Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

interesting if the world’s strongest person ever got to meet the world’s smartest person.

Mariusz Pudzianowski. He lived in Biała Rawska, Poland, and could deadlift 924 pounds (about thirty of my nieces).

Surely some of the forgetting that seems to plague us is healthy and necessary. If I didn’t forget so many of the dumb things I’ve done, I’d probably be unbearably neurotic. But how many worthwhile ideas have gone unthought and connections unmade because of my memory’s shortcomings?

sixty-seven-year-old British educator and self-styled guru named Tony Buzan,

“Junk food in: junk brain. Healthy food in: healthy brain,”

If rote memorization is a way of scratching impressions onto our brains through the brute force of repetition—the old “drill and kill” method—then the art of memory is a more elegant way of remembering through technique.

I’d spent the first two and a half decades of my life with a memory that operated so seamlessly that I’d never had cause to stop and inquire about its mechanics.

hucksterism.

This book is about the year I spent trying to train my memory, and also trying to understand it—its inner workings, its natural deficiencies, its hidden

Though this is not meant to be a self-help book, I hope you’ll come away with a sense of how one goes about training one’s memory, and how memory techniques can be used in everyday life.

Luria would go on to study S for the next thirty years, and would eventually write a book about him, The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory,

exactitude

enfeebled,

esoteric

mnemonic

1980, the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus polled her colleagues and found that fully 84 percent of them agreed with this statement: “Everything we learn is permanently stored in the mind, although sometimes particular details are not accessible.

As neuroscientists have begun to unravel some of the mysteries of what exactly a memory is, it’s become clear that the fading, mutating, and eventual disappearance of memories over time is a real physical phenomenon that happens in the brain at the cellular level.

Stromeyer showed Elizabeth’s right eye a pattern of ten thousand random

“Magic Eye” random dot stereograms that were a fad in the 1990s.

apocryphal,

If he wasn’t taking snapshots in his mind, what exactly was he doing?

synesthesia,

pachyderm

proboscis.

there and when the pain starts I feel it . . . it’s a tiny, orange-red thread. I’m upset because I know that if this keeps up the thread will widen until it turns into a dense mass . . . So I cut the thread, make it smaller and smaller, until it’s just a tiny point. And the pain disappears.”

topography

science is still relatively clueless about what transpires in the circuitry of the cortex, the wrinkled outer layer of the brain that allows us to plan into the future, do long division, and write poetry, and which holds most of our memories.

To make sense of the world, we must filter it. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.”

capacious

Lukas’s attempt to memorize a deck of playing cards on the fifty-three-second elevator ride to the Empire State Building’s observation deck.

“We each have exactly five minutes to drink two beers, kiss three women, and memorize forty-nine random digits. Why forty-nine digits? It’s seven squared.”

His “normal bar trick,” he told me, involves shimmying up to a young lady and inviting her to create an “arbitrarily long number,” and then promising to buy her a bottle of champagne

Bill Clinton is supposed to never forget a name and, well, look where that got him.

The secret to success in the names-and-faces event—and to remembering people’s names in the real world—is simply to turn Bakers into bakers—or Foers into fours. Or Reagans into ray guns. It’s a simple trick, but highly effective.

ebulliently.

risible

A diaspora of Japanese chicken sexers spilled across the globe.

arcane

K. Anders Ericsson. He was a psychology professor at Florida State University

“Exceptional Memorizers: Made, Not Born.”

There is something about mastering a specific field that breeds a better memory for the details of that field.

Miller was referring to. His paper was titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.”

We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.

Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item.

chunks, 12/07/41 and 09/11/01,

“the two big surprise attacks on American soil.”

Chess experts can remember positions from games for hours, weeks, even years afterward.

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

magnetoencephalography,

According to Ericsson, what we call expertise is really just “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.