Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer

››› Download audio book for free. ‹‹‹ Original Title: Moonwalking with Einstein ISBN: 159420229X ISBN13: 9781594202292 Autor: Joshua Foer (Goodreads Author) Rating: 4.2 of 5 stars (2748) counts Original Format: Hardcover, 307 pages Download Format: PDF, DJVU, iBook, MP3. Published: March 3rd 2011 / by Penguin Press HC, The / (first published January 1st 2011) Language: English Genre(s): Nonfiction- 983 users

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Description: Foer's unlikely journey from chronically forgetful science journalist to U.S. Memory Champion frames a revelatory exploration of the vast, hidden impact of memory on every aspect of our lives. On average, people squander forty days annually compensating for things they've forgotten. Joshua Foer used to be one of those people. But after a year of memory training, he found himself in the finals of the U.S. Memory Championship. Even more important, Foer found a vital truth we too often forget: In every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories. Moonwalking with Einstein draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of memory, and venerable tricks of the mentalist's trade to transform our understanding of human remembering. Under the tutelage of top "mental athletes," he learns ancient techniques once employed by Cicero to memorize his speeches and by Medieval scholars to memorize entire books. Using methods that have been largely forgotten, Foer discovers that we can all dramatically improve our memories. Immersing himself obsessively in a quirky subculture of competitive memorizers, Foer learns to apply techniques that call on imagination as much as determination--showing that memorization can be anything but rote. From the PAO system, which converts numbers into lurid images, to the memory palace, in which memories are stored in the rooms of imaginary structures, Foer's experience shows that the World Memory Championships are less a test of memory than of perseverance and creativity. Foer takes his inquiry well beyond the arena of mental athletes-across the country and deep into his own mind. In San Diego, he meets an affable old man with one of the most severe case of amnesia on record, where he learns that memory is at once more elusive and more reliable than we might think. In Salt Lake City, he swaps secrets with a savant who claims to have memorized more than nine thousand books. At a high school in the South Bronx, he finds a history teacher using twenty- five-hundred-year-old memory techniques to give his students an edge in the state Regents exam. At a time when electronic devices have all but rendered our individual memories obsolete, Foer's bid to resurrect the forgotten art of remembering becomes an urgent quest. Moonwalking with Einstein brings Joshua Foer to the apex of the U.S. Memory Championship and readers to a

profound appreciation of a gift we all possess but that too often slips our minds.

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Other Editions:

- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (Kindle Edition)

- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (Paperback)

- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (Paperback)

- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (Kindle Edition)

- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (Audiobook)

Books By Author:

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- The Atlas Obscura Explorer's Notebook

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Rewiews:

Aug 14, 2012 Steve Rated it: liked it Here’s the hook. Suppose you want to commit the items on your to-do list to memory because you don’t have a pencil and paper. The first five items on your list are: 1. Buy a bottle of Bordeaux for tonight’s dinner party 2. Put Trainspotting at the front of the Netflix queue 3. Finish the office TPS reports before the weekend 4. Pick up the copy of The Master and Margarita that’s on hold at the library 5. Check the Haile Selassie wiki entry to see if the account of the attempted coup in Cutting for St Here’s the hook. Suppose you want to commit the items on your to-do list to memory because you don’t have a pencil and paper. The first five items on your list are: 1. Buy a bottle of Bordeaux for tonight’s dinner party 2. Put Trainspotting at the front of the Netflix queue 3. Finish the office TPS reports before the weekend 4. Pick up the copy of The Master and Margarita that’s on hold at the library 5. Check the Haile Selassie wiki entry to see if the account of the attempted coup in Cutting for Stone was factual The list may be much longer than this, but the shortened version above will illustrate the point well enough. Research shows we remember mental images of things much better than we do raw data by rote

(things like numbers, playing cards, poems, or list items). Most people can only keep a random sequence of about 7 digits in their heads at a time when first hearing them. Memory experts have found that by transforming any sequence of things into pictures instead, and sticking these pictures in what they call a memory palace, that we can recall them much more effectively. An example should help show this. First of all, we need to visualize a place we know very well. This is the memory palace. In fact, the home you grew up in, while it may not have been a real palace, is probably rich in the kind of recallable detail that can help in retaining long sequences. We then position the mental images associated with the objects we’re trying to remember along a path within the home. In my case, that might mean I come to the front door where a little doe – say Bambi’s girlfriend Faline – is resting. You can tell by her eyes that she’s bored, though. She’s a “Bordeaux”. (I know it’s bad, but this is going to work.) Let the image burn into your brain for a moment. Once inside at the base of the stairs in the foyer I come to a freight car of a model train. It looks ridiculous spotted with pink polka dots, but hey, it’s a way to remember Trainspotting. Up the stairs on the left is a faux antique table. On it sits our mnemonic for TPS: miniature tepees. And just to make it more memorable, imagine that a teenager lives inside one of them and it was TPed with Charmin. (I was tempted to have Lumbergh say “Ummm… yeah…. “ at this point, but wasn’t sure that Office Space was a universal reference.) Then it’s a quick right into the living room. In the middle of it is a big hot tub, but instead of water inside, it’s a giant margarita. The drink comes complete with salt around the edge of the tub and a wedge cut from a lime the size of a beach ball. Inside the tub is a miniature ship with a master on board shouting orders. Some of the crew look like they wouldn’t mind walking the plank. Finally, through the entry way into the kitchen I see Marley’s ghost (Bob Marley, that is) and he’s sitting on the table with doctor/writer extraordinaire Abraham Verghese. In case the link to Haile Selassie isn’t clear, he was also known as Ras Tafari, viewed by many a Jamaican as a messianic figure. Surprisingly enough, Marley is not holding anything rolled up and burning; he’s got a dove perched on his hand instead and it’s cooing (which, of course, is auditorially equivalent to coup-ing). So there’s our list. Picture it in sequence one more time: the bored doe just inside the door, the spotted train at the base of the stairs, the tepees on the table at the top of the stairs, the ship master in the margarita in the living room, and finally, sitting on the kitchen table, the Selassie worshipper with the author of Cutting for Stone and the cooing dove. I could presumably have had dozens of these images stuck along a path throughout the house. The placement along a set route (say up the stairs and clockwise, hitting every room) helps since that way we aren’t as apt to skip anything. Experts also say it’s best to choose images that are ridiculous or racy or in any other way more apt to stick in your head. That pretty much covers the trick to memorization. To get an entire book out of the deal, though, Foer had to expand the scope. He started out mentioning the remarkable feats the elite memorizers can perform (x digits of pi, y decks of cards, z lines of verse). He then got into the small but interesting world of competitive memorization, including his own involvement. Foer began his investigation on a journalistic whim and ended up, with hard work and a lot of help from memory mentors, becoming the US champion. Even though the end result of his competition is mentioned at the outset, there is drama in how it unfolds.

The competition involves several categories, one of which is memorizing card sequences. The trick in doing that is an offshoot of what I described above. The difference is that every card has a mental image associated with it that you spend days and days drilling into your head beforehand. Each mental image has a subject and a verb. The ace of clubs may be Karl Spackler (the Cinderella boy himself) teeing off at Augusta. The two of clubs may be Groucho Marx lighting a cigar. And so on for each card in the deck. Then, when you want to memorize the randomized order of a deck, you put these images in a fresh memory palace. Only to make fewer images necessary, you can join the subject of one card with the action of the next card into a single image. If the first card is the seven of diamonds (which you may have associated with Einstein twirling the tassel on his mortarboard) and the next one is the jack of spades (which is J.D. Salinger moonwalking, say) then the pair of those cards together would produce an image of Einstein moonwalking. Memorizing the deck would then involve 26 images. There may be variations, but that’s the basic approach. Sequences of digits are done similarly, only for that you may have 100 different pre-memorized images – one for each pair in the range from 00 to 99. Foer points out that our memories don’t get much of a workout these days. We all know how easy it is to rely on spell checks and Google searches for things we used to keep in our heads. So is it useful to keep more information available for immediate use? Probably. Foer argues that our ideas, abstractions, and arguments depend on recallable units that are the building blocks. What Foer does not do as effectively is demonstrate how the aforementioned devices help with that kind of practical memory. He admits to it, too, though only after he tells his fun story of the US Memory Championship. The “mental athletes” he first encountered were not what he’d expected. They were not savants, nor did they possess photographic memories. Rather, they’d all learned these visualization techniques that date back to the ancient Greeks. The top competitors were often the ones with the most creative images. After being coached by several top mnemonists, Foer was able to compete with the best in the US. He said he still loses his keys, though. There was more to this book as well. However, and I say this with a full appreciation of the irony, I don’t remember much of it. (It was several months ago.) There was a partial debunking of the savant from 60 Minutes who was “born on a blue day”, there was a bit on the tricks in reciting poems, and there was the blow-by-blow action of the memory competition. My impression at the time was that it was all fairly interesting, but not very useful in the end. So who remembers the to-do list? Would you have remembered it without the images? I just tested myself and I can recite it back without error, but then I’ve made six rounds of edits to this stupid review. I’d probably remember it anyway. Besides that, I usually have a pencil and paper. 128 likes 60 comments

Kristin Amazing review! I use these kinds of memory techniques already. I think I could seriously compete with them. BUT my social, real life memory skills (r Amazing review! I use these kinds of memory techniques already. I think I could seriously compete with them. BUT my social, real life memory skills (remembering conversations, the details of my

friends' lives, etc., not so much! Absolutely terrible really. I worry I have early signs of dementia or something. Wish there was a book for THAT!

Oct 24, 2016 05:23AM

Steve Thanks, Kristin! Sounds like you've really mastered the tricks for the memory gymnastics of that sort. As for your perceived deficiency in what you ca Thanks, Kristin! Sounds like you've really mastered the tricks for the memory gymnastics of that sort. As for your perceived deficiency in what you call the "real life" memory, I'm going to discount early dementia as a possibility (though for me, with my couple of decades on you, it would be more plausible). What I find for myself in recent conversations is almost perfect recall of stupid or boring things I said that I wish I could edit. I'm so clever and charming two minutes after the fact. :)

Oct 24, 2016 04:29PM