Moonwalking with Einstein
Joshua Foer, a journalist covering the US Memory Championship, ends up training for and winning it, using his experience to investigate the history of memory techniques, the science of expertise, and why humans outsourced their memories to external devices.
Summary
Foer goes to cover the US Memory Championship as a journalist and is told by several competitors that memory is a trainable skill rather than a fixed capacity, and that anyone can learn to memorize a shuffled deck of cards in under two minutes. He decides to test this claim by spending a year training with a memory coach and competing the following year.
The central technique is the method of loci (memory palace): associating items to be memorized with vivid, often bizarre images placed along a mentally walked route through a familiar physical space. Foer is good at explaining why this works. Human memory evolved for spatial navigation and episodic narrative, not for the arbitrary strings modern life produces. Bizarre, emotionally charged images at fixed locations are what that architecture retains.
The book runs on three tracks: the competition narrative, the history of memory practice from antiquity through the printing press, and an investigation of expertise, meaning what deliberate practice requires and where it stops paying off.
The historical argument is the most interesting part: before external storage, memory was considered a moral virtue and a cultivated art. The printing press made deep memorization less necessary, and we've outsourced it further ever since. Foer isn't arguing we should memorize more; he's asking what we lose when we don't.
Quotes
"We are the sum of our memories. Everything we are is the product of what we have thought and experienced and learned."
"In the end, all expertise is memory. We know things because we've seen them before."