Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item.

We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.

According to Ericsson, what we call expertise is really just “vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain.” In other words, a great memory isn’t just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

Virtually all the nitty-gritty details we have about classical memory training—indeed, nearly all the memory tricks in the mental athlete’s arsenal—were first described in a short, anonymously authored Latin rhetoric textbook called the Rhetorica ad Herennium, written sometime between 86 and 82 B.C. It is the only truly complete discussion of the memory techniques invented by Simonides to have survived into the Middle Ages.

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.

“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.”