Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

When it comes to memorizing long strings of numbers, like a hundred thousand digits of pi or the career batting averages of every New York Yankee Hall of Famer, most mental athletes use a more complex technique that is known on the Worldwide Brain Club (the online forum for memory junkies, Rubik’s cubers, and mathletes) as “person-action-object,” or, simply, PAO. It traces its lineage directly back to the loopy combinatorial mnemonics of Giordano Bruno and Ramon Llull. In the PAO system, every two-digit number from 00 to 99 is represented by a single image of a person performing an action on an object.

When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend. In fact, in every domain of expertise that’s been rigorously examined, from chess to violin to basketball, studies have found that the number of years one has been doing something correlates only weakly with level of performance.

What had begun as an exercise in participatory journalism had become an obsession. I had set out simply wanting to learn what the strange world of the memory circuit was all about, and to find out if my memory was indeed improvable. That I might be in a position to really win the USA championship seemed about as improbable as George Plimpton stepping into the ring with Archie Moore and actually knocking him out.

combing through the literature, one comes across a few rare cases here and there—perhaps less than a hundred in the last century—of savants with remarkable memories who appear to break the rules. What’s most striking about these individuals is that their exceptional memories—“memory without reckoning,” it’s been called—almost always coexist with profound disability.

Daniel could perform complex multiplication and division in his head, seemingly effortlessly. He could tell you if any number up to ten thousand was a prime. Most savants have just a single claim to exceptionality, a lone “island of genius,” but Daniel had a veritable archipelago. In addition to his lightning calculations, he was also a hyperpolyglot—a term used to describe the small number of people who can speak more than six languages. Daniel claimed to speak ten, and he said he learned Spanish in a single weekend. He’d even invented a language of his own called Mänti. To test his linguistic skills, the producers of Brainman flew Daniel to Iceland, and gave him one week to become conversational in Icelandic, one of the world’s most notoriously difficult languages. The talk-show host who tested him on national television at the end of the week pronounced himself “amazed.” Daniel’s tutor for the week called him a “genius” and “not human.”

Even though it’s described as a syndrome, savantism is not actually a recognized medical condition, and has no set of standard diagnostic criteria. However, Treffert divides savants into three informal categories. There are “splinter skill” savants who have memorized a single esoteric body of trivia, like Treffert’s young patient who can tell you the year and model of a vacuum cleaner just from its unique hum. A second group, which he calls “talented savants,” have developed a more general area of expertise, like drawing or music, which is remarkable only because it stands in such stark contrast to their disability. The third group, prodigious savants, have abilities that would be spectacular by any standard, even if they weren’t accompanied by handicaps in other areas.

According to Baron-Cohen, two rare conditions may have conspired to produce Daniel’s savant abilities. The first is synesthesia, the same perceptual disorder that afflicted the journalist S, in which the senses are intertwined. By one estimate, there are more than a hundred different varieties of the disorder. For S, sounds conjured up visual imagery. In Daniel’s case, numbers take on a distinctive shape, color, texture, and emotional “tone.” The number 9, for example, is tall, dark blue, and ominous, while 37 is “lumpy like porridge” and 89 resembles falling snow. Daniel says he has a unique synesthetic reaction like that for every number up to 10,000, and that experiencing numbers in this way allows him to do quick mental math without pencil or paper. To multiply two numbers, he sees each number’s shape floating in his mind’s eye. Intuitively, and without effort, he says, a third shape, the answer, forms in the negative space between them. “It’s like a crystallization. It’s like developing a photo,” Daniel told me. “Division is just the reverse of multiplication. I see the number and I pull it apart in my head. It’s like leaves falling from a tree.” Daniel believes his synesthetic shapes somehow implicitly encode important information about the properties of numbers. Prime numbers, for example, have a “pebble-like quality.” They’re soft and round, without the jagged edges of numbers that can be factorized.

Daniel’s other rare condition is Asperger’s syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism. Autism was first identified in 1943 by the child psychiatrist Leo Kanner. He described it as a form of social impairment, a disorder in which, as Kanner put it, patients “treat people as if they were things.” Along with this inability to empathize, autistic individuals have a host of other problems, including language impairment, an extremely focused range of interests, and “an anxiously obsessive desire for the preservation of sameness.” A year after Kanner first wrote about autism, an Austrian pediatrician named Hans Asperger noted another disorder that seemed almost identical except that Asperger’s patients had strong linguistic abilities and fewer intellectual impairments. He called his precocious young patients, with their bottomless wells of arcane trivia, “little professors.” It wasn’t until 1981 that Asperger’s was recognized as its own separate syndrome.

Clearly the mental athletes had plenty of reason to be envious of Daniel. His memory skills were almost exactly equivalent to theirs, and yet their respective places in the cultural firmament couldn’t have been more different. While the trained mnemonists toiled away in geeky obscurity, Daniel’s medicalized condition had generated enormous popular interest.

What fascinates us and excites us about savants—the reason Daniel has received so much attention from both scientists and the public—is their otherness, and their ability to do the seemingly impossible with apparent ease. They are, in effect, aliens in our midst, walking exceptions to the natural order of the universe. As jaw-dropping as the memory tricks performed by mental athletes may be, they’re still just tricks. And like any magic trick, once you know how it’s done—and that you could do it, too—the effect loses a good bit of its luster. But savants are the real deal: For them, memory is not a trick, but a talent.

a CT scan of Kim’s brain revealed that his cerebellum, an organ crucial to sensory perception and motor function, was severely distended. An earlier scan had discovered that Kim also lacks a corpus callosum, the thick bundle of neurons that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and allows them to communicate. It’s an incredibly rare condition, but how it might contribute to his savantism isn’t at all clear.

there is one neuroanatomical anomaly that turns up again and again in savants, including Kim: damage in the brain’s left hemisphere. Interestingly, the exaggerated abilities of savants are almost always in right-brain sorts of activities, like visual and spatial skills, and savants almost always have trouble with tasks that are supposed to be primarily the left-brain’s domain, such as language. Speech defects are extremely common among savants, which is part of the reason that loquacious, well-spoken Daniel seems so extraordinary.

The fact that people can become savants so spontaneously suggests that those exceptional abilities must lie dormant, to some degree, in all of us. There may be, as Treffert likes to put it, “a little Rain Man” hiding inside every brain. He’s just kept under lock and key by the inhibitory “tyranny of the dominant left hemisphere.”

when students are taught to draw, often the first two exercises they’re made to master are tracing negative space and contour lines. The aim of these exercises is to shut down the top-level conscious processing that can’t see a chair as anything but a chair, and activate the latent, lower-level perceptual processing that sees it only as a collection of abstract shapes and lines. It takes a great deal of training for an artist to learn to deactivate that top-level processing; Treffert believes savants may do it naturally.

Because TMS allows neuroscientists to turn regions of the brain on and off at will, they can use it to perform repeatable experiments without waiting for someone to walk into their office with a rare lesion that just happens to affect the specific part of the brain they want to study. Allan Snyder, an Australian neuroscientist who popularized TMS as an experimental tool, uses the technique to temporarily induce savantlike artistic skills in otherwise normal people by targeting the left frontotemporal lobe (the same region that is often damaged in savants). After having the left temporal lobe zapped, subjects can draw more accurate pictures from memory, and can more quickly estimate the number of dots flashed on a screen. Snyder calls his device a “creativity-amplifying machine.” He might as well call it the savant cap.

Then, one week before the championship, just at the moment when I wanted to be training hardest, Ed told me I had to stop. Mental athletes always halt their training a week before contests in order to do a spring cleaning of their memory palaces. They walk through them and mentally empty them of any lingering images, because in the heat of competition, the last thing you want to do is accidentally remember something you memorized last week. “Some competitors, when they get to a really high level, will not speak to anyone three days before a contest,” Tony Buzan told me. “They feel that any association that enters their head could interfere with associations they form in the contest.”

I tuned out for the rest of his speech, put my earplugs back in, and took one last walk through each of my palaces. I was checking, as Ed had once taught me, to make sure all of the windows were open and good afternoon sunlight was streaming in, so that my images would be as clear as possible.

“They’re known as MAs, or mental athletes,” I heard Kenny Rice earnestly tell the camera, “but at this point in the competition, MA could stand for something else: mental anguish.”

at the foot of my parents’ bedroom door, myself moonwalking with Einstein (four of spades, king of hearts, three of diamonds).

Card by card, each one matched. When we got to the end of the decks, I threw the last card down on the table, and looked up with a wide, stupid grin that I tried and failed to squelch. I was the new USA record holder in speed cards. The throng that had gathered around my desk applauded loudly. One person hooted. Ben Pridmore pumped his fist. A twelve-year-old boy stepped forward, handed me a pen, and asked for my autograph.

My digit span, the gold standard by which working memory is measured, had doubled from nine to eighteen. Compared with my tests almost a year earlier, I could recall more lines of poetry, more people’s names, more pieces of random information thrown my way. And yet a few nights after the world championship, I went out to dinner with a couple of friends, took the subway home, and only remembered as I was walking in the door to my parents’ house that I’d driven a car to dinner. I hadn’t just forgotten where I parked it. I’d forgotten I had it. That was the paradox: For all of the memory stunts I could now perform, I was still stuck with the same old shoddy memory that misplaced car keys and cars. Even while I had greatly expanded my powers of recall for the kinds of structured information that could be crammed into a memory palace, most of the things I wanted to remember in my everyday life were not facts or figures or poems or playing cards or binary digits. Yes, I could now memorize speeches, and the names of dozens of people at a cocktail party, and that was surely useful. And you could give me a family tree of English monarchs, or the terms of the American secretaries of the interior, or the dates of every major battle in World War II, and I could learn that information relatively fast, and even hold on to it for a while. These skills would have been a godsend in high school. But life, for better or worse, only occasionally resembles high school.

My working memory was still limited by the same magical number seven that constrains everyone else. Any kind of information that couldn’t be neatly converted into an image and dropped into a memory palace was just as hard for me to retain as it had always been. I’d upgraded my memory’s software, but my hardware seemed to have remained fundamentally unchanged.

The most important lesson I took away from my year on the competitive memory circuit was not the secret to learning poetry by heart, but rather something far more global and, in a way, far more likely to be of service in my life. My experience had validated the old saw that practice makes perfect. But only if it’s the right kind of concentrated, self-conscious, deliberate practice. I’d learned firsthand that with focus, motivation, and, above all, time, the mind can be trained to do extraordinary things. This was a tremendously empowering discovery. It made me ask myself: What else was I capable of doing, if only I used the right approach?

after having learned how to memorize poetry and numbers, cards and biographies, I’m convinced that remembering more is only the most obvious benefit of the many months I spent training my memory. What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.

So why bother investing in one’s memory in an age of externalized memories? The best answer I can give is the one that I received unwittingly from EP, whose memory had been so completely lost that he could not place himself in time or space, or relative to other people. That is: How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it’s about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have become estranged. That’s what Ed had been trying to impart to me from the beginning: that memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it’s about nurturing som...