Have you ever been curious about people who display impressive skills in memorisation? Perhaps you’ve found yourself in awe at those who are able to learn impressive amounts of information and recall it as needed. Ultralearning is a book that offers insights into the world of people who spend their time doing just that.

Ultralearning is a guide of sorts that you can consider before starting any memorisation efforts in order to save you time. The book gives plenty of interesting examples where people have been able to learn things such as languages, programming code or public speaking in a short amount of time, and it discusses the scenarios in which these feats have occurred.

I want to stress however that reading this book will not instantly make you able to cheat sheet your way through ultralearning. What it does do, is that from reading about others’ experiences, you can consider the things you need to do in your own life to achieve your own learning goals. There are plenty of tips to consider thoroughly before you start your ultralearning. You need to put the effort in and devise the goal you want to work towards, as well as the plan of action. This book steers you in the right direction, but it’s up to you to put the actual work in.

What I liked about this book is the positivity and encouraging words that give you a real push to start learning more. With the guide it provides, it does seem absolutely possible, you just need to decide what to learn and then research what’s needed, according to steps outlined in this book. What I didn’t like was the lack of specificity in the guides, I imagine this is because the author cannot simply tell you an example for every possible subject the readers might want to learn. In this way it can sound kind of vague. I would have like a couple of specific examples to compare my learning project to however, and see some more steps on how a subject can be broken down and memorised easily.

Another thing I found interesting was the information given about why we forget in the first place. Wouldn’t it be amazing to read about something once and just remember every detail forever? Brains don’t normally work like that, and this book talks about why, and what research has shown about memory retention. Overall I found it an interesting read.