Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

(at the rate of two hundred lines per hour, he told

A trained memory was the key to cultivating “judgment, citizenship, and piety.”

futz

strut.

He had spent virtually every free moment of the last six weeks cleaning out memory palaces that had been devoted to pi, undoing months of hard work so that he could reuse the palaces in the memory championships.

It wasn’t until he showed up at his first World Memory Championship in 2000 that he found out about the memory palace.

bête noir.

memoria rerum and memoria verborum,

The Roman rhetoric teacher Quintilian looked down on memoria verborum on the grounds

that creating such a vast number of images was not only inefficient, since it would require a gargantuan memory palace, but also unstable. If your memory for a speech hinged on knowing every word, then not only did you have a lot more to remember, but if you forgot a single word, you could end up trapped in a room of your memory palace staring at a blank wall, lost and unable to move on.

employing memoria rerum. In his De Oratore, 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. Indeed, the word “topic” comes from the Greek word topos, or place. (The phrase “in the first place” is a vestige from the art of memory.)

chagrin

remember specific quotes correctly—that is to say, verborum—he often didn’t even properly remember

the gist of what had been discussed—rerum.

What matters is the res, the meaning of those words.

In India, an

entire class of priests was charged with memorizing the Vedas with perfect fidelity.

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

ex nihilo

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

redacted

“one of a long tradition of oral poets that … composed wholly without the aid of writing.”

clichés

The very reason that clichés so easily seep into our speech and writing—their insidious memorability—is exactly why they played such an important role in oral storytelling. And the Odyssey and Iliad, excuse the cliché, are riddled with them.

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

The principles that the oral bards discovered, as they sharpened their stories through telling and retelling, were the same basic mnemonic principles that psychologists rediscovered when they began conducting their first scientific experiments on memory around the turn of the twentieth century:

alliteration aids memory.

The most useful of all the mnemonic tricks employed by the bards was song.

Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language.

alliteration,

meter

invented by Simonides at exactly the moment when the use of writing was on the rise in ancient Greece, around the fifth century B.C.

By the time the author of the Ad Herennium sat down to compose his handbook on oration in the first century B.C., writing was already a centuries-old craft, as fundamental a part of the Roman world as computers are a part of our

The anonymous author of the 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.

Metrodorus of Scepsis, a Greek contemporary of Cicero’s, offered a solution to the quandary of how to see the unseeable

The Ad Herennium mentions that “most of the Greeks who have written on memory have taken the course of listing images that correspond to a great many words, so that persons who wished to learn these images by heart would have them ready without expending effort in search of them.”

The challenge of memorizing poetry is its abstractness.

He described a means of memoria sillabarum, or “memory by syllables,” which could be used to memorize words that were hard to visualize.

This process of transforming words into images involves a kind of remembering by forgetting: In order to memorize a word by its sound, its meaning has to be completely dismissed.

risqué.

priggish

He decried the art of memory as idolatrous and “impious, because it calls up absurd thoughts, insolent, prodigious, and the like which stimulate and light up depraved carnal affections.”

Many actors will tell you that they break their lines into units they call “beats,” each of which involves some specific intention or goal on the character’s part, which they train themselves to empathize with. This technique, known as Method acting, was pioneered in Russia by Konstantin Stanislavski around the turn of the last century. Stanislavski was interested in these techniques not for their mnemonic potential but rather as tools to help the actor more realistically depict his character.

protégés,

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.

Socrates goes on to disparage the idea of passing on his own knowledge through writing, saying it would be “singularly simple-minded to believe that written words can do anything more than remind one of what one already knows.”

flagrant

irony:

It’s only because his pupils Plato and Xenophon put his disdain for the written word into written words that w...