Enthusiastic belief in a method may well bring results but from your blog about brain fog and concentration I would suggest you are pushing yourself too hard. When chess becomes a relentless task master its time to look at your life.
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GlennBk with respect you're reading too much into what I said, by brain fog I just mean the way your concentration flags if you don't take a break. When you're a beginner many chess books feel too dense to read for a long time and still take things in. Reading books without a board isn't possible for long at all when you start out (or wasn't for me anyway). Now I can read a chess book for longer and still enjoy the experience, that's all I mean. No displeasure involved!
I'm just letting people know how useful I found memorising games (not a new observation by any means) if they're looking for ways to improve their game. I'm fairly new to chess so the best computer training/other high yield techniques would be interesting to hear about.
This was the kind of thing I had in mind really, posted by Nygren, saying a method he's fund to improve the way he learns. It would be good to collect together the sort of advice you could otherwise spend a of lot time finding from different chess writers or working out from personal experience.
http://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-equipment/studying-the-right-material-and-the-right-way
Quoted:
"I just want to share some experience I had yesterday regarding my chess study in attempt to improve my rating (Currently 1600). Maybe this can inspire others with similar improvement problems.
Disclaimer: Most of you might know this already and this topic might seem silly!
I study all kinds of books. Openings, middlegame etc. Reading books like Reassess Your Chess. When I read those books the explaination makes sence why the N belongs to the created outpost etc. When I then play OTB I am not able to use much of the theory I have read about.
Yesterday I decided to change priority and focus a lot more on annotating. In my library of about 80 chessbooks I looked for annotated games of a player closest to my style and found the game in chessbase.
PROLOGUE:
I study many annotated games. Well at least I thought so! Reading through the moves and look at the ideas that the author points out. After reading study recommendations from Dvoretsky and the "Studying Chess Made Simple", I tried the following new approach.
STEP I:
I put the game in Chessbase - training mode and played through the game trying to guess the next move and not to look at the actual moves. When I had different candidate moves, these were put in as variations. After playing through the game, I looked at my candidates with computer running to see the mistakes or if my candidates were playable.
STEP II:
Next I played fast through the game again to repeat the development of the position.
STEP III:
Then I took my annotated book and looked at the authors explainations and variations and used computer or played new variations if I missed some explainations and wanted to why an obious move could not be played.
STEP IV:
Now I made some conclusions about the game and used the recommendations of eg. Dvoretsky to make a positional sketch. You find one or more positions in the game and save only the position and maybe the different possible variations in the position. Remove the previous moves. This was saved into my positional sketch database for later repetition.
CONCLUSION:
This was the first time I did so much work on one game. Took me about 2 hours and only 3 pages in one book!
I think I learned more of this single game than I did reading 50 pages of Reassess Your Chess or similar books. (Silman: I like Reassess Your Chess a lot 
)
When I did this study I came very close to the way I think when I play OTB and it surprised me to see how I explored my own weaknesses by looking at a GM game.
In my case I saw how weak my positional tactics/visualisations actually are! How I get lazy OTB when I have to calculate difficult positions in the middlegame and start playing "hope chess".
I learned a lot about the ideas in the games, but even more about my own chess!"
Any other techniques that made your learning more effective anyone?
I memorised a game recently for the first time (Morphy's opera game) and it got me thinking about how to learn more efficiently. Now I can play through this game in my mind's eye, and repeating that process keeps improving my visualisation better than any other technique I've tried.
The more you can visualise, the less "brain fog" there seems to be after concentrating for a while on books. I think it's because there's a framework the new information can slot into, e.g. you just 'feel" consequences for various squares of the bishop going to c4, having looked several times in the mind's eye at it being there in the Morphy game and seen what it attacked/what could attack it etc. There's less work for the mind to do. Also you can use the odd five minutes here and there on the games you've learned or blindfold ones, so the time you can spend on chess increases again.
So there's one: memorise classic games. It improves your knowledge but improves the yield of your training too. Any other tips to learn more efficiently? E.g. smart ways to use computers for training, feedback loops, other classic tips...