Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

Socrates lived in the fifth century B.C., at a time when writing was...

In the time of Socrates, Greek texts were written on long, continuous scrolls—some stretching up to sixty feet—pasted together from sheets of pressed papyrus reeds imported from the Nile Delta

In fact, it wasn’t until about 200 B.C. that the most basic punctuation

marks were invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, the director of the Library of Alexandria,

But after the printing press appeared around 1440,

Sisyphean

savory details,

Kabbalistic

apotheosis

entire era’s ideas about memory

friar

Catalan

credulous

In 1887, Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain,

profligate

procrastinated

Egyptian god Theuth came to King Thamus and offered him the gift of writing as a “recipe for both memory and wisdom.”

chasm

I used a technique known as the “Major System,” invented around 1648 by Johann Winkelmann, which is nothing more than a simple code to convert numbers into phonetic sounds.

They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance.

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.

Regular practice simply isn’t enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.

The best way to get out of the autonomous stage and off the OK plateau, Ericsson has found, is to actually practice failing. One way to do that is to put yourself in the mind of someone far more competent at the task you’re trying to master, and try to figure out how that person works through problems. Benjamin Franklin was apparently an early practitioner of this technique.

The secret to improving at a skill is to retain some degree of conscious control over it while practicing—to force oneself to stay out of autopilot.

Through this kind of immediate feedback, experts discover new ways to perform ever better and push our collective OK plateaus ever higher.

How is it that we continue to surpass ourselves? Part of Ericsson’s answer is that the barriers we collectively set are as much psychological as innate.

When Roger Bannister, a twenty-year-old British medical student, finally broke the four-minute mile in 1954, his accomplishment was splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world and

Instead of thinking of enhancing my memory as analogous to stretching my height or improving my vision or tweaking some other fundamental attribute of my body, Ericsson encouraged me to think of it more like improving a skill—more like learning to play an instrument.

tapestries.”

gratuitous

“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.”

peacock’s tail: impressive not for its utility, but for its profound lack of utility.

but as out of place in our modern world as quill pens and papyrus scrolls?

aficionados.

litany

dapper

goatee,

vanguard

pedagogy?

The slow disappearance of classroom memorization had its philosophical roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s polemical 1762 novel, Émile: Or, On Education, in which the Swiss philosopher imagined a fictional child raised by means of a “natural education,” learning only through self-experience. Rousseau abhorred memorization, as well as just about every other stricture of institutional education. “Reading is the great plague of childhood,”

fatuous

“hera...

muckraker

“Pedagogues

Into this void rushed a group of progressive educators led by the American philosopher John Dewey,

They did away with rote memorization and replaced it with a new kind of “experiential learning.”

stultifying—not

pontifications,