Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

anyone could do what they do. It was simply a matter of learning to “think in more memorable ways” using the “extraordinarily simple” 2,500-year-old mnemonic technique known as the “memory palace” that Simonides of Ceos had supposedly invented in the rubble of the great banquet hall collapse.

we’ve gradually supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of external memory aids—a process that has sped up exponentially in recent years. Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that all the world’s ink had become invisible and all our bytes had disappeared. Our world would immediately crumble. Literature, music, law, politics, science, math: Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.

When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality.

The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued.

For normal humans, memories gradually decay with time along what’s known as the “curve of forgetting.”

Even so, the scientists found that people were able to recognize more than 80 percent of what they’d seen. In a more recent study, the same test was performed with 2,500 images, but instead of asking people to choose between an image of Muhammad Ali and an Alka-Seltzer tablet (an easy choice, no matter how effervescent Cassius Clay might have been), they had to choose between alternative images that were almost identical: a stack of five dollar bills versus a stack of one dollar bills, a green train car versus a red train car, a bell with a narrow handle versus a bell with a wide handle. Even when the images differed only in a tiny detail, people still remembered 90 percent of them correctly.

Somewhere in your mind there’s a trace from everything you’ve ever seen.”

He also suffered from a rare perceptual disorder known as synesthesia, which caused his senses to be bizarrely intertwined. Every sound S heard had its own color, texture, and sometimes even taste, and evoked “a whole complex of feelings.”

All of our memories are, like S’s, bound together in a web of associations. This is not merely a metaphor, but a reflection of the brain’s physical structure.

One thing is clear, however: The nonlinear associative nature of our brains makes it impossible for us to consciously search our memories in an orderly way. A memory only pops directly into consciousness if it is cued by some other thought or perception—some other node in the nearly limitless interconnected web.

It was a technique he promised I could use to remember people’s names at parties and meetings. “The trick is actually deceptively simple,” he said. “It is always to associate the sound of a person’s name with something you can clearly imagine. It’s all about creating a vivid image in your mind that anchors your visual memory of the person’s face to a visual memory connected to the person’s name. When you need to reach back and remember the person’s name at some later date, the image you created will simply pop back into your mind .

To understand why this sort of mnemonic trick works, you need to know something about a strange kind of forgetfulness that psychologists have dubbed the “Baker/baker paradox.”

There is something about mastering a specific field that breeds a better memory for the details of that field.

Miller had discovered that our ability to process information and make decisions in the world is limited by a fundamental constraint: We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.

Some people can hold as few as five things in their head at any given time, a few people can hold as many as nine, but the “magical number seven” seems to be the universal carrying capacity of our short-term working memory.

Most people remember those seven plus-or-minus two numbers by repeating them over and over again to themselves in the “phonological loop,” which is just a fancy name for the little voice that we can hear inside our head when we talk to ourselves. The phonological loop acts as an echo, producing a short-term memory buffer that can store sounds just a couple seconds, if we’re not rehearsing them.

Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item. Chunking is the reason that phone numbers are broken into two parts plus an area code and that credit card numbers are split into groups of four.

Notice that the process of chunking takes seemingly meaningless information and reinterprets it in light of information that is already stored away somewhere in our long-term memory.

We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.

The experts are interpreting the present board in term of their massive knowledge of past ones. The lower-ranked players are seeing the board as something new.

Our memories are always with us, shaping and being shaped by the information flowing through our senses, in a continuous feedback loop. Everything we see, hear, and smell is inflected by all the things we’ve seen, heard, and smelled in the past.

who we are and what we do is fundamentally a function of what we remember.

two types of amnesia—anterograde, which means he can’t form new memories, and retrograde, which means he can’t recall old memories either,

And since he forgets that he always forgets, every lost thought seems like just a casual slip—an annoyance and nothing more—the same way it would to you or me.

But without the ability to compare today’s feelings to yesterday’s, he cannot tell any cohesive narrative about himself, or about those around him, which makes him incapable of providing even the most basic psychological sustenance to his family and friends.

Trapped in this limbo of an eternal present, between a past he can’t remember and a future he can’t contemplate, he lives a sedentary life, completely free from worry.

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 time, there would be no need for a memory. But without a memory, would there be such a thing as time?

We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events.

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds

That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.

found that people who lose their memories are still capable of yet other kinds of unremembered learning.

This phenomenon of unconscious remembering, known as priming, is evidence of an entire shadowy underworld of memories lurking beneath the surface of our conscious reckoning.

Declarative memories are things you know you remember, like the color of your car, or what happened yesterday afternoon.

Nondeclarative memories are the things you know unconsciously, like how to ride a bike or how to draw a shape while looking at it in a mirror (or what a word flashed rapidly across a computer screen means). Those unconscious memories don’t seem to pass through the same short-term memory buffer as declarative memories, nor do they depend on the hippocampal region to be consolidated and stored. They rely primarily on different parts of the brain.

semantic memories, or memories for facts and concepts, and episodic memories, or memories of the experiences of our own lives.

For some unknown reason, it’s the most recent memories that blur first in most amnesics, while distant memories retain their clarity.

This phenomenon is known as Ribot’s Law, after the nineteenth-century French psychologist who first noted it, and it’s a pattern found also in Alzheimer’s patients. It suggests something profound: that our memories are not static. Somehow, as memories age, their complexion changes. Each time we think about a memory, we integrate it more deeply into our web of other memories, and therefore make it more stable and less likely to be dislodged.

But in the process, we also transform the memory, and reshape it—sometimes to the point that our memories of events bear only a passing ...

It’s thought that sleep plays a critical role in this process of consolidating our memories and drawing meaning out of them.

It has been suggested that the reason our own dreams so often feel like a surreal recombination of elements plucked from real life is that they are just the by-product of experiences slowly hardening into long-term memories.

Until the age of three or four, almost nothing that happens to us leaves the sort of lasting impression that can be consciously recalled as an adult.

As infants, we also lack schema for interpreting the world and relating the present to the past. Without experience—and perhaps most important, without the essential organizing tool of language—infants lack the capacity to embed their memories in a web of meaning that will make them accessible later in life.

What binds that me to this me, and allows me to maintain the illusion that there is continuity from moment to moment and year to year, is some relatively stable but gradually evolving thing at the nucleus of my being. Call it a soul, or a self, or an emergent by-product of a neural network, but whatever you want to call it, that element of continuity is entirely dependent on memory.

our memories aren’t perfectly adapted for our contemporary information age.

The principle underlying all memory techniques is that our brains don’t remember all types of information equally

The point of memory techniques is to do what the synasthete S did instinctually: to take the kinds of memories our brains aren’t good at holding on to and transform them into the kinds of memories our brains were built for.

Just about anything that could be imagined, he reckoned, could be imprinted upon one’s memory, and kept in good order, simply by engaging one’s spatial memory in the act of remembering. To use Simonides’ technique, all one has to do is convert something unmemorable, like a string of numbers or a deck of cards or a shopping list or Paradise Lost, into a series of engrossing visual images and mentally arrange them within an imagined space, and suddenly those forgettable items become unforgettable.

first described in a short, anonymously authored Latin rhetoric textbook called the Rhetorica ad Herennium, written sometime between 86 and 82 B.C. It is the only truly complete discussion of the memory techniques invented by Simonides to have survived into the Middle Ages.