Learning Day: How to Improve Your Memory Fast (Patreon)

As someone who grew up before all human knowledge was available instantly, anywhere, I place a high value on memory. I genuinely enjoy books about mnemonic techniques and brain palaces I'll never use because I have a phone and also I like to be surprised every time I watch the hit beach that makes you old film Old. So I found the 2017 book, How to Improve Your Memory Fast - 324 Effective Tips To Sharpen Your Memory And Boost Brainpower, by Adam Colton organically and unironically.

I admit How to Improve Your Memory Fast - 324 Effective Tips To Sharpen Your Memory And Boost Brainpower does not have the best cover. From graphic design to capitalization choices, it has the look of a seven paragraph pdf file being sold by a desperate ebook grifter, but it is an actual 100 page book about hacking your brain with an advanced memory program.

The copy on the back cover was exciting and mysterious. Did Adam Colton invent some kind of new mental organizational system? A series of neural map association tools? It must be pretty complicated to not even try to explain on the book jacket. I checked the Table of Contents to see what I was in for.

Oh, that's fucking weird. Chapter 1 is a four page "Memory Loss Fact Sheet," and Chapter 2 is the whole goddamn book. I have to be honest, I'm starting to suspect this isn't going to be a very good book.

This is strange, but 324 is a lot of tips. If given 324 pieces of advice about anything, you have to assume at least one of them is going to be "eat more onions."

Hold on, I think I'm already confused. Adam has the tone of someone against routines, and yet he's saying if we break those routines, we'll forget things. So when he says most of us live in routines, that's good. It means you might already be doing the advanced mind hack to have turbo-charged memory. Maybe? Hold on, let me skip ahead and see if I can clear it up.

Okay, he makes it more clear in #56. His message is simple: keep a daily routine.

Oh no, I think I got it mixed up. I remembered it as keeping a daily routine, but what you really want to do is mix up your daily routine.

I'm sorry, guys. I thought I was good at memory stuff, but I keep fucking this up. Your daily routine is the best way to keep your mind sharp. Keep it.

Damn it, shit. Okay, I get it now. The worst thing you can do is maintain a routine or make changes to it. Straying from it keeps us from remembering things, but keeping it is holding our memory back.

Onions are good for memory as well. Adam, mind academic, cites "a few studies" about the benefits of onions for memory, which help improve memory and even memory. We like to joke in memory academia, "Don't 'forget' to eat onion."

Studies have shown memories are onion as well. To coin a phrase, don't "forget" to eat onion.

You can always tell how good a memory scientist is by how quickly they give the advice, "smart pills do not exist." And since Adam Colton waited until #41 to do it, we know he is a very, very good memory scientist. It means he knows forty things more relevant to improving memory than not taking magic brain boosting vitamins and only 29 of them were onion.

As impossible as this might be now, forget what I said. Those brain boosting vitamins might be worth a shot.

As impossible as this might be now, forget what I said. Staying away from those brain boosting vitamins might be worth a shot.

This is fun, but I'll stop jumping around the book to cherry pick Adam's rare mistakes. Let's really go through How to Improve Your Memory Fast - 324 Effective Tips To Sharpen Your Memory And Boost Brainpower and try to learn something. For instance, #37 isn't a bad tip.

It wouldn't call it an "advanced memory program," but sleeping is worth keeping in mind if you're using a brain.

Sleeping is also important.

Want to be a fucking dumb asshole? Try not sleeping.

If you're really looking to improve your memory, I have three words for you and both of them are dentist. Visit one, a dentist, if you want to have a good memory. Which brings me to my point: where am I? I haven't slept in days, are you the dentist?

An undisclosed number of uncited studies show sleep is memory.

Try memory? Consider sleeps, ask dentist.

Several reasons can be unmemory, but nonsleep is main suspect. Are you a sleepy? Then the culprit!

"Hack your brain to remember almost anything," says the back of this book. "Sleep sleep? Onions! Dentist," says the inside of it.

I'm going to be honest. I'm intentionally jumping around the book to make Adam look like a fucking idiot who wrote "go to bed" three hundred different ways. So just to be fair, I'll show you the very next entry after #121 to give you a more fair representation of how the book flows:

After your sleep, did you consider a nap? Brain is linked to sleep by science studies, say top experts. This book is obviously amazing, not only for its possible criminal deceit of its readers, but because I've never seen such little confidence in a self-help author. Self-help authors think they have the secrets to happiness or wealth or ninja death touches. Adam Colton doesn't think he's capable of anything. He's so certain he can't teach you how to improve your memory that he assumes you've forgotten the thing you're still reading, which again, is go to bed.

I forget where we were. Have you tried sleeping?

You might be wondering what fills in the space between this lunatic begging us to sleep. And it's exactly what you think-- six other obvious pieces of advice repeated without any clear pattern: exercise, concentrate, socialize, organize, try not to have Alzheimer's, and fish oil. They are, suspiciously, the exact tips you get when you Google "how improve memory."

It's almost more crazy that he keeps rewording this, right? Like, there's no way he's fooling anyone. A person who bought this book knows exactly how they got tricked by page 5, so what's the point? Adam can only be trying to trick some Amazon.com robot designed to detect if some author copied the same page 100 times. But if it can't detect spam as poorly disguised as this, what good is it? If you sell me a book that only says "HAHA THIS ISN'T A BOOK FUCK YOU" on every page, fuck you back. But if you sell me a book that carefully writes "HAHA FUCK YOU" in a different way 324 times, are you okay? I mean, fuck you still, but now I'm worried you're some kind of ebook hostage.

If Adam Colton saw The Shining he would think it's a vacation story about the fun-loving author of 43,092 Ways All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.

Seriously, though; The Shining uses the full creative effort of two geniuses at the height of their artistic power to communicate to the audience how Jack Torrance's sanity is eroding, and it's not until they reveal that Jack has been writing this exact book when the viewers are certain he's lost his entire goddamn mind. So to be clear, this book, the book Adam Colton chose to write, is identical to the horror twist in one of the most unsettling movies ever made.

I guess Adam's research did turn up some interesting facts about sleep deprivation. He found "studies" pointing to sleepy people being sluggish, and that's scientific grant money well spent. Maybe those same researchers can get to the bottom of why Kajagoogoo couldn't break into the adult contemporary charts, babe. It's 'cause your band's name sounds like an unctuous sherpa ordering baby food at a Miami Oktoberfest; I'll take my doctorate now, cha cha.

Here's a fun fact about me: I've written six UFC and WWE video games which included dozens, sometimes hundreds of variations of lines like "that jab connected" or "really working the leg in there, Taz." One of the UFC titles I wrote earned, and this isn't a joke, a Guiness World Record for "Most Dialog Recorded in a Video Game." So I have some understanding of how it's not as easy as it looks to shove similar words around until they're in new (but still coherent) places. And I can tell you Adam Colton is 100% going insane. This fucking guy figured he'd make an easy $0.93 an hour fleshing out a Google featured snippet to 100 pages, but by this point in his writing process there's no difference between him and a hiker trapped under an avalanche. He has made a terrible mistake.

As a business plan, publishing this book is like putting your foot in a lawnmower over and over until a passerby offers you thirty bucks for a toe.

Wait a second, did he say yeast infections?

Okay, he's definitely talking about yeast.

Oh, I see why these got so yeasty. I accidentally switched to Adam Colton's other book from 2017, How to Get Rid of a Yeast Infection - 330 Great Tips to Prevent and Cure Candida Yeast Infection.

Apparently "Adam Colton" has written books on everything from battling hemorrhoids to "How To Get The Most Out Of Your Plastic Surgery" to, oh, this is a surprise-- "How to Beat Insomnia And Sleepless." They are all like this-- several of the most basic tips anyone with any common sense would already know or immediately learn from their browser's autofill, repeated in no particular pattern until they fill precisely 100 pages. If I could sum up his writing career in one image it would be:

I feel like I'm forgetting something. Oh, right! We need to get back to his memory book!

Adam is only 31 entries from the finish line and he's still coming up with barely new ways to suggest a nap. It's dramatic, but not exactly heroic in this context. It's like watching an exhausted shoplifter summon every last bit of strength to steal a bottle of crab shampoo.

He's almost there, readers. But forget the 7-8 hours of sleep the "medical studies" told us. "Research" says you need a full eight hours. It doesn't matter, you won't remember any of this.

And with "If you are finding your memory is lacking it may be because of a lack of sleep," Adam Colton wrote the final version of his best advanced memory brain hack. According to Amazon rankings, when I bought this book, I doubled its sales, so speaking as exactly half the owners of How to Improve Your Memory Fast - 324 Effective Tips To Sharpen Your Memory and Boost Brainpower, this book was as lucrative and ethical as digging up cat graves and opening a tooth store. What were we talking about? Five stars.

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