The "Wait, Where Did I Put My Keys?" Crisis
I was jogging along the Charles River yesterday morning—trying to outrun my tenure review anxiety—when I realized I couldn't remember the name of the student who sits in the third row of my 10 AM lecture. The one who always wears the ironic vintage t-shirts. (I want to say... Josh? It's probably Josh.)
That minor cognitive lapse sent me down a rabbit hole. As a psychologist, I know how memory works biologically, but knowing the mechanics doesn't always help you remember your mother's birthday. So, I grabbed William Walker Atkinson's Memory: How to Develop, Train and Use It.
Atkinson is old school. Like, early 1900s New Thought movement old school. And honestly? I needed something that wasn't a shiny new app promising to fix my brain in three minutes a day. I wanted the heavy lifting.
The Psychology of "The Will"
Here's the thing about Atkinson—he doesn't care about your feelings. He cares about your Will. He hammers this home even harder in Power of Concentration, where he basically treats your brain like a disobedient puppy that needs training.
Listening to this felt like sitting in a lecture hall with a professor who definitely still uses a chalkboard. The core philosophy here is that memory isn't just a container you dump facts into; it's a muscle you have to beat into submission.
From a psychological perspective, it's actually fascinating. He talks a lot about the "Subconscious" (or what he calls the great storehouse), but he strips away the Freudian drama. It's practical. He basically argues that we forget things because we're lazy observers. We don't pay attention. He explores this whole framework more systematically in Your Mind and How to Use It, which is basically the extended director's cut of this argument.
And—ouch. He's right.
I found myself nodding along during the section on attention. He argues that you can't remember what you never truly perceived. It's mindfulness before we branded it, packaged it, and sold it to corporate HR departments. My therapist would probably say this is why I need to stop grading papers while watching The Great British Bake Off.
Roger Melin: The Voice of Sturdy Oak
I couldn't find a ton of background on him, but his voice is the audio equivalent of a sturdy oak desk. Functional. Solid. Very serious.
For a book like this, it works. Mostly. Melin has this clear, enunciated delivery that makes sure you hear every syllable of Atkinson's somewhat archaic sentence structures. He's not acting. He's transmitting data.
But—let's be real here—if you try to binge this for more than an hour, you will zone out. Zero dramatic variation. Monotone in a way that suggests the narrator is very concerned with clarity but entirely unconcerned with entertaining you.
I was listening while chopping onions for a curry (don't ask, it's a comfort thing), and I realized I had tuned out for five minutes because Melin's rhythm is so hypnotic. Soothing, sure. But for a book about paying attention, the narration sometimes makes it very hard to do exactly that.
Who Should (and Shouldn't) Listen
The language is dated. Atkinson uses phrases and sentence structures that scream "I wear a monocle." If you need high-energy, dopamine-hit style advice, this is going to bore you to tears. Skip it.
But if you're like me—skeptical of modern shortcuts and interested in the foundational mechanics of how we think—it's a solid listen. It's short (under 5 hours), which is a blessing.
Just maybe don't listen to it while operating heavy machinery. Or while trying to remember if you locked the front door.
My verdict? A useful reminder that our brains are lazy, and fixing them takes actual work. Who knew?
(Now, if I could just remember if I actually submitted that grant proposal...)
