Books and Me

By Jonathan A. Levi (2019) One minor quibble I have about "The Only Skill That Matters" is that the title only accurately describes the contents if you take it as meaning, "How to Learn Efficiently", even though this overarching skill is subsequently broken down into quite a few distinct sub-skills that need to be acquired in different ways.   Having said that, all of what the author says makes a huge amount of sense, even if you will have seen most of it somewhere else already.  He rehashes the inspirational work of Harry Lorayne  on how to use visual mnemonics, discusses the various applications of the Pareto Principle, (that 80% of the benefits accrue for 20% of the input), about how to manage motivation, speed reading, pre-reading, the inter-related nature of knowledge, aka cross-pollination, the benefits of the brute force approach, self-quizzing and teaching, all of which we have come across before elsewhere but it is all condensed very neatly and a...

by Bessel Van Der Kolk (2015) Where to start?  This book is monumental, being vast in scope, beautifully argued and hugely significant all at once.  It is also deeply humane and potentially healing.  It would have been very easy for Bessel to have turned out an angry diatribe but instead he quietly makes his case, and you only gradually begin to clock, whilst reading between the lines, that his argument represents a huge challenge to current psychiatric, schooling and social services. His argument is that the epidemic of unhappiness which is currently so often attributed to snowflakery/lack of resilience is actually, often as not, a response to deeply traumatic events which for whatever reason, we do not really want to acknowledge or confront. So instead of blaming the victim or imposing deeply cruel methods of treatment (he gently explains why CBT so often fails),  Bessel gets about delineating the effects of trauma upon the mind, brain and body, an...

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...