Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

staccato

prodigies from the long tail of humanity’s bell curve,

hucksterism.

since Hermann Ebbinghaus first brought the study of memory into the laboratory in the 1870s.

Lascaux

Penfield came to believe that the brain records everything to which it pays any degree of conscious attention, and that this recording is permanent.

He concluded that “in light of this one cannot say that any event was completely forgotten.”

exceptional memory wasn’t the only strange feature of his brain. He also suffered from a rare perceptual disorder known as synesthesia, which caused his senses to be bizarrely intertwined. Every sound S heard had its own color, texture, and sometimes even taste, and evoked “a whole complex of feelings.”

toward me; as for blue, this means an image of someone waving a small blue flag from a window,” he told Luria. Because every word summoned up an accompanying synesthetic image—sometimes also a taste or smell—S lived in a kind of waking dream, once removed from reality. While one universe unfolded around him, another universe of images blossomed in his mind’s eye.

epiphany.

visual memory and spatial navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding. At

bon vivant,

“jocose,”

“lissome,”

“queru...

digit span test.

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

If you were asked to memorize the twenty-two letters HEADSHOULDERSKNEESTOES, and you didn’t notice what they spelled, you’d almost certainly have a tough time with it. But break up those twenty-two letters into four chunks—HEAD, SHOULDERS, KNEES, and TOES—and the task becomes a whole lot easier.

The twelve-digit numerical string 120741091101 is pretty hard to remember. Break it into four chunks—120, 741, 091, 101—and it becomes a little easier. Turn it into two chunks, 12/07/41 and 09/11/01, and they’re almost impossible to forget.

An avid runner, he began thinking of the strings of random numbers as running times. For example 3,492 was turned into “3 minutes and 49 point 2 seconds, near world-record mile time.” And 4,131 became “4 minutes, 13 point 1 seconds, a mile time.” SF didn’t know anything about the random numbers he had to memorize, but he did know about running.

In the 1940s, a Dutch psychologist and chess aficionado named Adriaan de Groot asked what seemed like a simple question: What separates merely good chess players from those who are world-class?

One of the reasons chess is such a satisfying game to play and to study is that your average chess buff can be utterly befuddled by a master’s move.

They weren’t seeing the board as thirty-two pieces. They were seeing it as chunks of pieces, and systems of tension.

several opponents at once, entirely in their heads

The chess experiments reveal a telling fact about memory, and about expertise in general: We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context. A board of randomly arranged chess pieces has no context—there are no similar boards to compare it to, no past games that it resembles, no ways to meaningfully chunk it. Even to the world’s best chess player it is, in essence, noise.

researchers have found that higher-rated chess players are more likely to engage the frontal and parietal cortices of the brain when they look at the board, which suggests that they are recalling information from long-term memory.

Lower-ranked players are more likely to engage the medial temporal lobes, which suggests that they are encoding new information. The experts are interpreting the present board in terms of their massive knowledge of past ones. The lower-ranked players are seeing the board as something new.

He argued that expertise in “the field of shoemaking, painting, building, [or] confectionary” is the result of the same accumulation of “experiential linkings.”

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.

pronto.

You need to get your head towards the grindstone and enjoy leaving it there.

The virus struck with freakish precision. The medial temporal lobes—there’s one on each side of the brain—include the hippocampus and several adjacent regions that together perform the magical feat of turning our perceptions into long-term memories. Memories aren’t actually stored in the hippocampus—they reside elsewhere, in the brain’s corrugated outer layers, the neocortex—but the hippocampal area makes them stick.

Indeed, there are only a handful of other individuals in the world in whom both hippocampi and the key adjacent structures have been so precisely notched out of an otherwise intact brain.

But without a memory, would there be such a thing as time? I don’t mean time in the sense that, say, physicists speak of it: the fourth dimension, the independent variable, the quantity that compresses when you approach the speed of light.

It’s a point well illustrated by Michel Siffre, a French chronobiologist

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.

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

remembering more means being more human,”

HM that the two types of memory processes happened in different parts of the brain, and that without most of the hippocampal area, HM couldn’t turn a short-term memory into a long-term one.

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.

Declarative memories are things you know you remember, like the color of your car, or what happened yesterday afternoon.

Motor skill learning takes place largely in the cerebellum, perceptual learning in the neocortex, habit learning in the basal ganglia.

Within the category of declarative memories, psychologists make a further distinction between semantic memories, or memories for facts and concepts,

and episodic memories, or memories of the experiences of our own lives. Recalling that I had eggs for breakfast this morning would be an episodic memory. Knowing that breakfast is the first meal of the day is a semantic memory.

Episodic memories are located in time and space: They have a where and a ...

Semantic memories are located outside of time and space, as free-floatin...

though both are critically dependent on the hippocampus and other structures within the medial temporal

This phenomenon is known as Ribot’s Law, after the nineteenth-century French psychologist who first noted

While the hippocampus is involved in their initial