Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

Ad Herennium, there would be translated excerpts of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria and Cicero’s De Oratore for me to read, followed by a collection of medieval writings on memory by Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor, and Peter of Ravenna.

Memory training was considered a centerpiece of classical education in the language arts, on par with grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Students were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it.

A strong memory was seen as the greatest virtue since it represented the internalization of a universe of external knowledge.

In other words, natural memory is the hardware you’re born with. Artificial memory is the software you run on your hardware.

Artificial memory, the anonymous author continues, has two basic components: images and places. Images represent the contents of what one wishes to remember. Places—or loci, as they’re called in the original Latin—are where those images are stored.

The idea is to create a space in the mind’s eye, a place that you know well and can easily visualize, and then populate that imagined place with images representing whatever you want to remember. Known as the “method of loci” by the Romans, ...

Memory palaces don’t necessarily have to be palatial—or even buildings. They can be routes through a town—as they were for S—or station stops ...

One might have dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of memory palaces, each built to hold a different set of memories.

Humans just gobble up spatial information.”

The principle of the memory palace, he continued, is to use one’s exquisite spatial memory to structure and store information whose order comes less naturally—in

The crucial thing was to choose a memory palace with which I was intimately familiar.

“For your first memory palace, I’d like you to use the house you grew up in, since that’s a space you’re likely to know very well,” Ed said. “We’re going to array the items of my to-do list one by one along a route that will snake around your childhood home. When it comes time to recall the list, all you will need to do is retrace the steps we’re about to take in your imagination. The hope is that all the objects you’re about to memorize will pop back into mind.

“Now, it’s very important to try to remember this image multisensorily.” The more associative hooks a new piece of information has, the more securely it gets embedded into the network of things you already know, and the more likely it is to remain in memory.

“Things that grab our attention are more memorable, and attention is not something you can simply will. It has to be pulled in by the details. By laying down elaborate, engaging, vivid images in your mind, it more or less guarantees that your brain is going to end up storing a robust, dependable memory. So try to imagine the pleasant smell of the pickled garlic, and exaggerate its proportions. Imagine tasting it. Really let the flavor roll around on your tongue. And make sure you see yourself doing this at the foot of your driveway.”

The Ad Herennium advises readers at length about creating the images for one’s memory palace: the funnier, lewder, and more bizarre, the better. “When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvelous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember for a long time.”

What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I was learning, is the ability to create these sorts of lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any that has been seen before that it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly.

“Now, anthropomorphizing the bottles of wine is quite a good idea,” Ed suggested. “Animate images tend to be more memorable than inanimate images.” That advice, too, came from the Ad Herennium. The author instructs his readers to create images of “exceptional beauty or singular ugliness,” to put them into motion, and to ornament them in ways that render them more distinct. One could “disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint,” or else proceed by “assigning certain comic effects to our images.”

normally memories are stored more or less at random in semantic networks, or webs of association. But you have now stored a large number of memories in a very controlled context.

Before I could embark on any serious degree of memory training, I first needed a stockpile of memory palaces at my disposal. I went for walks around the neighborhood. I visited friends’ houses, the local playground, Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art.

The goal, as Ed explained it, was to know these buildings so thoroughly—to have such a rich and textured set of associations with every corner of every room—that when it came time to learn some new body of information, I could speed through my palaces, scattering images as quickly as I could sketch them in my imagination. The better I knew the buildings, and the more each felt like home, the stickier my images would be, and the easier it would be to reconstruct them later.

To really learn a text, one had to memorize it. As the early-eighteenth-century Dutch poet Jan Luyken put it, “One book, printed in the Heart’s own wax / Is worth a thousand in the stacks.”

Americans have impoverished memories because we are preoccupied with the future, while folks on the other side of the Atlantic are more concerned with the past.

The earliest memory treatises described two types of recollection: memoria rerum and memoria verborum, memory for things and memory for words.

Cicero agreed that the best way to memorize a speech is point by point, not word by word, by employing memoria rerum. In his De Oratore, he suggests that an orator delivering a speech should make one image for each major topic he wants to cover, and place each of those images at a locus. Indeed, the word “topic” comes from the Greek word topos, or place.

Much of the chaos that our brains filter out is words, because more often than not, the actual language that conveys an idea is just window dressing. What matters is the res, the meaning of those words. And that’s what our brains are so good at remembering.

The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized.

Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don’t; concrete nouns are easier to remember than abstract nouns; dynamic images are more memorable than static images; alliteration aids memory.

Song is the ultimate structuring device for language.

The anonymous author of the Ad Herrenium suggests that the best method for remembering poetry ad verbum is to repeat a line two or three times before trying to see it as a series of images.

Socrates feared that writing would lead the culture down a treacherous path toward intellectual and moral decay, because even while the quantity of knowledge available to people might increase, they themselves would come to resemble empty vessels.

But through at least the late Middle Ages, books were thought of not merely as replacements for memory, but also as memory aids.

Paul Fitts and Michael Posner attempted to answer this question by describing the three stages that anyone goes through when acquiring a new skill. During the first phase, known as the “cognitive stage,” you’re intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second “associative stage,” you’re concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally you reach what Fitts called the “autonomous stage,” when you figure that you’ve gotten as good as you need to get at the task and you’re basically running on autopilot. During that autonomous stage, you lose conscious control over what you’re doing. Most of the time that’s a good thing. Your mind has one less thing to worry about.

As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the “OK plateau,” the point at which you decide you’re OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving.

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.

The secret to improving at a skill is to retain some degree of conscious control over it while practicing—to force oneself to stay out of autopilot.

The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.

the first and last name associated with each of them. One does that by dreaming up an unforgettable image that links the face to the name.

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.

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.