I've gotten good results just from listening to some of the podcasts from this series. For example, it points out that you can only remember what you've paid some attention to, and how to pay more attention. There's also a piece about developing clearer memories of your past, and one about how to intentionally build associations and understanding which wil make it easier to remember what you study.
Unfortunately, it isn't cheap-- I caught some of it when the podcasts were free. This kind of thing is typically free for each podcast for a couple of days, and then discounted for a little while afterwards.
The lecturer was Vera Birkenbihl-- she seems to have a lot of material available in German, but very little in English.
I know that the "learning strategies" company is a purveyor of all manner of frauds and quackery. I once bought an "Aura Seeing" course from them and they are most famous for their Photo-reading program. That said, some bits are reputable or founded on fact. Can you vouch for these in particular?
I want a perfect eidetic memory.
Unfortunately, such things don't exist, but that's not stopping me from getting as close as possible. It seems as if the popular solutions are spaced repetition and memory palaces. So let's talk about those.
Memory Palaces: Do they work? If so what's the best resource (book, website etc.) for learning and mastering the technique? Is it any good for memorizing anything other than lists of things (which I find I almost never have to do)?
Spaced Repetition: What software do you use? Why that one? What sort of cards do you put in?
It seems to me that memory programs and mnemonic techniques assist one of three parts of the problem of memory: memorizing, recalling, and not forgetting.
"Not forgetting" is the long term problem of memory. Spaced repetition seems to solve the problem of "not forgetting." You feed the information you want to remember into your program, review frequently, and you won't forget that information.
Memory Palaces seem to deal with the "memorizing" part of the problem. When faced with new information that you want to be able to recall, you put it in a memory palace, vividly emphasized so as to be affective and memorable. This is good for short term encoding of information that you know you want to keep. You might put it into your spaced repetition program latter, but you just want to not forget it until then.
The last part is the problem of "recalling." Both of the previous facets of the problem of memory had a distinct advantage: you knew the information that you wanted to remember in advance. However, we frequently find ourselves in situations in which we need/want to remember something that we know (or perhaps we don't) we encountered, but didn't consider particularly important at the time. Under this heading falls the situation of making connections when learning or being reminded of old information by new information: when you learn y, you have the thought "hey, isn't that just like x?" This is the facet of the memory problem that I am most interested in, but I know of scarcely anything that can reliably improve ease of recall of information in general. Do you know of anything?
I'm looking for recommendations: books on memory, specific mnemonics, or practices that are known to improve recall, or anything else that might help with any of the three parts of the problem.