Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

The leader of this renaissance in memory training is a slick sixty-seven-year-old British educator and self-styled guru named Tony Buzan, who claims to have the highest “creativity quotient” in the world.

When you hear that the man in the photo is a baker, that fact gets embedded in a whole network of ideas about what it means to be a baker: He cooks bread, he wears a big white hat, he smells good when he comes home from work.

Most of the evolution that shaped the primitive brains of our prehuman ancestors into the linguistic, symbolic, neurotic modern brains that serve us (sometimes poorly) today took place during the Pleistocene, an epoch which began about 1.8 million years ago and only ended ten thousand years ago. During that period—and in a few isolated places, still to this day—our species made its living as hunter-gatherers, and it was the demands of that lifestyle that sculpted the minds we have today.

our memories aren’t perfectly adapted for our contemporary information age. The tasks that we often rely on our memories for today

simply weren’t relevant in the environment in which the human brain evolved.

As exceptional as we are at remembering visual imagery

Though the intervening two thousand years have seen quite a few innovations in the art of memory, the basic techniques have remained fundamentally unchanged from those described in the Ad Herennium. “This book is our bible,” Ed told me.

But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember for a long time.”

See, normally memories are stored more or less at random in semantic networks, or webs of association. But you have now stored a large number of memories in a very controlled context. Because of the way spatial cognition works, all you have to do is retrace your steps through your memory palace,

“My philosophy of life is that a heroic person should be able to withstand about ten years in solitary confinement without getting terribly annoyed,”