Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

older people who keep their minds active with crossword puzzles and chess can stave off Alzheimer’s and progressive dementia,

“We each have exactly five minutes to drink two beers, kiss three women, and memorize forty-nine random digits.

collection of medieval writings on memory by Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor, and Peter of Ravenna.

Cicero says that the techniques are so well known that he felt he didn’t need to waste ink describing them in detail

St. Augustine tells of a friend, Simplicius, who could recite Virgil by heart—backward. (That he could recite it forward seems to have been unremarkable.)

Indeed, the single most common theme in the lives of the saints—besides their superhuman goodness—is their often extraordinary memories.

what, really, was the point of all this. In truth, those notes had been working just fine stuck to my wall. Surely the art of memory had more valuable applications.

“My philosophy of life is that a heroic person should be able to withstand about ten years in solitary confinement without getting terribly annoyed,” he said. “Given that an hour of memorization yields about ten solid minutes of spoken poetry, and those ten minutes have enough content to keep you busy for a full day, I figure you can squeeze at least a day’s fun out of each hour of memorization—if you should ever happen to find yourself in solitary confinement.”

Augustine was said to be so steeped in the Psalms that they, as much as Latin itself, comprised the principle language in which he wrote.

I decided to make memorizing a part of my daily routine. Like flossing. Except I was actually going to do it.

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.

The fourteenth-century English theologian and mathematician Thomas Bradwardine, who was later appointed archbishop of Canterbury, took this kind of verbatim memorization to its highest and most absurd level of development. He described a means of memoria sillabarum , or “memory by syllables,” which could be used to memorize words that were hard to visualize.

Socrates feared that writing would lead the culture down a treacherous path toward intellectual and moral decay,

It occurred to him that the system would work a whole lot better if someone transformed the metaphor of the memory palace into a real wooden building. He imagined creating a “Theater of Memory” that would serve as a universal library containing all the knowledge of mankind.

Physiological Memory: The Instantaneous Art of Never Forgetting

He’s an engineer by nature, which means he sees problems and tries to build solutions.

cochlear implants can convert sound waves directly into electrical impulses and channel them into the brain stem, allowing previously deaf people to hear. In fact, they’ve already been installed in more than 200,000 human heads.

Were these ancient techniques anything more than “intellectual fossils,” as the historian Paulo Rossi once put it, fascinating for what they tell us about the minds of a bygone era, but as out of place in our modern world as quill pens and papyrus scrolls?

Hirsch has argued that students are being sent out into the world without the basic level of cultural literacy that is necessary to be a good citizen (what does it say that two thirds of American seventeen-year-olds can’t even tell you within fifty years when the Civil War occurred?), and what’s needed is a kind of educational counterreformation that reemphasizes hard facts.

“Memory needs to be taught as a skill in exactly the same way that flexibility and strength and stamina are taught to build up a person’s physical health and well being,” argues Buzan, who often sounds like an advocate of the old faculty psychology. “Students need to learn how to learn. First you teach them how to learn, then you teach them what to learn.

he put up the code. It was the Major System. Suddenly, I realized I could memorize anything.”

It wasn’t long before he was using the Ad Herennium’s advice about loci and images to study for exams—even to memorize all his notes from entire courses.

Frances Yates published The Art of Memory, the first major modern academic work to delve into the rich history of mnemonics,

Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.” If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you’ll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.

In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on. Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory.

The goal of training one’s memory was to develop the capacity to leap from topic to topic and make new connections between old ideas.

titled Use Your Head,

The competitive memory community breaks cleanly into two camps: those who think Tony Buzan is the second coming of Jesus Christ and those who think he has gotten rich peddling overhyped, sometimes unscientific ideas about the brain.

The truth is, the operating manual for the brain that Buzan went looking for in college still hasn’t been written.

Mind Mapping, having tried the technique to outline a few parts of this book, is that much of its usefulness comes from the mindfulness necessary to create the map.

the more you know, the easier it is to know more. Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

documentary called Brainman about one of those rare prodigies. The subject of the film, which aired on the Science Channel, was a twenty-six-year-old British savant named Daniel Tammet,

Daniel is the oldest of nine children. He grew up in subsidized housing in East London and had what he calls “a very difficult” childhood that “seems like something out of Dickens.” In Born on a Blue Day, he describes the massive epileptic seizure he suffered as a four-year-old:

To multiply two numbers, he sees each number’s shape floating in his mind’s eye. Intuitively, and without effort, he says, a third shape, the answer, forms in the negative space between them. “It’s like a crystallization. It’s like developing a photo,” Daniel told me. “Division is just the reverse of multiplication. I see the number and I pull it apart in my head. It’s like leaves falling from a tree.” Daniel believes his synesthetic shapes somehow implicitly encode important information about the properties of numbers. Prime numbers, for example, have a “pebble-like quality.” They’re soft and round, without the jagged edges of numbers that can be factorized.

This is the most fascinating thing. What can we learn about numbers and advanced math from this mind?

Autism was first identified in 1943 by the child psychiatrist Leo Kanner. He described it as a form of social impairment, a disorder in which, as Kanner put it, patients “treat people as if they were things.”

The fact that people can become savants so spontaneously suggests that those exceptional abilities must lie dormant, to some degree, in all of us.

Treffert further speculates that savants with exceptional memories may somehow hand over the duties of maintaining declarative memories, like facts and figures, to the more primitive nondeclarative memory systems, like those that help us recall how to ride a bike or catch a fly ball without consciously thinking about it (the same systems that allow the amnesic HM to draw in the mirror and EP to navigate his neighborhood without knowing his address). Consider how much mental processing must take place just to position one’s hand to catch a fly ball—the

As we develop AI, this becomes obvious

Allan Snyder, an Australian neuroscientist who popularized TMS as an experimental tool, uses the technique to temporarily induce savantlike artistic skills in otherwise normal people by targeting the left frontotemporal lobe (the same region that is often damaged in savants). After having the left temporal lobe zapped, subjects can draw more accurate pictures from memory,

Nobody would want to have their attention captured by every triviality, but there is something to be said for the value of not merely passing through the world, but also making some effort to capture it—if only because in trying to capture it, one gets in the habit of noticing, and appreciating.

During the first half of the twentieth century, playing simultaneous games of blindfolded chess against multiple opponents became a fetishized skill in the chess world. In 1947, an Argentinian grand master named Miguel Najdorf set a record by playing forty-five simultaneous games in his mind. It took him twenty-three and a half hours, and he finished with a record of thirty-nine wins, four losses, and two draws, and then was unable to fall asleep for three straight days and nights afterward. (According to chess lore, simultaneous blindfolded chess was once banned in Russia due to the mental health risks.)

Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory,

Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 11.

Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory,

Manguel, A History of Reading,

the Apple and Windows operating systems, whose spatially arranged folders and icons are just a modern reworking of Camillo’s mnemonic principles. See Peter Matussek (2001), “The Renaissance of the Theater of Memory,” Janus 8 Paragrana 10, 66-70.