Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. 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.

In Australia and the American Southwest, Aborigines and Apache Indians independently invented forms of the loci method. But instead of using buildings, they relied on the local topography to plot their narratives, and sang them across the landscape. Each hillock, boulder, and stream held a part of the story. “Myth and map became coincident,” says John Foley, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Missouri who studies memory and oral traditions. One of the tragic consequences of embedding narrative into the landscape is that when Native Americans had land taken from them by the USA government, they lost not only their home but their mythology as well. “The

Indeed, the word “topic” comes from the Greek word topos, or place. (The phrase “in the first place” is a vestige from the art of memory.)

The brain is a costly organ. Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body’s mass, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and it’s where a quarter of all our glucose gets burned.

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.

Once upon a time, there was nothing to do with thoughts except remember them. There was no alphabet to transcribe them in, no paper to set them down upon. Anything that had to be preserved had to be preserved in memory. Any story that would be retold, any idea that would be transmitted, any piece of information that would be conveyed, first had to be remembered.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates describes how the Egyptian god Theuth, inventor of writing, came to Thamus, the king of Egypt, and offered to bestow his wonderful invention upon the Egyptian people. “Here is a branch of learning that will . . . improve their memories,” Theuth said to the Egyptian king. “My discovery provides a recipe for both memory and wisdom.” But Thamus was reluctant to accept the gift. “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls,” he told the god. “They will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding. And it is not true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow-men.” Socrates

Unlike the letters in this book, which form words that carry semantic meaning, letters written in scriptio continua functioned more like musical notes. They signified the sounds that were meant to come out of one’s mouth. Reconstituting those sounds into discrete packets of words that could be understood first required hearing them. And just as it is difficult for all but the most gifted musicians to read musical notes without actually singing them, so too was it difficult to read texts written in scriptio continua without speaking them aloud. In fact, we know that well into the Middle Ages, reading was an activity generally carried out aloud, a kind of performance, and one most often given before an audience. “Lend ears” is a phrase often repeated in medieval texts. When St. Augustine, in the fourth century A.D., observed his teacher St. Ambrose reading to himself without moving his tongue or murmuring, he thought the unusual behavior so noteworthy as to record it in his Confessions. It was probably not until about the ninth century, around the same time that spacing became common and the catalog of punctuation marks grew richer, that the page provided enough information for silent reading to become common. The

For a period, Latin scribes actually did try separating words with dots, but in the second century A.D., there was a reversion—a giant and very curious step backward, it would seem—to the old continuous script used by the Greeks. Spaces weren’t seen again in Western writing for another nine hundred years. From our vantage point today, separating words seems like a no-brainer. But the fact that it was tried and rejected says a lot about how people used to read. So, too, does the fact that 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?

In his essay “The First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” Robert Darnton describes a switch from “intensive” to “extensive” reading that occurred as books began to proliferate. Until relatively recently, people read “intensively,” says Darnton. “They had only a few books—the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two—and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness.” But after the printing press appeared around 1440, things began gradually to change. In the first century after Gutenberg, the number of books in existence increased fourteenfold. It became possible, for the first time, for people without great wealth to have a small library in their own homes, and a trove of easily consulted external memories close at hand.

Intensive vs extensive reading

Even more than Camillo, the greatest practitioner of this dark, mystical form of mnemonics was the Dominican friar Giordano Bruno. In his book On the Shadow of Ideas, published in 1582, Bruno promised that his art “will help not only the memory but also all the powers of the soul.” Memory training, for Bruno, was the key to spiritual enlightenment.

ENlightenment

On the innermost wheel, the 150 two-letter combinations were each paired with a different mythological or occult figure. On the perimeter of the second wheel were 150 actions and predicaments—“sailing,” “on the carpet,” “broken”—corresponding to another set of letter pairs. The third wheel consisted of 150 adjectives, the fourth wheel had 150 objects, and the fifth wheel had 150 “circumstances,” such as “dressed in pearls” or “riding a sea monster.” By properly aligning the wheels, any word up to five syllables long could be translated into a unique, vivid image. For example, the word crocitus, Latin for “croaking of a raven,” becomes an image of the Roman deity “Pilumnus advancing rapidly on the back of a donkey with a bandage on his arm and a parrot on his head.” Bruno was convinced that his opaque and divinely loopy invention was a major step forward for the arts of memory, analogous in scale, he proclaimed, to the technological leap from carving letters in trees to the printing press.

Memory wheel

The more tightly any new piece of information can be embedded into the web of information we already know, the more likely it is to be remembered. 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. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.