Moonwalking with Einstein
A journalist follows the U.S. Memory Championship for a year, gets sucked in, and ends up winning it — using techniques that have been around for two thousand years.
Summary
Foer set out to write a magazine piece about memory athletes and ended up training as one. The book is the story of that year — the people he met, the techniques he learned, and the slowly dawning realization that the people who can recite a deck of cards in under two minutes are not, by any meaningful measure, smarter than the rest of us. They've just practiced.
The central technique is ancient: the "memory palace," a method described by Cicero and the anonymous author of Rhetorica ad Herennium almost two millennia ago. You convert what you want to remember into vivid, often absurd images, and you place those images along a familiar mental route — your childhood home, your walk to school. Recall becomes a stroll. Foer makes the case that this isn't a parlor trick but a lost civic skill, something Western education quietly stopped teaching once books got cheap and Google got fast.
The more interesting argument is what we lost when we offloaded memory to paper and silicon. Foer sits with Kim Peek, the inspiration for Rain Man; he interviews S, the Russian journalist whose memory was so total he couldn't forget; he profiles EP, a man whose hippocampus has been destroyed and who lives in a permanent thirty-second present. Together these portraits sketch the strange shape of a faculty most of us never think about until it begins to fail.
It's a self-help book disguised as a memoir disguised as journalism, and the disguise works. You finish it convinced that "I have a bad memory" is roughly as honest as "I'm bad at running" — true, probably, but only because you haven't trained.
Quotes
"How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits."
"The brain is a costly organ. Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body's mass, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe... It's there for a reason. And that reason is to remember."
"Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one."
"The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it."
Why it stayed with me
The line about monotony and novelty changed how I think about whether a year was a "good" one. And the memory palace stuff actually works — I still use it for grocery lists and the occasional speech.