Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

letting our previous experiences shape not only how we perceive our world, but also the moves we end up making in it.

Our memories are always with us, shaping and being shaped by the information flowing through our senses, in a continuous feedback loop.

anterograde, which means he can’t form new memories, and retrograde, which means he can’t recall old memories either,

crassly,

A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.

I mean psychological time, the tempo at which we experience life’s passage. Time as a mental construct.

“By remembering more. By providing my life with more chronological landmarks. By making myself more aware of time’s passage.”

his plan reminded me of Dunbar, the pilot in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 who reasons that since time flies when you’re having fun, the surest way to slow life’s passage is to make it as boring as possible.

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 youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out,” he wrote.

Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.

There’s an old philosophical conundrum that often gets bandied about in introductory philosophy courses:

Socrates thought the unexamined life was not worth living. How much more so the unremembered life?

This phenomenon of unconscious remembering, known as priming, is evidence of an entire shadowy underworld of memories lurking beneath the surface of our conscious reckoning.

between semantic memories, or memories for facts and concepts, and episodic memories, or memories of the experiences of our own lives.

This phenomenon is known as Ribot’s Law, after the nineteenth-century French psychologist who first noted it, and it’s a pattern found also in Alzheimer’s patients.

Each time we think about a memory, we integrate it more deeply into our web of other memories, and therefore make it more stable and less likely to be dislodged.

place. It has been suggested that the reason our own dreams so often feel like a surreal recombination of elements plucked from real life is that they are just the by-product of experiences slowly hardening into long-term memories.

confabulation.

infantile amnesia

sublimity”

“The general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it,”

From that simple observation, Simonides reputedly invented a technique that would form the basis of what came to be known as the art of memory.

Memory training was considered a centerpiece of classical education in the language arts, on par with grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Students were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it.

sacrosanct.

“The natural memory is that memory which is embedded in our minds, born simultaneously with thought. The artificial memory is that memory which is strengthened by a kind of training and system of discipline.”

natural memory is the hardware you’re born with. Artificial memory is the software you run on your hardware.

palatial—or

effervescent

“Now, it’s very important to try to remember this image multisensorily.” The more associative hooks a new piece of information has, the more securely it gets embedded into the network of things you already know, and the more likely it is to remain in memory.

and attention is not something you can simply will.

“My philosophy of life is that a heroic person should be able to withstand about ten years in solitary confinement without getting terribly annoyed,”

foist

As the early-eighteenth-century Dutch poet Jan Luyken put it, “One book, printed in the Heart’s own wax / Is worth a thousand in the stacks.”

apposite

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

He explains that learning texts is worth doing not because it’s easy but because it’s hard.

futz

Perhaps it says something about our national character that America has produced none of the world’s best competitive memorizers—that we’re not as detail-obsessed as the Germans, as punctilious as the Brits, or as driven as the Malaysians.

apiarist

eccentricities,

barrister.”

“planning to retire to a life of synaesthesia and senility.” His

Instead, he had devoted the last six months to memorizing the first 50,000 digits of the mathematical constant pi, which he planned to recite at the Mind Sports Olympiad, a weeklong festival of board games to be held a week after the World Memory Championship.

Akira Haraguchi had emerged from nowhere to memorize 83,431 digits just a month earlier. It took him sixteen hours and twenty-eight minutes to recite them.

(records: 2,080 digits and 27 decks of cards).

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.

philosophizing,

The most famous of the Western tradition’s oral works, and the first to have been systematically studied, were Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad.

epithets