Product Description

For the first time in book form, Jean Marie Stine shares the strategies from her renowned seminars and workshops. She explains how one's environment can be more conducive to learning, just by controlling light, temperature, and sound. In today's fast-paced, competitive world, it's important to keep up to get ahead, and with Stine's techniques, it's easy to make the most of the brain's power to tackle the tough tasks of everyday life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1378272 in Books
• Published on: 1997-03-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Library Journal
A seminar leader and author of fiction and nonfiction works, Stine (Writing Self-Help/How-To Books, Wiley, 1997) here assures her readers they can indeed increase their abilities to meet the needs of a hectic life. She breaks down the exercises into five sections on reading, remembering, listening, learning, and evaluating. The chapter on listening "between the lines" is particularly useful. Those not turned off by the excessive exhortations and claims will find much that is helpful here. The text is easy to read and full of simple exercises. This is not a comprehensive, scientifically tested program but a collection of tools, some of which readers may find more effective than others. Recommended for medium to large public libraries.?January Adams, Franklin Twp. P.L., Somerset, N.J.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

The book is helpful but not great
This book falls into the category of books that claim that a few mental exercises can make Einsteins out of all of us, that the Einsteins and Newtons of the world are not that much different than the rest of us. While I don't agree with this belief, I do believe that mental ability can be improved through exercises and I found many of the exercises to be interesting and helpful. I had a problem with the author's demonstration of how these exercises can help the reader. In the introduction, the author has the reader read a section of text and then she introduces a "Brain Power Doubler" for the reader to use while reading a second section of text. The "Brain Power Doubler" is supposed to allow the reader to read the second section of text in less time than the first section of text even though the two sections are supposed to have the same number of words. When I went back and checked the number of words in both sections, I found several times as many words in the first section than in the second section, which had more to do with the time differences than the exercise.

Pseudoscientific claptrap
I picked this book up in a "bargain bin," so my expectations were rather low. Unfortunately, they were fulfilled.

The actual practices in the book are rather good. Some of them I've seen before and practice in my daily life. But the book itself tries to back them up with the saddest examples of cargo-cult science and unverifiable "case studies" I've seen this side of _The Peter Principle_.

One example: the author is trying to convince the reader that near-perfect recall is possible to achieve. As a convincing argument, she puts forth the fact that the average desktop computer has near-perfect recall, and scientists have stated that the modern computer is many years away from being able to emulate or compete with the human brain. Therefore, a human should be able to do anything a computer can! This kind of sad logic can be found in every chapter.

Intriguingly, the author includes a chapter on how to read critically. The fourteen techniques are all good, if not groundbreaking. The irony, to me, was that this book as a whole fails every test--from relying heavily on (flawed) analogy as noted above, to vague attribution (aside from a rather light bibliography, there are is not a single endnote backing up any of the many "scientific studies" referenced), to appeals to authority (the author likes to drop the name of Isaac Asimov as a "personal friend") and "emotionally loaded arguments" (the exuberant infomercial theme evident in the title is carried throughout the book).

All in all, if you already have a habit of reading or thinking critically, you will find this book hard to read. If you can hold your nose past the garbage long enough to read about the techniques, you may find them interesting.

Really Weak and Unhelpful
This book was very impractical and unhelpful. Stine spent most her time telling stories and describing situations instead of presenting effective techniques to actually help her reader learn "how to" memorize and utilize all the things the front cover totes. If you are wanting a book that will actually help you learn how to memorize more effectively then don't waste your money on this one.