Blog

a new book to help you master the Russian / Cyrillic alphabet
new hardcover and large print formats for some books
improved distribution / availability of my books
new online games
new card game for those wanting to test or improve their memory & attention skills in the physical world

I have a new book available, the first "spin-off" from my Indo-European Cognate Dictionary. The Easy Russian Alphabet: A Visual Workbook is slim (only 80 pages), very visual, with lots of mnemonic images and lots of white space, and plenty of reviews for practice. It includes some 340 words for additional practice, most of which are cognates, with obvious meanings (verbal mnemonics have been provided for those few that are less obvious). It's my first book using color, and I'm thrilled with how it looks. Unfortunately, the use of color adds greatly to the cost of printing, which is why I have refrained from it in my other books, but given the brevity of this one, the printing costs weren't so bad. And all the images, partly color-coded, really demanded the use of color. So, very pretty. And useful, too, I hope!

Now I have signed directly with the major book distributor Ingram, I hope my books will be easier for college bookstores to purchase. I know some have had difficulties, due to their purchase requirements.

Interested in language?

Here's the reason I haven't been updating my website or sending out my newsletter for a long time — I've been working on a dictionary. The Indo-European Cognate Dictionary, to be precise. It's out now, and I'm really excited about it. Excited that it's done, excited than I now have a physical copy that I can use myself, excited because — hey, I've written a dictionary! It weighs in at 545 pages, and it's available in the usual digital formats, except Kindle. If I work out how to get Kindle to display the non-Roman scripts properly, it will appear in that format too, but don't hold your breath. Why Kindle can't do this, when ePub (the format used by practically every other reader) does it no problem, without any special measures needed, escapes me totally, but there it is.

New mnemonics books & articles

New 2nd edition of Mnemonics for Study
New Spanish & Italian editions
New mnemonics articles

I have updated my Mnemonics for Study book. The two main changes are that each chapter now has review questions, and there's an extra chapter which is a very detailed step-by-step case study, showing how and when to use mnemonics to learn the Geological Time Scale. There are lots of visuals, mnemonics and others. I hope this will make it more useful, particularly for those of you using the book as a class text.

This update started in iBooks, using their interactive software, so that's still the best format, because the chapter reviews are all interactive, and I could even include simple flashcard widgets, as well as image galleries. However, the book is available in the usual digital formats as well as paperback. The paperback is in black & white, because I do try to keep the price way down, but all the digital formats are in full color (assuming your reader displays color!).

New book, Holiday sale, New articles

My Memory Journal: journal & guide to improving your memory
Make Your Own Memory Journal: digital version available for immediate download
Prices slashed on all Wayz Press memory and study ebooks, for the holiday period
New articles with tips on improving your sleep, and advice on building cognitive reserve

My Memory Journal

My new book for the new year (sorry, I did try to get it out sooner!) is My Memory Journal. This is a paperback, a journal that's also an everyday memory strategy, with instructions on how to use it, plus a brief discussion of a memory strategy or habit that you can focus on each week. The Memory Journal covers six months, so there are 26 such "Focuses". The Focuses cover such topics as: Mindset, Goal-setting, Cognitive load, Sleep, Visualization, Senses, Monitoring, etc. There's a page for each day, so the whole thing comes in at about 266 pages. At the moment the book's only available at Amazon, and directly from Createspace (I get maximum royalty there), but in the new year I'll see about widening that.

Homework revisited

At the same time as a group of French parents and teachers have called for a two-week boycott of homework (despite the fact that homework is officially banned in French primary schools), and just after the British government scrapped homework guidelines, a large long-running British study came out in support of homework.

The study has followed some 3000 children from preschool through (so far) to age 14 (a subset of around 300 children didn’t attend preschool but were picked up when they started school). The latest report from the Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education Project (EPPSE), which has a much more complete database to call on than previous studies, has concluded that, for those aged 11-14, time spent on homework was a strong predictor of academic achievement (in three core subjects).

A cognitive failure is generally a strategy failure

I'd like to dwell a little on the comment I made in my recent brief post, regarding the balance between your awareness of the fallibility of human memory and your belief in your own abilities. Some examples should help clarify what I mean.

Let's think of that all-too-common scenario, forgetting whether or not you have done something. Now, you could berate yourself with how forgetful you are getting, and see this as a sign of getting older, or of impending Alzheimer's, or (if you're still quite young), simply of your generally terrible memory. Or, aware of how memory works, you could say to yourself, I should have been paying attention, I know perfectly well that actions I do regularly are hard to keep track of. Perhaps I should start using some sort of external sign to mark when I've done the thing.

Taking things too seriously

I was listening to a podcast the other day. Two psychologists (Andrew Wilson and Sabrina Galonka) were being interviewed about embodied cognition, a topic I find particularly interesting. As an example of what they meant by embodied cognition (something rather more specific than the fun and quirky little studies that are so popular nowadays — e.g., making smaller estimations of quantities when leaning to the left; squeezing a soft ball making it more likely that people will see gender neutral faces as female while squeezing a hard ball influences them to see the faces as male; holding a heavier clipboard making people more likely to judge currencies as more valuable and their opinions and leaders as more important), they mentioned the outfielder problem.

The fallibility of human memory

I don't often talk about eyewitness testimony, but it's not because of the lack of research. It's a big field, with a lot of research done. When I say I don't follow it because I regard the main finding as a done deal - eyewitness testimony is useless - that's not meant to denigrate the work being done. There is, clearly, a great deal of value in working out the exact parameters of human failures, and in working out how we can improve eyewitness testimony. I just arbitrarily decided to ignore this area of research until they'd sorted it all out! (I can't follow everything, I'm swamped as it is!)

Practice counts! So does talent

The thing to remember about Ericsson’s famous expertise research, showing us the vital importance of deliberate practice in making an expert, is that it was challenging the long-dominant view that natural-born talent is all-important. But Gladwell’s popularizing of Ericsson’s “10,000 hours” overstates the case, and of course people are only too keen to believe that any height is achievable if you just work hard enough.

The much more believable story is that, yes, practice is vital — a great deal of the right sort of practice — but we can’t disavow “natural” abilities entirely.

Benefits from fixed quiet points in the day

On my walk today, I listened to a downloaded interview from the On Being website. The interview was with ‘vocal magician and conductor’ Bobby McFerrin, and something he said early on in the interview really caught my attention.

In response to a question about why he’d once (in his teens) contemplated joining a monastic order, he said that the quiet really appealed to him, and also ‘the discipline of the hours … there’s a rhythm to the day. I liked the fact that you stopped whatever you were doing at a particular time and you reminded yourself, you brought yourself back to your calling’.

Those words resonated with me, and they made me think of the Moslem habit of prayer. Of the idea of having specified times during the day when you stop your ‘ordinary’ life, and touch base, as it were, with something that is central to your being.

I don’t think you need to be a monk or a Moslem to find value in such an activity! Nor does the activity need to be overtly religious.