"Practical memory improvement" e-book

• Introduction

• Part I: A new focus for memory improvement

• Part II: The boring truth about never forgetting

• Part III: How to learn memory skills

Practice tools

• Maths Accelerator

• Sound Speller

Articles

• Today's music theory simply explained

• A beginner's guide to musical improvisation by Hector Leitch

• How to write mathematics clearly

• Have fun learning from computer games

• Help your child learn to spell

• Help your child learn number facts * NEW *

• 7 memory myths exploded

• A new approach to stress management

• What is different about people who have lots of good ideas?

• How sports skill really works

• How can Schema Theory help you learn sports skills?

• Human Knowledge Design

• Straight and crooked thinking about uncertainty

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True stories

Useful links

See a picture of the author

Welcome

A new website has spun off from Learning Ideas. It is devoted to free stress relief tools and is called www.RelaxOnline.me.uk. There's a page you can set to pop up every now and then to remind you to take a rest. There's soothing imagery and music. But the most interesting development so far is an interactive Stress Analyst that chats with you about what is on your mind and helps you get it in perspective. The tool is based on the article "A new approach to stress management" which has been on Learning Ideas for some time now and tends to get very high ratings from readers.

Feedback

Thank you to everyone who gave feedback over the last few months. Mandatory feedback has now been removed, though of course you are more than welcome to write to me. The results from the period October 2004 to early March 2005 confirm earlier indications. Roughly 54% of visitors are students (mostly visiting "A new focus for memory improvement" which is well indexed on the web). 20% are educators/trainers, 6% are researchers, and 20% are "other."

Generally they like what they see. 15% of all ratings were "Outstanding", 55% were "Very good", while 23% were "OK". Average ratings were just short of "Very good". The most common comments by far were "Insightful" and "Right."

Researchers and educators/trainers tend to give the highest ratings and the handful of ratings at "mediocre" or worse were from students/pupils.

The papers were about equally rated, so although some papers are visited far more than others this is just because of indexing of the web and interest in certain topics, not the quality of the papers.

Would you like me to come and talk about memory skills?

I recently received a very interesting request to give a lecture about memory improvement. Unfortunately it turned out to be in another country so not practical. But what a good idea! I would be happy to talk to just about anybody about the ideas on this website, and especially memory improvement. So if you are looking for a good speaker why not get in touch? No fee unless your proposal is commercial.

I live near London, England.

Please help! Encourage others with your success

One of the difficulties of changing the way you think and learn is keeping your motivation going through the weeks and months of patient practice it takes to make a big and lasting improvement. I believe testing your performance with and without improved methods is important for proving to yourself that you are learning things that work. Another great source of encouragement is hearing about other people who have made some progress.

Please click here if you have a few minutes to spare to help yourself and other visitors to this site.

Last month's poll result

93% thought that schools should make more effort to teach memory skills.

I have a personal example of why this is a good idea. Recently my wife and I helped our middle son, who is 6 years old, learn how to learn spellings. He was struggling and getting most words wrong in the weekly spelling test at school. Now he has learned to notice the details of a spelling he is spending far less time learning the words but getting full marks most weeks.