Moonwalking with Einstein

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I picked this book up because I was curious about how to improve my own memory. I suffer from medical issues that make remembering stuff more difficult than the average person. This book turned out not to be a book to teach you specific ways to improve your memory, but was instead one journalist’s journey to do the same.

Foer became interested in memory training after covering a competition. It piqued his interest enough that he decided to go through a year of memory training with a coach, Ed Cooke, and become a competitor himself. It isn’t just about his own training though. Foer is a journalist, and he provides ample research material, including cases of people with extraordinary memories and those with memory impairments, and information on how the mind processes memories.

Turns out, we are geared to remember things more in a spatial manner than by rote memorization. The concept of a memory palace (probably more familiar to younger audiences from the show Sherlock) was a technique developed in ancient Greece, that utilized this notion of remembering things in a spatial context. You take a place you know well, say your childhood home, and you litter it with exotic images representing the things you want to remember. If you retrace your steps along the inner pathway, you should find the images where you left them and it will recall the item you were trying to memorize. The more outlandish the images you use, the more likely you are to retain the specific memory.

Another technique involved associating numbers with specific images, usually from 00 to 99. Each number is assigned a Person, Action, Object oriented sequence and you can mix and match parts of the numbers to remember more complex numbers. For example…. if the number 03 is Loki wearing a raven cloak, 21 is a knight jousting with a lance and 16 is Mario stomping a Goomba, you would take the person from the first number, the action from the second and the object from the third. To remember the number 032116 you would construct an image of Loki jousting with a Goomba. Memorable, huh?

Though Foer does not lay out complete instructions, you do get an idea of how to do some of the mnemonic techniques from reading this book. I have been able to put some of it to use already, using the memory palace (such a goofy name!) to place things and remember them. Several weeks later, I still can! Nothing short of astonishing for me, who remembers very little.