Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

It’s thought that sleep plays a critical role in this process of consolidating our memories and drawing meaning out of them.

Call it a soul, or a self, or an emergent byproduct of a neural network, but whatever you want to call it, that element of continuity is entirely dependent on memory.

golem.

“elaborative encoding.”

Like our vision, our capacity for language, our ability to walk upright, and every other one of our biological faculties, our memories evolved through a process of natural selection in an environment that was quite different from the one we live in today.

Most of the evolution that shaped the primitive brains of our pre-human ancestors into the linguistic, symbolic, neurotic modern brains that serve us (sometimes poorly) today t...

began about 1.8 million years ago and only ended ten t...

and it was the demands of that lifestyle that sculpted the minds we have today.

Much as our taste for sugar and fat may have served us well in a world of scarce nutrition, but is now maladaptive in a world of ubiquitous fast food

What our early human and hominid ancestors did need to remember was where to find food and resources, and the route home, and which plants were edible and which were poisonous.

The point of memory techniques is to do what the synasthete S did instinctually: to take the kinds of memories our brains aren’t good at holding on to and transform them into the kinds of memories our brains were built for.

fifth century B.C.

Simonides

Ceos

Thes...

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

To use Simonides’ technique, all one has to do is convert something unmemorable, like a string of numbers or a deck of cards or a shopping list or Paradise Lost, into a series of engrossing visual images and mentally arrange them within an imagined space, and suddenly those forgettable items become unforgettable.

Latin rhetoric textbook called the Rhetorica ad Herennium, written sometime between 86 and 82 B.C.

Ed wanted me to start my investigation with the classics. In addition to the Ad Herennium, there would be translated excerpts of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria and Cicero’s De Oratore for me to read, followed by a collection of medieval writings on memory by Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor, and Peter of Ravenna.

Students were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it.

A person in Greece named Charmadas recited the contents of any volumes in libraries that anyone asked him to quote, just as if he were reading them.”

Seneca the Elder could repeat two thousand names in the order they’d been given to him.

The idea is to create a space in the mind’s eye, a place that you know well and can easily visualize, and then populate

that imagined place with images representing whatever you want to remember. Known as the “method of loci” by the Romans, such a building would later come to be called a “memory palace.”

Dr. Yip Swee Chooi, the effervescent Malaysian memory champ, used his own body parts as loci to help him memorize the entire 56,000-word, 1,774-page Oxford Chinese-English dictionary. One might have dozens, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of memory palaces, each built to hold a different set of memories.

“It’s important that you deeply process that image, so you give it as much attention as possible,” Ed continued. “Things that grab our attention are more memorable, and attention is not something you can simply will. It has to be pulled in by the details. By laying down elaborate, engaging, vivid images in your mind, it more or less guarantees that your brain is going to end up storing a robust, dependable memory.

Herennium advises readers at length about creating the images for one’s memory palace:

But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember for a long time.”

What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I was learning, is the ability to create these sorts of lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any that has been seen before that it cannot

Which is why Tony Buzan tells anyone who will listen that the World Memory Championship is less a test of memory than of creativity.

memory is marvelously excited by images of women.”

“Now, anthropomorphizing the bottles of wine is quite a good idea,” Ed suggested. “Animate images tend to be more memorable than inanimate images.” That advice, too, came from the Ad Herennium.

chardonnay

plaintively

sauv...

gewürztr...

ries...

hula-hooping

I saw a man wearing a snorkel diving into

See, normally memories are stored more or less at random in semantic networks, or webs of association. But you have now stored a large number of memories in a very controlled context.

“Barring an episode of binge drinking or a wallop to the side of your head, you’re going to find that those images will hold in your mind far longer than you might expect,”

Heidegger’s

first needed a stockpile of memory palaces at my disposal.

went for walks around the neighborhood. I visited friends’ houses, the local playground, Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art.

Ed figured I’d need about a dozen memory palaces just to begin my training. He has several hundred, a metropolis of mental storehouses.

makeshift

I tore down a handful of the most urgent items, converted them into images, and diligently filed them away in a memory palace I had constructed out of my grandmother’s suburban ranch home.

“Find book on African kings”

credenza.

Ed, I had already discovered, was always memorizing something. He had long ago learned