This: http://www.pmemory.com/
Is it worth a shot? I'm out of ammo

No, it's not worth a shot. You don't need to pay anyone to get information like that, or to meet your own potential. The site makes a good point: good nutrition is fundamental to optimal mental performance.

Quote:The brain uses tremendous amounts of energy and is the most metabolically active organ in the body; it never completely rests. As a result, it has one of the highest rates of free radical production. These free radicals begin to destroy the structure of the brain, its connections and the cells. Unless you replace those damaged parts with nutrients, the brain function starts to fall off more and more.
For example Omega-3 fatty acids are replaced extremely rapidly. If you are deficient in this nutrient your brain begins to change its structure very quickly and soon loses its ability to properly function because one of its vital components is missing. It takes only two weeks of deficiency to produce that.
Americans consume an average of 129 pounds of sugar a year. 57% of it comes from processed foods. For example, teenagers are drinking an equivalent of 54 teaspoons of sugar a day just from soda.
Sugar consumption dramatically increases free radical generation in the brain. It produces cross linking of the proteins in all cells which dramatically increases the damaging effect of these free radicals, making every cell in your body age much, much faster, particularly brain cells. In some extreme cases, it can even result in permanent brain damage.
Research at the University of Connecticut in 1986 by Dr. Jane Goldman showed that sugar, equal to one Coke, produces a significant decline in mental performance. (Students were making twice as many mistakes on tests.)
Lack of Vitamin B-1 in the diet causes memory failure and depression. Consumption of a lot of carbohydrates depletes Vitamin B-1.
Vitamins C, D, E, K, A, B and carotenoids are all associated with brain function.
A study of 260 adults over the age of 60 found links between vitamins C, B-2, B-12, B-9 and concept learning.
Studies found that animal fat impairs ability to learn and remember, but healthy fats, such as Omega-3, improve depression, memory retention and thinking. This is because the brain uses an enormous amount of fatty acids for its membranes.
Aspartame, MSG, pesticides, and herbicides in food; aluminum in deodorants; fluoride in the water; and mercury in vaccines play a major role in brain toxicity and brain function decline. Excessive toxicity destroys brain cells.
What I am trying to show you is that it is almost impossible to get any significant and serious memory improvement when you don’t know what fundamental nutrients your memory and brain need and how these nutrients are related to overall health and foods. Memory Training without this knowledge is pretty much useless.

Most of the nutrients he lists are accurate - but there are much more thorough and reliable sources. Also, he's pretty much lying about aspartame, MSG, aluminium, fluoride and mercury - they play a markedly miniscule role in brain toxicity, definitely not a "major" one. Their role is so small that you can safely ignore them and focus on the much more significant role of nutrition.

It's also not true to say that you can't effectively train memory without nutrition - unless you're eating sand 3 meals a day you can improve your memory performance with technique.

Seriously, always ignore stupid sites like this which are out to make a buck and are obviously sales-oriented. The list of fake customer reviews is an obvious giveaway. Just do the research yourself and apply it, don't fall for gimmicks.

If you want to read the book, you can download it here: http://www.pmemory.com/student-area/file...public.pdf

Blahah Wrote:If you want to read the book, you can download it here: http://www.pmemory.com/student-area/file...public.pdf

Gimmick, or not, the book looks pretty thorough to me...it has 161 pages in it. I don't understand why people would publish such a book for free....did they steal it form somewehere? Or did they just copy / paste contents in it from the internet? There's obviousy a lot of work with it, and not chraging any money for it does make it a bit suspicious

Raschaverak Wrote:

Blahah Wrote:If you want to read the book, you can download it here: http://www.pmemory.com/student-area/file...public.pdf

Gimmick, or not, the book looks pretty thorough to me...it has 161 pages in it. I don't understand why people would publish such a book for free....did they steal it form somewehere? Or did they just copy / paste contents in it from the internet? There's obviousy a lot of work with it, and not chraging any money for it does make it a bit suspicious

I'd be more suspicious of anyone selling this kind of information, honestly, since basically every memory technique that exists is already widely known and available for free. Believe it or not, but people have been working on the problem of remembering things for a very long time. There really isn't anything new out there.

IceCream Wrote:Are you really not finding any success with anki? How about publishing your graphs, perhaps the other members here can help give you peace of mind that your memory is not actually much different than theirs.

Even if it did turn out to be worse, you can change the intervals in anki to improve memory performance. It means doing more reviews, but will lead to a higher % of remembered facts. You should probably only consider doing this if your long term memory is really truly not any good, so please check this first.

Well according to my doctor, I have a better than average memory...but that doesn't matter much. I haven't even started to use anki yet. Let me explain. Right now I'm into learning the Japanese for everyone book, but only the grammar. The vocabulary, and practicing is another topic. I'm only interested in the grammar points. And yes, I'm able to memorize anything, lists, numbers, and grammar points without having to practice them or anything. It's nothing special, it's just a custom of mine. Now, given my previous topic about "can I learn with Anki", we concluded that yes you can learn with anki, new info, you just have to speed up the repetition rate and adjust it a little bit. My problem is that I don't like that way. I prefer to learn the material once from the book, the old fashioned style, and then use Anki for the long term memory. I can't really memorize just by repeatedly seeing the same thing (regarding short term memory of course). Same goes for auditory memory. If somebody keeps talking to me, and I'm supposed to memorize it, I have to visualize it, in order to do that. There is no other way for me. I'm very dependent on visualizing everything. I works, but it's very, very tiring, building up silly images / or even recreating the situation where I heard the specific info. So this is the fastest way for me. That's why I'm looking for a tehcnique with which you can save the whole image building process for your brain, or even avoid it, but the whole thing still won't succumb to simple repeated exposure to the specific info... Complicated? It is
For example when I go shopping, I never make a list. When I'm in the shop, I just imagine the whole apartment, and what is in it, and what is missing, and according to that I'll buy my things....I guess that's how I roll. I will have a shot with Anki and with it's cramming mode, and somebody even mentioned a program named Genius. I'm a bit hopeless, and baffled, in which direction to go, or what to do. Or maybe I really am mentally retarded

IceCream Wrote:When i look at my core 6k deck, i've forgotten 70% of new cards. But i remember 90% of mature cards (cards 21 days +).

Personally I find that with my 'sentences' deck the graphs of ease (1/2/3/4) look more or less identical for new and mature cards (and like you I don't "pre-learn" words before putting them into anki). The 'remembered' percentage is 80% or so, which is pretty good, but I seem to be still quite likely to flub a reading even on an old card... This is a complete contrast with the decks I generate with subs2srs, which start out with a higher % of failures but by maturity the graph is hugely weighted to 'very easy'. Perhaps "understand what you're hearing" is just an easier task than "remember the reading and meaning of this sentence"...

IceCream Wrote:well, i guess that program isn't for you then... from looking at various things like the forum, and googling stuff related to it, the central point does seem to be such pictorial memory.

No, you shouldn't speed the original intervals up just so you have better short term memory. The whole point of anki is long term memory. If you do that, you'd just have silly amounts of reviews & not be able to learn as much stuff.

Basically, the key to understanding this problem is a time / efficiency thing. One of the reasons we all like anki so much is the amazing amounts of facts we can remember with it. Yes, we sacrifice slightly in the first 21 days. But our long term memory is not only entirely more stable this way, but we can learn ridiculous amounts of stuff in a very short time.

The amount of time it will take you to memorise a page of a book using another technique is going to be significantly longer in the short term than you would spend on it in anki, and it will not be as stable in the long term. Basically, you will still have to repeat the information to remember it. But in the extra time you spent memorising it (creating visual associations etc) in the first place, you failed to learn other stuff. While using visual and associative memory is a good technique for something like RTK, it's a poor technique for learning something like words or grammar points, simply because its unnecessary.

Well, if you don't like anki, it's your choice, but personally, i prefer to spend the least amount of time possible to obtain strong long term memories (unless i'm cramming for a test. In which case, nowadays, i'd probably start learning for the test well before hand). When i look at my core 6k deck, i've forgotten 70% of new cards. But i remember 90% of mature cards (cards 21 days +). That's plenty good enough for me. I didn't even learn the words in any way first, just repeated them 3 or 4 times until i initially remembered them (for those i didn't, i just suspended them, and tried again a week later or whatever). I also did the whole 6000 words in 40 days (61 days to review to maturity). There is absolutely no way that would be possible if i was trying to remember them like pages in a book.

TLDR: Basically, to learn a load of facts, you have to forget about this short term memory thing. Don't worry about what you're forgetting in the short term. Just keep shoving in more new stuff, and let anki take care of it. If you really don't want to do that, the techniques you already have are probably strong enough for what you want to do. But the amount of information you will be able to memorise will be less, since this a more time consuming method overall.

Thanks for the reply. I guess I never really trusted Anki that much. I'm an iditot.
I also don't like typing in a lot, but unsing Anki would mean this, oh well a small price to pay, right? Anyway, I'll start using Anki as of today, and see wehere it goes eventually

hmmmmmmm I should eat more sushi

caivano Wrote:hmmmmmmm I should eat more sushi

By all means: http://www.extremebodyworkout.com/blog/2...i-healthy/

IceCream Wrote:@raschaverak: well, once you're done with your grammar, everything else you'll be totally able to find online, which will make things much quicker (No typing ). Sentences you simply copy / paste from internet sites, subs2srs will make your cards for you for tv shows, and simple word cards plus audio can be downloaded from smartfm, or you can just save using rikaichan when you come across them, and import incredibly easily in anki. Thurd's anki addon is great for getting audio for these (you just have to click to download it). So really, it takes practically no effort whatsoever. ：）

Hehe, I do not intend to write a letter in Anki. I just found the japanese for everyone via Ebook....o copy / paste, and haste things up, cause' I've wasted too much time aleready...if Anki really works, I'll be very, very, very addicted to it, I have a feeling