Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

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