The downside of the history of technology is that it goes hand in hand with the atrophying of human capabilities as they are turned over to machines that do them much better. Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of memory. When the Greeks started writing down what had been oral histories somewhere about 2500 years ago, they started a trip down the slippery slope to our current state of affairs, where anyone who can actually remember the names of someone they met at a party is considered a unusual, and anyone who has actually committed, say, poetry, to memory runs the risk of being considered a savant.
The truth is that there’s nothing wrong with our memories, as we discover in Moonwalking with Einstein, nothing that a little practice and a few tricks couldn’t fix.
In 2005 Josh Foer (picture a comedian [a man joshing] standing in an open doorway [a foyer]) was starting out as a science writer and living in his parent’s basement, when he went to watch the U.S.A. Memory Championship, and write an article about it. A year later, (spoiler alert) he came back to win the title. Moonwalking With Einstein is everything in between; a walk down memory science lane and a tour of the tricks and techniques that turn an average mind into a steel trap from which no fact can escape. Even if those fact are the precise order of cards in multiple packs, glimpsed for a fraction of a second apiece.
Although Josh puts down how he did it in clear terms, you won’t find this to be a self-help manual that enables you to rush out and start memorizing license plate numbers or answers for your final exam. Actually, there’s enough information in the book for you to do that, but it’s not the point of the book, as the author makes clear from the start.
Rather, Moonwalking with Einstein is a historical and scientific tour of the “art of memory,” whose origins are generally considered to rest with Simonides of Ceos, a Greek poet who lived around 550 B.C. and who narrowly missed being killed in the collapse of a dining hall he had just spoken in. By recreating the scene in his mind he was able to point out the location of each person lying beneath the rubble, a feat that spurred him to create the system of mnemonics that underlies the abilities of classical scholars and contemporary mental athletes alike.
The human mind doesn’t have much use for words and even less for numbers, written or spoken, and as a result they’re notoriously hard to remember. On the other hand, we have marvelous facilities for remembering locations and images, and it turns out that it’s not that hard to associate boring facts with interesting images and to store them in familiar scenes for later retrieval. That’s the essence of the technique the book explores in a nutshell, and thanks to the author’s explanation I shall probably never be free of the image of Claudia Schiffer lounging in a tub of cottage cheese on the porch of the house I grew up in.
The more ludicrous (and lascivious) the image, the more apt you are to remember where you left it in your “memory palace.”
Memory palaces are physical places that you’ve committed to memory, full of locations you can identify and stash images you’ve associated with facts in. The first example the author offers is the house he grew up in, and as he invites you to play along, you’ll no doubt wind up with a trail of odd objects cluttering up a well remembered place. Fortunately, though he doesn’t take us through the process, you can clean out the palace so it will be ready for the next shopping list, set of exam questions, or the name of every person you meet at a party.
The value of Moonwalking with Einstein isn’t as a how-to book, but an introduction to memory science wrapped up in voyage of self discovery. By linking the presentation of a whole lot of science, both informational and biological, to an engaging first person account, the author is actually using some of the memory techniques to get the ideas to stick and the reader to keep going. Between the hope that this will turn out to be actually useful and the drama of Josh’s transition from average joe to mental athlete, it’s harder to stop reading than you might imagine.
Early on Josh hooks up with a couple memory athletes from the international circuit, among them Ed Cooke, a wildly charismatic raconteur and memory competitor who challenged Josh to do more than write about the sport from the outside, and who coached the author over the next year.
At the outset, Ed warns Josh:
“…you are shortly going to go from having an awed respect for people with go memory to saying, ‘Oh, it’s all a stupid trick…and you will be wrong. It’s just an unfortunate phase you’re just going to have to pass through.”
He’s right on both counts.
Storing facts inside a memory palace is a trick, making something that looks unimaginably difficult forehead smackingly straightforward. That it couples prosaic data with lurid imagery, makes it harder to take. To link pure data with base imagery, and the baser the better since it’s all about using the mind’s natural priorities unnaturally, adds twisted connotations to the data you may not care for, or even other images and places. Ed points out later in the book that he eventually had to “excise my mother from my (card) deck.” to keep her out of compromising scenarios.
You can see how this might keep these techniques from being taught to elementary school kids, who are undoubtedly in the best position to take advantage of them.
Possibly the most important thing that comes out of Josh’s efforts isn’t the utility of the memory palace technique, which after all is thousands of years old, but the differences between experts and amateurs in how they approach their areas of interest.
Amateurs get to a certain level, decide it’s good enough, and switch over to auto-pilot when they practice. Experts are able to move beyond this “plateau of OK” by being mindful of what they’re doing when they train. They practice the hard parts, rather than the ones they know, tracking their progress and studying other experts technique, all in order to keep it “real” to them and to keep getting better.
The downside of building a super-memory turns out to be that it takes a fair amount of work to learn the tricks, and that when you do, it changes the way you look at things. The upside is that there are times when this sort of ability is exactly what you need to excel.
Moonwalking with Einstein shows us that while there may not be any free lunches, there are a lot of ways to reduce the price to something you can afford. Memory isn’t so much a muscle as a skill set, and one you can definitely improve with practice.
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