HN Books @HNBooksMonth

I came across his work years ago and adore it. He's really carved out a niche for himself. I also recommend his book "Tricks of the Mind" as a gift for young nerds: https://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Mind-Paperback-DERREN-BROWN/dp...

It's a nice combination of charm, trickery, and skepticism. Bits about his life, teaching techniques he uses in his mentalism, and interesting items from his work. For example, he goes into this trick in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haP7Ys9ocTk

For those who don't watch it, he pretends to be an astrologer and gives a group of people a reading. They are shocked at how accurate it is. He then has them randomly trade readings and try to guess who the reading applies to. It turns out that he gave them all the same reading, making use of the Forer effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect

In the book, he explains how he constructed it and gives the text of the reading. It was a pleasure to read through and see how artfully it was done.

In Derren Brown's excellent Tricks of the Mind[1], he mentions the lengths that audiences are willing to go. In one example, he says something about "this coin in my hand" while holding his hand up near his face for a moment, index finger and thumb spaced to the approximate distance of a coin, yet there's not actually a coin there, just empty space! Afterward, people will swear that there was a coin in his hand, going so far as to describe what sort of coin it was.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Mind-DERREN-BROWN/dp/1905026358...

Derren Brown's book, 'Tricks of the Mind', has an interesting section on memory:

http://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Mind-Derren-Brown/dp/1905026358...

He discusses the 'loci system', 'memory palaces', and 'peg system':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_peg_system

I haven't tried them out myself yet.

⬐ whacked_new

It takes a lot of practice to really get the hang of these systems. Is anybody here a regular user of any systematic memory technique?

I know the Major Method but only used it once or twice. The encoding step is by far the largest bottleneck; I intend to write an application to assist learning the MM, but I'm occupied with another related application atm :-)

Here's a very simple method I use to make sure I leave the house with everything I need: I have a special number (say, 4), and when I go out my belongings need to add up to that. That would be keys, wallet, camera, phone. If I have other things I adjust my number accordingly. Maybe it's overly simple, but I'm pretty sure some people forget their phones once in a while.

⬐ jsrn

for the Major Method, there is an application helping with the encoding step:

http://www.phoneticmnemonic.com/

(it works quite good, but only on short numbers up to 3 digits, so you have to split longer numbers 'manually', which isn't so bad IMO). It's also available as a FF extension (didn't test it myself).