Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

Strip away the emotions, the philosophizing, the neuroses, and the dreams, and our brains, in the most reductive sense, are fundamentally prediction and planning machines.

He’s an engineer by nature, which means he sees problems and tries to build solutions.

Photographs, videos, and digital recordings are, like books, prosthetics for our memories—chapters in the long journey that began when the Egyptian god Theuth came to King Thamus and offered him the gift of writing as a “recipe for both memory and wisdom.” Lifelogging is the logical next step.