Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

Buzan’s introduction to the art of memory, the moment that set his entire life on its present path,

(“I thought I’d take that job just to have ‘shoveling shit’ at the top of my CV”),

Frances Yates published The Art of Memory,

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.

This paradox—it takes knowledge to gain knowledge—is

The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.

twenty-six-year-old British savant named Daniel Tammet,

hyperpolyglot—a term used to describe the small number of people who can speak more than six languages.

hyperarticulate—equally

“an experience unlike any other, as though the room around me was pulling away from me on all sides and the light inside it leaking out and the flow of time itself coagulated and stretched out into a single lingering moment.”

synesthesia,

Asperger’s syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism.

“an anxiously obsessive desire for the preservation of sameness.”

Baron-Cohen, who runs the Cambridge Autism Research Centre and who also happens to be one of the world’s leading authorities on synesthesia.

Daniel Corney who had competed twice in the World Memory Championship, finishing as high as fourth place in 2000.

Kim Peek, aka Rain Man,

he has read at about ten seconds a page. (Each eye scans its own page independently.)

the most allusive conversationalist on the planet,

sequiturs.

“You’re fired!” Fran helped him explain the connection: The basketball star Dennis Rodman, who used to date Madonna, who played Argentinean first lady Eva Perón in the movie version of Evita, was fired by the Los Angeles Lakers in 1999.

Laurence Kim Peek. “We named him after Laurence Olivier and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim,”

esoteric.

neuroanatomical

Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, studies elderly patients with a relatively common form of brain disease called frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. He’s found that in some cases where the FTD is localized on the left side of the brain, people who had never picked up a paintbrush or an instrument can develop extraordinary artistic and musical abilities at the very end of their lives.

biennial

Extraordinary People, Treffert defines savant syndrome as “an exceedingly rare condition in which persons with serious mental handicaps . . . have spectacular islands of ability or brilliance which stand in stark, markedly incongruous contrast to the handicap.”

atrophied

“All you have to do is to savor the images, and really enjoy them. So long as you’re surprising yourself with their lively goodness, you’ll do just fine. Don’t at any stage worry. Take it easy, ignore the opposition, have fun. I’m proud of you already. And remember, girls dig scars and glory lasts forever.”

“You know, lack of sleep is the enemy of memory.”

thirty-year-old software engineer from San Francisco named Chester Santos,

The winner of the event was a seventeen-year-old competitive swimmer from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, named Erin Hope Luley, who’d managed an impressive 124 names,

myself moonwalking with Einstein (four of spades, king of hearts, three of diamonds).

Ram reached over to shake my hand and whispered in my ear, “The fifth card. What was it?” I dropped my hands, turned to him, and whispered back: “The five of clubs.” Dom DeLuise. Hula-hooping. Of course.

You know what this means, right? You are now the undisputed owner of the brains of America!”

I’m pleased to say, ahead of the French guy, and the entire Chinese team.

What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.

How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember.

We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories.

to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character.

Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it’s about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have become estranged.