Instead of buying the book Steve recommended I went on a serach on Amazon and found another book,
Your memory. This book also covers the why of memory techniques. Why it works the way it does (or what statiscally works best, the workings of the memory is sill somewhat uncharted territory it seems). It also touches upon all the techniques and how you can combine them later in the book. I highly recommend it!
Some interesting things he writes about is this guy who remembers everything very clearly like a photograph, but is unable to distinct important information from unimportant information. So his son's birth would be as significant as going and buying groceries.
This suggests that it is a good thing that our brain sorts between important and unimportant. The problem is that we have to "cheat" or make select things seem important or extraordinary. He also writes that, while having brainsurgery, apparently patients have reported to relive (with all senses) short episodes in their lives. So perhaps everything is there, recorded.
And while I'm at it, that "We only use [insert-precentage] of our brain."-statement is (again according to the author's research) not based on any scientific fact. Just some gimmick that have been withspread. The truth would be that we don't know exactly how much and it can vary, but that we have a lot of capacity left.
In respons to Trustme: In that book the author writes that these techniques basically takes more initial work each time you remember. But that you when you work out a system, you remember what you want from the beginning. So instead of rehearsing everything over and over until it sticks. You remember it from get-go. Thus you save time. But it would be some overhead to decode it again, yes. But many times you would not remember as much if you tried the traditional way.
Eali: I tried to make up stories to remember calculus definitions and proofs once. Subsituting different characters (like x, y, D, lim etc) with names. It worked so-so. I was going in the right direction, but I started off way too late. Perhaps you could apply this as well by translating the text into your own language first? You can also break words apart to remember them easier. For example: "ape-art" for remembering the word "apart". Then make a story out of it: "The ape makes art in his apartment". Then you could sort all the stories with the linked list-technique. Try to sort everything out as a upside down tree structure. It's easier to remember a story, then you sort out the important elements and decode them into your information. But do all this in your own lanugage instead. Sorry if this was really obvious stuff already.
I would like to add that I have in no way mastered these techniques yet. I try to appy them sporadicly but mainly I'm acting like a parrot here. Just retelling what I read. Sorry for ranting on so long, just excited about these new forums. I will end my post here as people who have more experience with this probably have stuff to say.
