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.

I've never considered myself to have a good memory. I'll remember places, directions and programming concepts, but can't remember a phone number of the name of someone I just met. This look into the competitive memory circuit around the world helped me put an image in my head of not just what's possible, but how people actually go about remembering 10,000 digits of pi. While I don't plan to exercise this muscle to the extent of people in this book, I do want to try using some of these concepts to put a few names to faces.

This book has nothing to do with Einstein and if you're looking to improve your memory this book is probably not for you. Right in the beginning Foer tells the reader, “This book is about the year I spent trying to train my memory, and also trying to understand it- its inner workings, its natural deficiencies, its hidden potential.” Foer starts this journey with an average memory and his goal, to compete at the US World Memory Championships the next year.
The book does give a brief culture history on the memory. Also, tricks mentalist use to commit list, desks of playing cards, and poetry to memory. Foer learns to apply these techniques. He meets famous memory celebrities like “Rain Man” inspiration Kim Peek, and some less famous people who can't remember the previous day.
But somewhat through the book it was a bit of information overload. While interesting, the author gets lost and within chapters, dumps all the researching memory literature and history in big chunks to show how he overcame challenges. It becomes overwhelming and even boring at times. Still an entertaining and intriguing read with useful tips.

De journalist Joshua Foer gaat naar een geheugenwedstrijd, zo'n evenement waar mensen de volledige volgorde van een pak kaarten van buiten leren, of duizend getallen na elkaar, of allerlei details over een hele stapel mensen.

Hij geraakt erdoor geïntrigeerd en maakt kennis met een aantal van de mededingers. Die vertellen hem allemaal dat zo ongeveer iedereen kan doen wat zij doen, en dat ze echt niet superintelligent of autistisch of zo zijn.

Waarop Foer beslist om het ook te proberen.

De “truuk” is duizenden jaren oud en doodeenvoudig: maak beelden van de dingen die moeten onthouden worden, liefst zo absurd mogelijk, en plaats ze ergens in een ‘geheugenpaleis'. Om de te onthouden dingen te weten te komen: loop het geheugenpaleis af en zie de dingen gewoon voor u staan.

Een voorbeeld. Om de woorden muis en lamp te onthouden, maak ik een verhaal dat bijvoorbeeld zo gaat. Ik sta aan de ingangsdeur van mijn huis (mijn echt huis, dat ik mij dus heel erg levendig kan inbeelden), en in plaats van een klink zit er een roze muis aan de deur. Als ik ze vastneem om de deur open te doen, voelt ze zacht en warm aan, en piept ze alsof ze vermoord wordt. Ik doe de deur open en ik loop voorbij het wc. Door de open deur zie ik een lamp, zo eentje van het model Luxo Jr, op het toilet zitten, hard scheten aan het laten. Als ik nog dertig woorden erna moet onthouden, maak ik nog dertig taferelen.

En ja, dat lukt. Plastische beelden, die in uw hoofd blijven zitten, vastgehamerd op een locatie die u bekend is: mensen zijn gebouwd om dergelijke dingen te onthouden.

Al de rest zijn details, van de methode: begin met elk getal een beeld te geven, en iets als 1873159429720546 is te onthouden als een wandeltocht door de wijk, bijvoorbeeld, met 16 objecten op 16 plaatsen in een duidelijke volgorde, bijvoorbeeld in elk deurgat één. Geef elke combinatie van twee cijfers een beeld, en het wordt 18-73-15-94-29-72-05-46 en het zijn maar 8 zaken meer.

Of doe combinaties: zoek 100 van elkaar onderscheiden onderwerpen (Einstein, de hond van de buren, uw blauwe teddybeer, Armand Pien) en 100 acties (moonwalken, eten, valschermspringen, snorkelen), en hop – elk getal van 0 tot 9999 heeft één duidelijk en onvergetelijk beeld. Dan is 1873-1594-2972-0546 bijvoorbeeld Einstein aan het moonwalken aan de voordeur, de hond van de buren aan het eten in het toilet, uw blauwe teddybeer die met een valscherm van de trap springt, een minuscule Armand Pien aan het snorkelen in de pompbak.

Een vreemd boek, Moonwalking with Einstein. Het leest als een lang artikel over de Foer en zijn belevenissen tussen die eerste keer dat hij het kampioenschap meemaakt, en het jaar erna, als hij van plan was om ook mee te doen; met tussen de verschillende episodes stukken over het geheugen, de gebruikte methodes, portretten van mensen zonder of juist met een heel goed geheugen.

Aangenaam, daar niet van. Snel uit, relaxerend op een fuck wij zitten écht raar in mekaar-manier, wat licht anders bekeken ook wel eens “verontrustend op een fuck wij zitten écht raar in mekaar-manier” zou kunnen zijn.

The author writes very clearly and the book is ok in explaining some techniques about memorisation. But I thought that would be a lot more techniques to practice and the book get lost explaining the life of some well known people who was already subject of study in other books.
It's an ok book. I would recommend.

The title does not capture the actual content. I've held off for quite a while reading this book, assuming that it would only discuss techniques to remember better with the epitome being the “memory palace”. I was pleasantly surprised that the narrative is really more of a review of how we as humans have perceived our own memory over the course of time, intertwined with the author's own journey in becoming the US national memory champion. Reads mostly as a novel.

I've never considered myself to have a good memory. I'll remember places, directions and programming concepts, but can't remember a phone number of the name of someone I just met. This look into the competitive memory circuit around the world helped me put an image in my head of not just what's possible, but how people actually go about remembering 10,000 digits of pi. While I don't plan to exercise this muscle to the extent of people in this book, I do want to try using some of these concepts to put a few names to faces.

Joshua Foer writes a compelling account of his experiences in memory competition. The memory techniques that he describes are so simple that “anyone can do it,” but it takes a certain type of personality to commit that much effort and time to practicing those techniques. And indeed, the other competitors that he meets along the way are a little bit eccentric.

I enjoyed the variety of topics that Foer weaves into his story. It felt like reading a mashup of non-fiction genres: science, history, psychology, biography. Particularly interesting to me was the chapter on how the modern education system has shunned memorization. The common opinion is that rote memorization as a learning method is rigid and soul-sucking and that broader understanding is more important that knowing the facts themselves. Foer introduces an inner-city teacher who does teach his students to memorize facts, because in his view, understanding can't occur without knowing the facts in the first place. I always enjoy opinions that are counter to the norm, so this was a high point of the book for me.

After first unsuccessfully trying to read the book (thought that it was a physics/astronomy book), I decided to pick it up again since I'm in a course about learning how to learn on Udemy. Joshua makes learning fun and explores every corner of his memory palace on learning and memorization. It truly shows that normal people can be capable of extraordinary things if you're willing to reach beyond your OK plateau.

It's gonzo journalism with a serious geek bent. Not happy to simply report on memory competitors Joshua Foer trains for a year to become a mental athelete and win the American Memory Championship title. He still forgets where he left his keys and, shortly after the world championships, remembered he drove his car to dinner only after taking the subway home.

Still much can be forgiven for any book that contains the following sentence: “People with a great eye for chicken ass naturally gravitate to the Zen-Nippon chick Sexing School”