Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

create. It’s said that clichés are the worst sin a writer can commit, but to an oral bard, they were essential.

The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized.

Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don’t;

the reason we teach kids the alphabet in a song and not as twenty-six individual letters. Song is the ultimate structuring device for language.

Folklorists have compared oral poems to pebbles worn down by the water.

Ad Herrenium suggests that the best method for remembering poetry ad verbum is to repeat a line two or three times before trying to see it as a series of images.

pious

benediction

prepos...

They invested in the acquisition of memories the same way we invest in the acquisition of things.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates describes how the Egyptian god Theuth, inventor of writing, came to Thamus, the king of Egypt, and offered to bestow his wonderful invention upon the Egyptian people. “Here is a branch of learning that will . . . improve their memories,”

I wonder if Socrates would have appreciated the flagrant irony: It’s only because his pupils Plato and Xenophon put his disdain for the written word into written words that we have any knowledge of it today.

Instead, words ran together in an unending stream of capital letters known as scriptio continua,

artificial intelligence capable of figuring out context, a computer has no way of telling the difference between “The stuffy nose may dim liquor” and “The stuff he knows made him lick her.”

The first concordance of the Bible, a grand index that consumed the labors of five hundred Parisian monks, was compiled in the thirteenth century, around the same time that chapter divisions were introduced.

erudite

“The First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” Robert Darnton describes a switch from “intensive” to “extensive” reading that occurred as books began to proliferate.

We value quantity of reading over quality of reading.

“I leaf through books, I do not study them,” he wrote. “What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.”

obsolescence,

Llullian wheels,

profligate

The next step is a brain-computer interface that lets the mind exchange data directly with a digital memory bank, a project that a few cutting-edge researchers are already working on, and which is bound to become a major area of research in the decades ahead.

“Major System,” invented in the seventeenth century by Johann Winkelmann,

which is nothing more than a simple code to convert numbers into phonetic sounds.

“person-action-object,” or, simply, PAO.

my own PAO system, which involved dreaming up fifty-two separate person/action/object images. To be maximally memorable, one’s images have to appeal to one’s own sense of what is colorful and interesting.

The king of hearts, for me, was Michael Jackson moonwalking with a white glove.

Ben held the world record for having learned 3,705 random ones and zeroes in half an hour.

1960s, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner attempted to answer this question by describing the three stages that anyone goes through when

acquiring a new skill.

The less you have to focus on the repetitive tasks of everyday life, the more you can concentrate on the stuff that really matters,

When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.

To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.

Attention, of course, is a prerequisite to remembering.

volitional

automata—particles

“lackadaisical”

Bruce Lee,

“There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.”

“Talented Tenth,” after W. E. B. Du

Bois’s notion that an elite corps of African-Americans would lift the race out of poverty.

What does it mean to be intelligent, and what exactly is it that schools are supposed to be teaching?

dichotomy

Tony Buzan

iota

Everything about Buzan gives the strong impression of someone wanting to make a strong impression.

“Floreant Dendritae!”—“May Your Brain Cells Flourish!”—and

Encyclopaedia Britannica Great Books of the Western World, several copies of the sci-fi thriller Dune, three copies of the Quran, a large quantity of books authored by Buzan,

antipodal