Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

Roman orators argued that the art of memory—the proper retention and ordering of knowledge—was a vital instrument for the invention of new ideas.

In his chronic forgetfulness, EP has achieved a kind of pathological enlightenment, a perverted vision of the Buddhist ideal of living entirely in the present.

without a memory, would there be such a thing as time?

I mean psychological time, the tempo at which we experience life’s passage.

“I’m working on expanding subjective time so that it feels like I live longer,”

“The idea is to avoid that feeling you have when you get to the end of the year and feel like, where the hell did that go?”

“By remembering more. By providing my life with more chronological landmarks. By making myself more aware of time’s passage.”

The more we pack our lives with memories,

the slower time seems to fly.”

Our subjective experience of time is highly variable. We all know that days can pass like weeks and months can feel like years, and that the opposite can be just as true: A month or year can zoom by in what feels like no time at all. Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before ...

Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.