means of that order.  They are more along the lines of:

"Don't worry - I know the answer.  It's an actor....you know the one -  he was in that film."

In other words, I have indeed remembered the question and broadly know what sort of answer we are looking for. What's more, I have remembered that the man does indeed have an identity of some sort - he's an actor who was in a film -  but whether he has an actual name.  Who knows?  Perhaps his parents never actually made that trip to the registry office.  But then again, they are asking, so he probably does.

At this point, privately to self: "Here's the plan: don't admit that you've watched everything he's ever done since he is the best male lead on the planet and actually, you've had quite a thing for him for going on for probably at least two decades".

OK, yes, I suppose that last bit does make it seem a little bit worse, a point I had conceded to myself when I got home, but by great good fortune,  "The Memory Book" by Lorayne and Lucas immediately came up as 99p on Kindle.

And it does help!  I would recommend the various systems which build upon the same basic premise and blame the education system for not teaching us all this after we got to grips with the alphabet and counting.  It's been around since 1974, for goodness sakes, and it would have saved me a lot of embarrassment in pub quizzes for starters.

Rating: 7/10



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