Hi Craig

I have two CD's , memory and Genius.  They came with a photoreading course I bought  years ago while I was at University.   Photoreading is good, but it needs lots of work.

School of Phenomenal Memory is awesome. It's hard work. If you put in the time and the effort, it's worth 10 times the cost at the very least.

Yeah, I'm a student.

By hard work I mean you can't just read through the lessons. They'd be pointless if that were the case. The lessons are a way of learning a system (the part that you do just read through) but mostly for developing your brain so that you can use the system with ease. It's a lot of controlled visualization, which can be mentally draining at first, and the volume increases throughout the lessons. You also have to gain the skill of visually coding words (for example, abstract nouns) so that you'll remember them. There's different kinds of memorization, some require more time and effort than others.

For textbooks, it's very useful. But you've got to keep in mind you're not going to be able to sit down and memorize a chemistry textbook in a couple of days. There's a limit to the amount of information you can memorize at any one time. This amount increases with practice and experience. Try not to think of your completion of the 59 lessons as the end goal. Compare it to an intensive guitar training program. You spend 5 months learning all the scales, how to play them, where the notes are, how to make chords, etc with a lot of hands on practice. But after that it still takes a while to really master the skill, the longer you play the better and quicker you are. There will always be room for improvement the rest of your life.

If you are memorizing textbooks for school, after you get done with the course it will cut your study time by half, at least, and you'll be extremely confident in retention. I've found it's nearly impossible to forget the stuff you intentionally memorize and want to remember. Beyond initial memorization, the course is a system for retaining information for as long as you'll need it. If you plan on memorizing several texts of a similar nature (for example, if you're a math student and are taking calculus, linear algebra, statistics, modeling, etc) then you'd probably spend some time at first creating and "fixing" some "figurative codes" (see the free GMS manual available on the school's home page) which takes a little longer at the beginning, but once the codes are fixed and they are at the reflex level, you can memorize texts consisting of that type of information a lot faster than texts of a completely different nature. This can be done with any kind of information which is really cool, in my opinion.

If you've got a life of learning ahead of you, your skills in visual thinking and memorizing will only improve with each passing month--more than likely above and beyond any current testimonial on their website. If you plan on doing a lot of learning, the skill-set and system will eventually habitualize and happen automatically. But like I said, it's hard work and requires dedication like any other worthwhile commitment. My advice, if you decide to take the course, is to just do the lessons no matter how much you doubt yourself. I was a perfectionist at first and became very discouraged because I didn't think I was doing it right and felt like I couldn't "see" the images as well as I needed to. I used tapping and a neurosemantic pattern (neurosemantics is a newer camp of NLP) called "mind to muscle pattern" to get over this perfectionism but in the end you've just gotta force yourself through the earlier lessons of the course in order to build some confidence. You will improve, quicker than you'd think, as long as you stay on schedule. Remember, there's no point in paying for a school to teach you how to do something you already know how to do so expect to run into some initial frustration and self-doubt. I spent over a year procrastinating doing my pmemory lessons and I really wish I hadn't.

no problem