Moonwalking with Einstein

This was a weird read. Foer sets off to write a book that is part autobiographical, part about the mnemonist community (competitive memorizers) and part about the science of memory. The third part is by far the weakest – if you've read any other pop science about memory, you've read everything here. The first part is also not that strong: it's mostly Foer hanging around a bunch of mnemonists. And as I quickly learned, mnemonists are not the sort of people I would want to hang out with: self-absorbed, quick to turn things into a lewd reference, under-employed and drunken. But none of that matters, I imagine people mostly come for the act of competitive memorizing.

Foer starts out the book by declaring that people like me don't exist, which was kind of a surreal book start. By people like me, I mean people with naturally strong memories. I've had an unusually strong memory my whole life: when the waiter doubles back to say an ordered dish is out of stock, I can recite the menu verbatim for my dining companions, barely having glanced at it; I work a field that requires memorizing hundreds of rare diseases (many of which I've never actually seen) and the associated features; I spent most of high school memorizing long swathes of poetry for fun (including the entirety of the Wasteland).

Foer's central argument is that everyone has the same memory and that any exceptions are synesthetes who can encode information visually. And that's where I really fell off the rails with him: I'm not a visual processor at all. I remember words. Which, of course, Foer states as impossible. He argues words have to be transformed into visual features to be memorized. For a while, I thought that maybe literally decades of chanting torah and memorizing each vowel sound and trope pattern explained the difference between how my memory works and how he claims the universal memory works, but then I remembered that my father memorizing a thousand digits of pi by remembering the aural patterns. So then I thought maybe as Jews, we've been selected for this by memorizing talmud and torah as a culture, but Foer is also Jewish (and does talk about Torah chanting for his Bar Mitzvah), so who knows.

Why does it matter that this book is aggressively not about me? Because I think it takes something that a small group of mnemonists do and makes it into a universal rule for memorizing: memories have to be visual and obscene. Memorizing a poem or a deck of cards isn't visual or obscene? First memorize an incredibly complex system of how to encode this information as lewd visuals, and then quickly transform one to the other and Bob's your uncle. This seems absurd to me, why not just memorize a poem by...memorizing it? But then I started to think about what I knew about the study of memory, and I know from the educational literature that people remember information that they've needed to transform or encode. I realized it doesn't matter if you transform the deck of cards into lewd visual images, or a rhyming scheme or a patter song, it's engaging with and transforming the content that makes it memorable. Foer considers, but dismisses this, but it's actually a fascinating central point because it's much more universalizable: most people with jobs are not going to spend hours first memorizing schemes that involve pop stars and specific sex acts just in case they need to memorize something else later, but a more flexible, lower upfront cost schema for memorizing is useful. Foer himself talks about how being a mnemonist isn't actually useful in any way – the mnemonists he encounters (and Foer himself) rudely forget people's names, miss appointments and all of the general scourges of daily memory

Two things that I will operationalize from the book: I am convinced that the idea of a spatial memory is useful. I'd read about memory palaces before but never found them useful. Foer's specific guidance to have multiple, each real life places that you have a strong spatial sense of, and to use them to order information by following a path around the space is very useful. The other is the major rule for memorizing numbers, encoding each digit into a phoneme so that a short number, like a credit card number or a phone number, (or a medical record number!) can become a distinctive word.

I'm really torn about ranking this a three. There was tons of really fascinating information and an inside look at the “super rememberers” competing to be the best. That said, there's also a ton of really problematic language and imagery. It wasn't published long enough ago to use that as an excuse, so I'm just really surprised that it got through publishing.