Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

building a “memory gymnasium” called the Oxford Mind Academy.

But how exactly a collection of cells could “contain” a memory remains among the deepest conundrums of neuroscience.

well. “When S read through a long series of words, each word would elicit a graphic image. And since the series was fairly long, he had to find some way of distributing these images of his in a mental row or sequence,”

he would conjure up an image associated with each of them, and scatter them along one of his many mental paths.

tasks: visual memory and spatial navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding.

“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.

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.

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.

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

“vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain.” In other words, a great memory isn’t just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.

from which we withdraw old information when we need it.

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.

technique called the memory palace grant them expert memories without their being experts in anything?