Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

In the Brainman documentary, I had watched Daniel divide 13 by 97 and give the result to so many decimal places that the answer ran off the edge of a scientific calculator. A computer had to be brought in for verification. He multiplied three-digit numbers in his head in a few seconds, and quickly figured out that 37 to the fourth power was 1,874,161. To me, Daniel’s mental math seemed much more impressive than his memory.

In addition to competing on the memory circuit, Ben also competes in the Mental Calculation World Cup, a biennial contest in which participants carry out mental calculations far more extreme than Daniel’s, including

multiplying eight-digit numbers without pencil or paper. None of these top calculators make any claims about seeing numerical shapes that fuse and divide in their minds’ eyes.

I asked Ronald Doerfler, author of one of those books...

Calculating Without In...

mendacity

I told him my theory, which I realized would be very difficult to prove: that he was using the same basic techniques as other mental athletes, and that he invented these far-out synesthetic descriptions of numbers to mask the fact that he had memorized a simple image to associate with each of the two-digit combinations from 00 to 99—one of the most basic techniques in the mnemonist’s tool kit.

incongruous

You’d never hear a polymath like Oliver Sacks described as a savant today, though he, as much as anyone, meets the dictionary definition.

But perhaps Daniel exemplifies an even more inspiring idea: that we all have remarkable capacities asleep inside of us. If only we bothered ourselves to awaken them.

insouciant

If anyone might have committed the time to developing a Millennium PAO system like Ed’s, or a 2,704-image card system like Ben’s, I suspected it would be

paisley

gaggle

surreal

I tuned out for the rest of his speech, put my earplugs back in, and took one last walk through each of my palaces. I was checking, as Ed had once taught me, to make sure all of the windows were

open and good afternoon sunlight was streaming in, so that my images would be as clear as possible.

nom de guerre

impudence

One does that by dreaming up an unforgettable image that links the face to the name. Take, for example, Edward Bedford, one of the ninety-nine names that we had to remember. He was a black man with a goatee, a

receding hairline, tinted sunglasses, and an earring in his left ear. To connect that face to that name, I tried to visualize Edward Bedford lying on the bed of a Ford truck, then, deciding that wasn’t distinctive enough, I saw him fording a river on a floating bed. To remember that his first name was Edward, I put Edward Scissorhands on the bed with him, shredding the mattress as he paddled it across the river.

mullet,

cockeyed

paired him up with the Fox News anchor Sean Hannity and Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, and painted an image in my mind of the ...

sheepishly.

He had been prodding me for months to develop a more complicated system for numbers—not quite the “64-gun Man of War” Millennium PAO system he had spent months working on, but something at least a step ahead of the simple Major System that most of the other Americans would be using. I’d indulged him and developed a PAO system for all fifty-two playing cards, but I never got around to doing the same for every two-digit combination from 00 to 99.

leprechaun?

squelch.

cordial,

kabuki

attrition

kitschy,

for a celebratory dinner at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, the grand old restaurant where the greatest chess players of nineteenth-century London used to gather, and where one of the most legendary chess matches of all time, the “Immortal Game” of 1851, was played by Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky.

I’d learned firsthand that with focus, motivation, and, above all, time, the mind can be trained to do extraordinary things. This was a tremendously empowering discovery. It made me ask myself: What else was I capable of doing, if only I used the right approach?

Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.