Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

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“Floreant Dendritae!”—“May Your Brain Cells Flourish!”—and

When I asked him about the source of his incredible self-confidence, he told me that he owes much of it to his extensive training in the martial arts. He has a black belt in aikido

Buzan is—he often found occasion to remind me—a modern Renaissance man:

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me and he put up the code. It was the Major System. Suddenly, I realized I could memorize anything.”

If the simplest memory trick could dramatically increase the amount of information a person could remember,

Over the course of several years, he created what he believed was a completely new system for taking notes that took advantage of the ancient wisdom of the Ad Herennium.

was trying to get to the essence—the queen’s jelly—of what note taking was all about,” he says. “That led me to codes and symbols, images and arrows, underlining and color.”

Buzan called his new system Mind Mapping, a term he later trademarked. One creates a Mind Map by drawing lines off main points to subsidiary points, which branch out further to tertiary points, and so on. Ideas are distilled into as few word...

And because it is full of colorful images arranged in order across the page, it functions as a kind of memory palace scrawled on paper. “In our gross misunderstanding of the function of memory, we thought that memory was operated primarily by rote. In other words, you rammed it in until your head was stuffed with facts. What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus,” says Buzan. “The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.”

As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.

The notion that memory and creativity are two sides of the same coin sounds counterintuitive.

The Latin root inventio is the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention. And to a mind trained in the art of memory, those two ideas were closely linked. Invention was a product of inventorying. Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas?

Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory. One

“The realization that composing depended on a well-furnished and securely available memory formed the basis of rhetorical education in antiquity,” writes

“As an art, memory was most importantly associated in the Middles Ages with composition, not simply with retention,” argues Carruthers. “Those who practiced the crafts of memory used them—as all crafts are used—to make new things: prayers, meditations, sermons, pictures, hymns, stories, and poems.”

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The people whose intellects I most admire always seem to have a fitting anecdote or germane fact at the ready.

fitting anecdote or germane fact at the ready.

They’re able to reach out across the breadth of their lear...

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but memory and intelligence do seem to go hand in hand, like a muscular frame and an athletic disposition.

“You always do at least twenty percent worse under the lights,”

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And yet, combing through the literature, one comes across a few rare cases here and there—perhaps less than a hundred in the last century—of savants with remarkable memories who appear to break the rules.

The subject of the film, which aired on the Science Channel, was a twenty-six-year-old British savant named Daniel Tammet, whose brain had been altered by an epileptic seizure he suffered as a toddler.

To test his linguistic skills, the producers of Brainman flew Daniel to Iceland, and gave him one week to become conversational in Icelandic, one of the world’s most notoriously difficult languages.

The producers of the Brainman documentary also invited two of the world’s leading brain scientists, V. S. Ramachandran at the University of California, San Diego, and Simon Baron-Cohen at Cambridge, to each spend a day testing Daniel.

However, Treffert divides savants into three informal categories. There are “splinter skill” savants who have memorized a single esoteric body of trivia, like Treffert’s young patient who can tell you the year and model of a vacuum cleaner just from its unique hum. A second group, which he calls “talented savants,” have developed a more general area of expertise, like drawing or music, which is remarkable only because it stands in such stark contrast

The third group, prodigious savants, have abilities that would be spectacular by any standard, even if they weren’t accompanied by handicaps in other areas. It’s a subjective scale, but an important one, Treffert believes, because prodigious savants are members of one of the rarest classes of human being on the planet. When a new prodigious savant like Daniel is discovered, it is a very big deal.

Meanwhile, I was putting in torturous hours taking mental strolls through every home I’d ever visited, every school I’d ever attended, and every library I’d ever worked in so that they could be converted into memory palaces.

According to Baron-Cohen, two rare conditions may have conspired to produce Daniel’s savant abilities. The first is synesthesia, the same perceptual disorder that afflicted the journalist S, in which the senses are intertwined. By one estimate, there are more than a hundred different varieties of the disorder.

Daniel says he has a unique synesthetic reaction like that for every number up to 10,000, and that experiencing numbers in this way allows him to do quick mental math without pencil or paper. To multiply two numbers, he sees each number’s shape floating in his mind’s eye. Intuitively, and without effort, he says, a third shape, the answer, forms in the negative space between them. “It’s like a crystallization. It’s like developing a photo,” Daniel told me. “Division is just the reverse of multiplication. I see the number and I pull it apart in my head. It’s like leaves falling from a tree.” Daniel believes his synesthetic shapes somehow implicitly encode important information about the properties of numbers. Prime numbers, for example, have a “pebble-like quality.” They’re soft and round, without the jagged edges of numbers that can be factorized.

year after Kanner first wrote about autism, an Austrian pediatrician named Hans

“What must the other children have made of me? I don’t know, because I have no memory of them at all. To me they were the background to my visual and tactile experiences.”

Daniel says he still can’t shave himself, or drive a car. The sound of the toothbrush scratching his teeth drives him mad. He

Kim Peek, aka Rain Man, the prodigious savant born in 1951 who inspired Dustin Hoffman’s character in the Hollywood movie. He has arguably the best memory in the world. Now that I’d spent some time with Daniel, I decided to visit Kim in his hometown in Utah to make a comparison, to find out what the two celebrated prodigies had in common, and what they could tell me about the nature of savant syndrome.

Possibly the most allusive conversationalist on the planet, his mind so overflows with facts and figures that they often come out as a waterfall of apparent non sequiturs.

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a CT scan of Kim’s brain revealed that his cerebellum, an organ crucial to sensory perception and motor function, was severely distended. An earlier scan had discovered that Kim also lacks a corpus callosum, the thick bundle of neurons that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and allows them to communicate. It’s an incredibly rare condition, but how it might contribute to his savantism isn’t at all clear.

Interestingly, the exaggerated abilities of savants are almost always in right-brain sorts of activities, like visual and spatial skills, and savants almost always have trouble with tasks that are supposed to be primarily the left-brain’s domain, such as language.

Speech defects are extremely common among savants, which is part of the reason that loquacious, well-spoken Daniel seems so extraordinary.

In 1979, a ten-year-old boy named Orlando Serrell took a baseball pitch to the left side of his head and came to with a remarkable capacity to calculate calendar dates and remember the weather on every day of his life. Bruce

He’s just kept under lock and key by the inhibitory “tyranny of the dominant left hemisphere.”

There actually is a technology that can selectively, and temporarily, turn off parts of the brain. It’s called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, and it works by using focused magnetic fields to wreak havoc on the electrical firing of targeted neurons.

Allan Snyder, an Australian neuroscientist who popularized TMS as an experimental tool, uses the technique to temporarily induce savantlike artistic skills in otherwise normal people by targeting the left frontotemporal lobe (the same region that is often damaged in savants).