Moonwalking with Einstein

So I finished this one, and I can say it was a nicely put book about the subculture of memory athletes, together with some insights on the most used techniques by themselves to remember insane number of random numbers, or words, or poems.

Long time ago (around 2008) I read an oreilly book called Mind Hacks, which teached some techniques to 'overclock' one's memory, or recall, or mental arithmetic. I remembered the "1 is a bun, 2 is a shoe" placeholders, but here I learned about PAO, the major system and the Dominic System, to be able to remember random numbers (I now know my credit card by heart, after all those years).

I'm now working on my own PAO list (I'm using a mixture of Dominic System and arbitrary associations), and I hope to get to some decent proficency of memorization of numbers and tasks using the technique of loci.

A chapter on Savants, mentioning Brainman (highly recommended), and references to Tony Buzan and random folklore from the 90's make it a very enjoyable fast read.

Overall I liked the book quite a lot, it was fun to read, and I definitely got something from it. I'm afraid none of these techniques used  by Memory Athlets will be very useful to retain the kind of information I usually need to remember like programming APIs, data from books (like memorization techniques, heh), or some data that needs to have more context than just a random number.

Anyway, I'm convinced already that the fact that converting things to vivid images and placing them in a memory palace greatly improves recalling. 

Next stop, How to develop a perfect memory. And I think that will be enough for this streak of self-improvement.