Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

In a world with few books, memory was sacrosanct.

They invested in the acquisition of memories the same way we invest in the acquisition of things. But today, beyond the Oxford examination hall’s oaken doors, the vast majority of us don’t trust our memories. We find shortcuts to avoid relying on them. We complain about them endlessly, and see even their smallest lapses as evidence that they’re starting to fail us entirely. How did memory, once so essential, end up so marginalized? Why did these techniques disappear?

Forgotten phone numbers and birthdays represent minor erosions of our everyday memory, but they are part of a much larger story of how we’ve supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of technological crutches—from the alphabet to the BlackBerry.

Writing, for Socrates, could never be anything more than a cue for memory—a way of calling to mind information already in one’s head.

Spoken sentences flow together seamlessly as one long, blurry drawn-out sound. We don’t speak with spaces. Where one word ends and another begins is a relatively arbitrary linguistic convention.

the ancient Greek word most commonly used to signify “to read” was ánagignósko, which means to “know again,” or “to recollect.” Reading as an act of remembering: From our modern vantage point, could there be a more unfamiliar relationship between reader and text?

As books became easier and easier to consult, the imperative to hold their contents in memory became less and less relevant, and the very notion of what it meant to be erudite began to evolve from possessing information internally to knowing where to find information in the labyrinthine world of external memory.

Regular practice simply isn’t enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.

“There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.”

Bruce Lee

“The formal education system came out of the military, where the least educated and most educationally deprived people were sent into the army,” he says. “In order for them not to think, which is what you wanted them to do, they had to obey orders. Military training was extremely regimented and linear. You pounded the information into their brains and made them respond in a Pavlovian manner without thinking. Did it work? Yes. Did they enjoy the experience? No, they didn’t. When the industrial revolution came, soldiers were needed on the machines, and so the military approach to education was transferred into school. It worked. But it doesn’t work over the long term.”

People who have more associations to hang their memories on are more likely to remember new things, which in turn means they will know more, and be able to learn more. The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world.

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.