Moonwalking With Einstein: Art Of Remembering

I really enjoyed this book. Each chapter circled around the central theme of how our memories work, and the author’s research into topics like memory techniques, how our brains remember, what happens when memory fails, how we develop expertise, the history of memory, and even how he trained to become a memory champion were all so interesting. It was a great read, well written, and I learned a lot and even laughed out loud a few times. It was fascinating. I’ll keep my eye open for more books by this author, on any subject.

This is one of those rare books that is not only a joy to read, but also immensely helpful. It can help all of us with something that is at once troublesome and worrisome: our memory. It does this with ease, not teaching us some grueling rote memory technique, but one that is easy, natural and intuitive. Yet Moonwalking with Einstein turns out to not be exclusively a how-to book on memory. So what is it?

Well, yes, it is about memory and how to improve it, but it is at once a history of techniques, a description of what memory is and what can go wrong with it, and also a running narrative of how the author, a journalist himself with no special memory skills, becomes one of the most proficient memory athletes in America.

I’d learned a mnemonic device to aid memorization decades ago while in college, and found it to be helpful, but for some reason I’d abandoned the technique once I graduated. But Moonwalking with Einstein expands the mnemonic technique I learned back then by use of something of which I’d never heard: the “Memory Palace.” The Memory Palace exploits our inherent skill for remembering images and spatial locations, harnesses these two abilities we all posses in abundance, and relates them to the memorization of numbers, lists and assortments of other difficult to remember items. The amazing thing is that the Memory Palace not only makes memorization easy, it also makes it fun.

What makes the book so interesting is that it is narrative non-fiction and reads like a novel. The author locks his conflict with his own memory early on, gives a sense of rising tension as he accumulates the forces to overcome its limitations, and resolves this internal conflict at the end when he participates in the US Memory Championship. I didn’t read it as urgently as I did today’s number one bestseller, Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, but still, I couldn’t put it down.

In Chapter Five, I scanned the “to-do” list of fifteen items on pages 92/3 that the author had to memorize in his initial attempt, and developed the technique for myself as I read about the author memorizing it. As my Memory Palace, I used an old home of a high school friend with which I was still familiar, constructing useful details as I went. When I had finished reading about the author memorizing the list (took me about five minutes), I had memorized it myself, and I found that the items were not only immediately memorable, but that the list of items and their sequence was still with me days later, and so imbedded in my memory that I’m sure I’ll ever forget it. All this, I accomplished effortlessly. This is a truly remarkable feat for me because I’m almost seventy years old and have chronic fatigue syndrome, which adversely affects all aspects of my memory.

It has also given me hope that I might finally learn ancient Greek. I tried to learn it several years ago, but found building a vocabulary so difficult that I abandoned the project. Rote memory was just too much trouble. I am interested in all things Greek, and as it turns out, the Memory Palace technique was invented in the fifth century BC by Simonides following his narrow escape from the collapse of a building. This in itself is a story you’ll be interested in reading about. The author says that since the time of this ancient Greek, “the art of memory has been about creating architectural spaces in the imagination.” Having been to Greece twice, I have all the makings of a superb Greek Memory Palace. While traveling around Greece and the western coast of Turkey for ten weeks, I visited many cities and islands: Athens, Thebes, Delphi, Ithaca, Mykonos, Delos, Santorini, etc. I can’t count all the archaeological sites I visited. What I’m creating isn’t just any old Memory Palace but actually a Memory Country. Within each location, I can identify as many locations for storing words and meanings as I need. But not only that, I can also use characters from Greek mythology to create actions and images to reinforce the material, as the author suggests. All this constitutes my Greek Memory Palace: the location where I will store ancient Greek words and meanings as I learn the language, in accordance with the instructions learned in Moonwalking with Einstein. None of it was difficult. I picked it up as I read the book.

The author describes how in the past people viewed their minds as something to perfect by loading it with all sorts of intellectual material. “People used to labor to furnish their minds. They invested in the acquisition of memories the same way we invest in the acquisition of things.” [page 134] Some even believed that “the art of memory was a secret key to unlocking the occult structure of the universe.” [page 151] This has given me an entirely new view of how to perceive my own mind and nourish it in the future.

The author also discusses how we came to lose touch with our ability to remember with the invention of the printed word. The history of that estrangement and how inventions like Wikipedia and the Internet foster that estrangement is a very interesting story. The author makes the reader aware of what is happening to us and provides a way to project ourselves into the future without suffering so much of technology’s debilitating effects.

Perhaps the reason this book is so successful is that the reader never loses sight of the practical use of the information the author is providing because the author is discovering it himself and actively making use of it in his quest to make it into the US Memory Championship.

This is an important book. Everyone can benefit from reading it.
David Sheppard

El libro es fundamental para aprender a memorizar con excelentes resultados y referencias (recomiendo leerlo después de “abre tu mente a los números”), yo lo uso con un fin educacional (memorizar los puntos principales y estructurales de libros que leo o recordar técnicas y operaciones) a diferencia del uso vulgar de sólo recordar la lista del mercado.
Hay gente que se queja que el libro no tiene técnicas específicas de memorización -como si fuese un manual- y tienen razón este es un libro introductorio a la materia, no un manual, y como tal cumple su función ya que lo primero que logra hacerte este libro es crear pasión sobre el tema, te contagia el amor por saber más de este conocimiento valioso, y además lo hace mediante una escritura muy placentera y por último, te da lo que el 99% de libros de mnemotecnia no hace: citar fuentes, decirte de donde vienen las “técnicas y los fundadores de estas técnicas” ¿con que fin? para que vayas y leas esos libros, ahí encontrarás las técnicas específicas que buscas.
Memorizar es saber, si no lo recuerdas no lo sabes.

Joshua Foer’s “Moonwalking With Einstein” is a good book, but it will leave some readers thinking about how much better it could have been. In “Moonwalking,” Foer tries to have it both ways: to write a serious book about an important subject, memory, while at the same time writing an accessible bestseller (which it no doubt will be). He does this by hooking his excellent writing about the science, history, and cultural significance of memory into the tale of his competition in the 2006 U.S. Memory Championship competition, complete with idiosyncratic competitors, many of whom apparently have neither the time, inclination, or in some cases the basic hygiene required to earn a living other than by hawking “memory secrets” with all the dignity of late night TV pitchmen.

Don’t get me wrong. Overall, “Moonwalking” is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Foer has a breezy writing style, and is at times delightfully funny. But it is that same entertaining, shaggy-dog style that ends up contrasting so glaringly with his sometimes profound and always though-provoking sections that tell the serious story of memory and its devaluation in the 20th Century.

Foer’s writing on the importance of memory in societies before the development of writing is excellent. The ability of such cultures to pass down knowledge and their own history from generation to generation depended on the development of techniques that allowed individuals to memorize astounding amounts of information. Foer recounts the discovery of the 2,500 year old mnemonic technique known as the “memory palace,” by which Simonides of Ceos supposedly recalled the exact location of the victims of the collapse of a banquet hall in which he was speaking in order to guide grief-stricken relatives to the bodies of their loved ones.

In fact the passage of knowledge through writing was disparaged by such men as Socrates, who believed that witten words “could never be anything more than a cue for memory – a way of calling to mind information already in one’s head,” and that “writing would lead the culture down a treacherous path toward intellectual and moral decay, because even while the quantity of knowledge available to people might increase, they themselves would come to resemble empty vessels.” In the 21st Century, when two-thirds of American teens don’t have a clue as to when the Civil War began, and one-fifth don’t know who the United States fought against in World War II, Socrates’ predictions seem prescient rather than merely a quaint longing for the good old days.

Foer reveals some remarkable facts about the evolution of our attitudes toward the written word. The use of punctuation and word spacing was tried out in the 2nd Century A.D., but was ultimately abandoned for 900 years. Until Guttenberg and the invention of moveable type, books were largely regarded as aids to memory rather as primary sources of information in themselves.

Foer also does an excellent job of describing the ways in which the increasing availability of written sources has created a world in which, if one reads at all, one reads extensively rather than intensively. Breadth of knowledge replaces depth of knowledge. Lack of a foundational memory pool inside our brains results in a reduced capacity for critical thinking. Comparing what we learn with what we know, integrating new material with previously acquired and remembered material to gain new insight and understanding about the world, is sacrificed at the alter of Google and instant but unconnected, and largely uunretained, knowledge.

Likewise, Foer’s exploration of the neuroscience of memory, including the stories the astonishing abilities of so-called savants, is both insightful and even touching.

It is when he tries to interweave his own experiences as he first reports on and later enters the U.S. Memory Championship competition that Foer stumbles. Foer seems to be working overtime to engage the reader in the story. To his credit, he at least partially succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Some episodes are even laugh out loud funny. But the raw material weighs him down. Unlike recent accounts of other potentially snooze-worthy contests such as crossword puzzle competitions and spelling-bees, his compatriots in the rarified world of super-memory often come across as unlikable or just plain dull. There is no one root for except the obvious candidate, the author himself.

It is too bad that the author, who tells so many important stories that have great relevance in this age of hyper-information, chose not stick to those stories. But we are lucky that Joshua Foer has given us as much as he has in “Moonwalking With Einstein.” Without the hook of his shoot-out at the memory corral, this timely and informative book might have gone largely unread by anyone.