Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

I didn’t know quite what to make of Ed. He was, I was gradually discovering, an aesthete, in the true Oscar Wilde sense. More than anyone I’d ever met, he seemed to participate in life as if it were art, and to practice a studied, careful carefreeness. His sense of what is worthy seemed to overlap very little with any conventional sense of what is useful, and if there were one precept that could be said to govern his life, it is that one’s highest calling is to engage in enriching escapades at every turn. He was a genuine bon vivant, and yet he approached the subject of his PhD research, the relationship between memory and perception, with a rigor and seriousness that suggested he intended to accomplish big things. He was in no conventional sense handsome, and yet later that night, I watched him approach a woman in the street, ask for a cigarette, and a few minutes later walk away reciting her phone number. His “normal bar trick,” he told me, involves shimmying up to a young lady and inviting her to create an “arbitrarily long number,” and then promising to buy her a bottle of champagne should he successfully remember it.