Write Out Loud (Reviews and Writing)

“…exactly the right principles, but just fails to show you how to put it into action…”

This review will be a little different because I have to acknowledge an immediate conflict of interests, albeit that this very conflict is the reason I wanted to review this book in the first place. I also intend to review one or two other books with similar clashes (you have been warned).

The conflict is, of course, that this book is on memorisation (or mnemonics, as it is known properly) and I have written a wonderfully successful book on exactly that subject. I will make comparisons and, yes, I am going to try and persuade you to buy my book (if you haven’t already) but I do hope to be as fair as possible. I’ll make the point right now that my book stands on the shoulders of giants and Harry Lorayne is one of those.

I grew up with Harry Lorayne when I took up an interest in magic (and interest that remains to this day). He was a great magician but, as a part of that, his specialism was memorising. He was as prolific a writer as he was a performer, living to an incredible 97 years (almost, he missed his birthday by less than a month) with a staggering number of books to his name. Most of the those books were about magic – and I have quite a few on my shelf – but some were about memorising. The Memory Book, written with Jerry Lucas, is arguably his most famous book and certain this book is a cornerstone of memory technique guides.

So, is it any good?

Yes it is…as long as you make allowances for the fact it was published in 1974. Any book that’s half a century old is going to be limited in its applications. Lorayne’s material is solid and you will find the essence of his ideas in pretty much any book on memorising – including mine.

Like almost all books on mnemonics, he focuses on visualising as the key sense we use to remember things. While there are a small number of people who struggling with imagining images in their mine, virtually all of us do this. I would argue it is an essential evolutionary trait that allowed puny, hairless monkey-men to work out how to attack huge and dangerous mammoths in a way that would send the mammoth over the cliff – giving food for the tribe for months to come – rather than result in a bunch of squished cavemen splattered along the clifftop. Being able to plan something is only possible because of visualising the plan. Living in communities is what turned us into the dominant species and living together takes the ability to imagine to do successfully.

Lorayne effectively shows how to make lists of words, visualise them and make links between them to allow you to imagine one leading on to another, leading on to another and so on. This idea is the crux of my method, which I call The Memory Story. I can’t tell you just how life-changing this method was when I read the principle in the early 80s. It is a crucial step for any kind of advanced memorising and opened my eyes to the possibilities of the brain.

But…

What Lorayne and so many like him fails to do is capitalise on this method and round it out for use in various situations. It’s one thing making a list of objects, but that doesn’t help you when you need to memorise a load of events for your history exam, or remember names and faces quickly when teaching a new class or beginning a new job. It gives little idea how you might memorise a language – especially if that language uses a written script you’re not used to. And yet, the visualising method can be used for all of these and many more situations – if you’re taught how.

The problem with Lorayne’s book is that it is fascinating and brilliant, but ultimately will be put down by almost everyone and never, ever used except perhaps to do a trick in front of your family and show how you can memorise a list of 20 objects made up by said family in a single reading out loud to you. Yes, I did that. Yes, I’m a nerd. But no, I didn’t then go on to have a brilliant memory. That took a few more years and a different book (that I will review soon) before my fledging method emerged.

There’s more to Lorayne’s book than just visualisation, of course. We remember ‘the strange’ better than the mundane, for instance – the very fact that gives my book its title. But this is really just filling in the extra details and really doesn’t help with giving the practical tools of memorising.

Classic though this book is – and full of great information – it falls down in exactly the same way most memory books do: there’s no concrete practical steps to actually memorise things. You may be inspired and able to do a couple of clever things, but it is little help for that exam you’ve got coming up.

My book, Try Not To Laugh, was written deliberately to help students have a systematic set of principles they can use for a range of academic topics. It is a practical guide to how to actually memorise the hard stuff – like numbers and esoteric things like the colours various chemicals go in the infamous ‘tests’ that so many school curriculums demand their students know. It includes dietary information, how to revise alone in various settings and how to revise together. It tells you the pitfalls to watch out for and gives multiple examples of memorising numbers, science information, faces and names, languages and so on.

The traditional answer to learning something has always been: write it out over and over again until it sticks. But this is a dreadful method that alienates many of us on the neurodiverse spectrum who simply can’t do it. It’s also a terribly time-consuming method that wastes precious revision time. Harry Lorayne’s method – fundamentally the same as all memory artists around the world – is exactly the right principles, but just fails to show you how to put it into action. I would like to think my book gets it right.

The methods I’ve put together into the comprehensive system detailed in the book come from decades of using this with actual students to pass actual exams. The last few years since Covid has seen this more necessary than ever before.

For the last few years (post-Covid) I’ve seen so many covid kids who have done their first year of A level Biology (for instance) struggling with the sheer amount of things they’re supposed to know. They come to me with less than a year to go before exams and very much behind. I’ve lost track how many times, after learning the relevant parts of my system, they leap forward with confidence within a couple of months and catch up with the course, better equipped to recall information with relative ease. I’m not pretending this suddenly makes revising easy – and my book explains at the neurological level exactly why it will never be so – but a good mnemonic technique like mine will make the job a lot lot easier and faster. That’s essential when you’re behind.

So, for the sake of love for Lorayne and gratitude for him being one of the influential ‘fathers’ on my journey with mnemonics, I’m giving this book a higher rating than it really should have. But it can’t have top rating because, in the end, no one is walking away from this book with a better memory than they started with. For that, buy Try Not To Laugh.

My Verdict:

Social Entrepreneur, educationalist, bestselling author and journalist, D K Powell is the author of the bestselling collection of literary short stories “The Old Man on the Beach“. His first book, ‘Sonali’ is a photo-memoir journal of life in Bangladesh and has been highly praised by the Bangladeshi diaspora worldwide. Students learning the Bengali language have also valued the English/Bengali translations on every page. His third book is ‘Try not to Laugh’ and is a guide to memorising, revising and passing exams for students.

Both ‘The Old Man on the Beach’ and ‘Sonali’ are available on Amazon for kindle and paperback. Published by Shopno Sriti Media. The novel,’The Pukur’, was published by Histria Books in 2022.

D K Powell is available to speak at events (see his TEDx talk here) and can be contacted at dkpowell.contact@gmail.com. Alternatively, he is available for one-to-one mentoring and runs a course on the psychology of writing. Listen to his life story in interview with the BBC here.

Ken writes for a number of publications around the world. Past reviewer for Paste magazine, The Doughnut, E2D and United Airways and Lancashire Life magazine. Currently reviews for Northern Arts Review. His reviews have been read more than 7.9 million times.

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