Moonwalking with Einstein
Quote of the book: âOne book, printed in the Heart’s own wax is worth a thousand in the stack’sâ
â Jan Luyken
Second quote of the book: âMonotony collapses time while novelty expands it. [âŠ]. That’s why it’s so 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 memoriesâ
â Joshua Foer
A well written and unexpected story of how a journalist became the memory champion of the United States! The book has a good balance between the history of writing and memory training, the authorâs personal experience in memory training, as well as interviews with well known figures in the the âmemory athleticsâ space.
My biggest takeaway is that improving oneâs memory is extremely difficult, and being a highly acclaimed memory athlete wonât necessarily translate to having a better memory for day-to-day tasks. The only way to truly remember something is to actively put a lot of mental effort into it. Since no one wants to read a book (which we presumably do for enjoyment) the way we read textbooks in school, itâs unlikely that weâll retain most of the information we consume. Combined with the constant distractions of social media, and increasingly short attention spans, our ability to remember is dwindling away. For something to be remembered, it doesnât only need to be read, it needs to be swelled upon. In other words, reading does not mean learning. Memorizing is not the same as understanding. Good memory does not necessarily translate to creativity or making connections. These ideas were reiterated throughout the book in many different forms.
Joshua Foer started the book with a few points that really hit home for me. Internal memory has been devalued ever since the world became literate, and has become even less prominent as our ability to externalize memories has improved. Rather than remembering things, we either write them down or remember where to find them (i.e. a Google search query). I write reviews for books I read, movies I watch, make notes for ideas I have, bookmark websites I like, use apps to track my tasks, etc⊠The only reason I do this is because Iâm lazy. Itâs much easier to take the time to organize my thoughts in this way than needing to remember everything. In fact, the reason Iâm writing this right now is so that I wonât have to remember my opinion of the book in a few years.
The book quotes Socrates in saying that if we start writing everything down, weâll become empty shells of our former selves. Writing was meant to aid in memorization, but has become a replacement for it⊠Even when it came to writing, we used to have wall paintings, then stone tablets, and later scrolls. Pages and books let us index this information so weâd have to remember even less. As an example, the author discusses how his recollection of the book â100 Years of Solitudeâ is of magical realism, but he couldnât list any details in particular. All of these points make me really sad because theyâre true! My only recollection of â100 Years of Solitudeâ isnât any different, and sometimes I do feel like a shell that knows where to point but doesnât actually hold any information of itâs own.
A key thing to remember is that the internationally recognized mental athletes do not necessarily have a bigger brain or are smarter in some way. They are individuals who have the willpower and grit to practice memorizing random things in a very specific set of scenarios: numbers, poems, letters, decks of cards, poems, etc⊠Similarly to how the strength of a power lifter in a squat rack with a well balanced olympic bar on his back may not necessarily translate to wits of strength in day-to-day tasks, mental athletes wonât be able to casually remember all the information they consume without the proper setup and concentration.Furthermore, similarly to how athletes need to take a rest the week before a major competition, mental athletes also stop training the week before a tournament and spend time clearing out their memory palaces.
======= Interesting Notes =======
Memory Tips & Tricks:
Remembering names: Use manufactured synesthesia (a mnemonic tool) to associate a name with a visual image. For example, âJoshua Foerâ can be remember as âJoshing things into four piecesâ.
Chunking: When memorizing a group of letters or numbers, chunking it into pieces is much easier. For example, 19921999 is hard to remember, but remembering it as two birth years (1992 and 1999) is much easier.
Memory palace: Since humans are good at remembering spatial information, we can use spatial information to provide visually organize unstructured data. The key to doing this successfully is to pick a location we are very well acquainted with (i.e. our childhood home), and start physically putting numbers/letters/cards/objects in points we will never forget.
Remember that weâre very good at remembering jokes and sexual things ;)
Alliteration aids with memory. This is why itâs so much easier to remember the text in chants and songs.
Associating text with emotion helps memorizing text. This is how actors manage to remember dozens of pages of scripts.
Stages of learning:
There are 3 stages to learning a new skill: Cognitive, Associated and Autonomous.
Experts in any field deliberately put effort into staying out of the autonomous stage to be able to keep improving.
The time put into practicing a skill is important, but may not necessarily translate to better results. Tl;dr Always pick quality over quantity.
Declarative memory: conscious.
Non-declarative memory: subconscious.
A very interesting exploration done by the author was on the mental abilities of those who are mentally handicapped:
A person who had a virus that damaged their hippocampus had no short term memory at all.
A person who had epileptic seizures as a child had some health issues, but an improved memory overall.
A child whose left and right hemispheres of the brain were not connected had the ability to memorize books word for word.
Damage to the left side of the brain puts a lot more emphasis on the right side of the brain. Individuals like these often experienced improved art or memory skills at very late stages in their life. This goes to show that such skills may lie dormant in all of us
Random interesting facts:
The brain only takes up 2% of our body mass, but consumes 20% of our oxygen intake and 33% of our energy.
Mark Twain was apparently really big on âmemory hacksâ.
One of the memory champions managed to memorized 30k digits of pie. However, when he discovered that a Japanese memory athlete had memorized 80k, he immediately gave up. It took him months to clear out his memory palace!
People are often impressed how chess grandmaster can play several games in parallel, even if blindfolded. While this is definitely impressive, it is not because their memories are that much better than ours. Through a lot of practice and the concept of chunking, every board they see is just a combination of other boards that theyâve seen in the past. New players interpret every single chess piece combination as something new. Similarly, if the chess pieces were moved around randomly, even the chess grandmasters would have a hard time remembering the layout.