Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything - By Joshua Foer
Date read: 2016-01-19How strongly I recommend it: 8/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
For those fascinated with memory. Riveting page-turner about a journalist (with no particularly good memory) who went to cover a memory championship event. Intrigued and befriending some competitors, he starts practicing, and a year later wins the U.S. memory championship event himself. Inspiring dive into the subject of memorization.
Contents:
My Notes
Memory training was considered a form of character building, a way of developing the cardinal virtue of prudence and ethics. Only through memorizing could ideas truly be incorporated into one's psyche and their values absorbed. The techniques existed not just to memorize useless information but also to etch into the brain foundational texts and ideas.
Roman orators argued that the art of memory was a vital instrument for the invention of new ideas.
A trained memory was the key to cultivating "judgement, citizenship, and piety."
The ancient and medieval way of reading was very different from how we read today. Once didn't just memorize texts; one ruminated on them - chewed them up and regurgitated them like cud - and in the process, became intimate with them in a way that made them one's own.
The earliest memory treatises described two types of recollection: memory for things (memoria rerum) and memory for words (memoria verborum).
Through at least the Middle Ages, books were thought of not merely as replacements for memory, but also as memory AIDS.
Words ran together in an unending stream of capital letters known as scriptio continua, broken up by neither spaces nor punctuation.
Ancient texts couldn't be readily scanned. YOu couldn't pull a scroll off the shelf and quickly find a specific excerpt unless you had some baseline familiarity with the entire text. The scroll existed not to hold its contents externally, but rather to help its reader navigate its contents internally.
By 400 A.D., the parchment codex, with its leaves of pages bound at the spine like a modern hardcover, had all but completely replaced scrolls as the preferred way to read. No longer did a reader have to unfurl a long document to find a passage. A reader could just turn to the appropriate page.
The first concordance of the Bible was compiled in the 13th century, around the same time that chapter divisions were introduced. For the first time, a read could refer to the Bible without having previously memorized it. One could find a passage without knowing it by heart or reading the text all the way through.
Rhetorica ad Herennium, written sometime between 86 & 82 B.C. is the only truly complete discussion of the memory techniques invented by Simonides.
Memory training was considered a centerpiece of classical education in the language arts, on par with grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Students were taught not just to remember, but how to remember it.
The single most common theme in the lives of the saints is their often extraordinary memories.
Schools go about teaching all wrong. They pour vast amounts of information into students' heads but don't teach them how to retain it.
Indexes were a major advance because they allowed books to be accessed in the nonlinear way we access our internal memories.
As books became easier to consult, the imperative to hold their contents in memory became less relevant, and the very notion of what it meant to be erudite began to evolve from possessing information internally to knowing where to find information in the labyrinthine world of external memory.
We are moving toward a future in which we will have all-encompassing external memories that record huge swaths of our daily activity.
Eventually, our brains may be connected directly and seamlessly to our life logs, so that our external memories will function and feel as if they are entirely internal. They will also be connected to the greatest external memory repository of all, the Internet. A surrogate memory that recalls everything and can be accessed as naturally as the memories stored in our neurons: it would be the decisive weapon in the war against forgetting.
Invention was a product of inventorying. Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas?
In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on. One needed a way of finding just the right piece of information at just the right moment.
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.
The nonlinear associate nature of our brains makes it impossible for us to consciously search our memories in an orderly way. A memory only pops directly into consciousness if it is cued by some other thought or perception.
Because our memories don't follow any kind of linear logic, we can neither sequentially search them nor browse them.
We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.
When a new thought or perception enters our head it doesn't immediately get stashed away in long-term memory. Rather, it exists in a temporarly limbo known as working memory. With the "magical number seven" being the universal carrying capacity of our short-term working memory.
Like a computer, our ability to operate in the world, is limited by the amount of information we can juggle at one time.
We don't remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.
Our memories are always with us, shaping and being shaped by the information flowing through our senses, in a continuous feedback loop. Everything we see, hear, and smell is inflected by all the things we've seen, heard, and smelled in the past.
We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events. Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.
If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear. That's why it's important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lenghtens our perception of our lives.
Ribot's Law suggest that our memories are not static. As memories age their complextion changes.
The vital learning that we do during the first years of life is virtually entirely of implicit, nondeclaritive kind.
Our internal memories are associational, nonlinear. You don't need to know where a particular memory is stored in order to find it. It simply turns up (or doesn't) when you need it. Because of the dense network that interconnects our memories, we can skip around from memory to memory and idea to idea very rapidly.
Education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can't have higher-level learning - you can't analyze - without retrieving information. And you can't retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place.
You can't learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can't memorize without learning.
The phenomenon of unconscious remembering, known as priming, is evidence of an entire shadowy underworld of memories lurking beneath the surface of our conscious reckoning.
Declarative memories are things you know you remember, like the color of your car, or what happened yesterday afternoon.
Nondeclarative memories are things you know unconsciously, like how to ride a bike or how to draw a shape while lookingat it in a mirror.
Within declarative memories are semantic memories or memories for facts and concepts, and episodic memories, or memories of the experiences of our own lives.
Episodic memories are located in time and space: They have a where and when attached to them.
Semantic memories are located outside of time and space, as free-floating pieces of knowledge.
Natural memory is the hardware you're born with. Artificial memory is the software you run on your hardware.
Artificial memory has two basic components: images and places. Images represent the contents of what one wishes to remember. Places ("loci" in Latin) are where images are stored.
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, which is to say the networks of our memory.
What I really trained my brain to do was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.
Memory training is a form of mental workout. Over time it'll make the brain fitter, quicker, and more nimble.
The secret to success to remembering people's names in the real world is to associate the sound of a person's name with something you can clearly imagine (e.g. turn Bakers into bakers or Foers into fours.
Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item.
When it comes to chunking, what we already know determines what we're able to learn.
The principle underlying all memory techniques is that our brains don't remember all types of information equally well. As exceptional as we are at remembering visual imagery, we're terrible at remembering lists of words or numbers. The point of memory techniques is to take the kinds of memories our brains aren't good at holding on to and transform them into the kinds of memories our brains were built for.
Elaborative Encoding - change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you've seen before that you can't possibly forget it.
Simonides' technique - convert something unmemorable into a series of engrossing visual images and mentally arrange them within an imagined space.
The most useful of all mnemonic tricks employed by the bards was song. If you can turn a set of words into a jingle, they can become exceedingly difficult to knock out of your head.
Ad Herrenium suggests that the best method for remembering poetry ad verb up (memory for words) is to repeat a line two or three times before trying to see it as a series of images.
Metrodorus developed a system of shorthand images that would stand in for conjunctions, articles, and other syntactical connectors.
Gunther's method of creating an image for the un-imageable is to visualize a similarly sounding, or punning, word in its place.
This process of transforming words into images involves a kind of remembering by forgetting: In order to memorize a word by its sound, it's meaning has to be completely dismissed.
Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don't; concrete nouns are easier to remember than abstract nouns; dynamic images are more memorable than static images; alliteration aids memory.
Many actors will tell you that they break their lines into units they call "beats." Each of which involves some specific intention or goal on the character's part, which they train themselves to empathize with. Known as Method acting was pioneered in Russia by Konstantinos Stanislavski around the turn of the last century.
The "Major System," invented in the 17th century by Johann Winkelmann, is nothing more than a simple code to convert numbers into phonetic sounds. Those sounds can then be turned into words, which can in turn become images for a memory palace.
In a PAO (person-action-object) system, every two-digit number from 00 to 99 is represented by a single image of a person performing an action on an object.
To be maximally memorable, one's images have to appeal to one's own sense of what is colorful or interesting. Which means that a mental athlete's stock of PAO images is a pretty good guide to the gremlins that live in someone's subconscious.
One creates a Mind Map by drawing lines off main points to subsidiary points, which branch out further to tertiary points, and so on. Ideas are distilled into a few words as possible and whenever possible are illustrated with images. Because it's full of colorful images arranged in order across the page, it functions as a kind of memory palace scrawled on paper.
The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is future memory. If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have to your disposal, the better you'll be at coming up with new ideas.
Experts process the enormous amounts of information flowing through their senses in more sophisticated ways.
Experts use their memories to see the world differently.
A great memory isn't the by-product of expertise; it's the essence of expertise.
The 3 stages that anyone goes through acquiring a new skill: first phase is the "cognitive stage," you're intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. In the second "associative stage," you're concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. In the third "autonomous stage," you've gotten as good as you need to get at the task and you're basically running on autopilot. During this stage you lose conscious control over what you're doing.
The "OK plateau" is the point at which you decide you're OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving.
What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine called "deliberate practice." Forcing them to stay in the "cognitive phase."
Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard.
When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.
To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes. The best way to get out of the autonomous stage and off the OK plateau is to actually practice failing.
The secret to improving at a skill is to retain some degree of conscious control over it while practicing - to force oneself to stay out of autopilot.
Top memorizers differentiate themselves from the second tier in how they approach memorization like a science. They develop hypotheses about their limitations; they conduct experiments and track data.
You can't create an image of a word, a number, or a person's name without dwelling on it. And you can't dwell on something without making it more memorable.
My experience had validated the old saw that practice makes perfect. But only if it's the right kind of concentrated, self-conscious, deliberate practice. I'd learned firsthand that with focus, motivation, and time, the mind can be trained to do extraordinary things.
The idea is to create a space in the mind's eye, a place that you know well and can easily visualize, and then populate the imagined place with images representing whatever you want to remember. Known as the "method of loci" by the Romans, such a building would later be called a "memory palace".
Humans are very, very good at learning spaces.
The principle of the memory palace is to use one's exquisite spatial memory to structure and store information whose order comes less naturally.
The more associative hooks a new piece of information has, the more securely it gets embedded into the network of things you already know, and the more likely it is to remain in memory.
If you wish to remember quickly, dispose the images of the most beautiful virgins into memory places; the memory is marvelously excited by images of women.
Animate images tend to be more memorable than inanimate images.
Create images of "exceptional beauty or singular ugliness," to put them into motion, and to ornament them in ways that render them more distinct.
When we try to recall something from a category that includes as many instances as "lunch" or "wine," many memories compete for our attention. The memory of last Wednesday's lunch isn't necessarily gone; it's that you lack the right hook to pull it out of a sea of lunchtime memories. But a wine that talks: That's unique. It's a memory without rivals.
Normally memories are stored more or less at random in semantic networks, or webs of association. But you have now stored a large number of memories Ina very controlled context. Because of the way spatial cognition works, all you have to do is retrace your steps through your memory palace. All you'll have to do is translate those images back into the things you were trying to learn in the first place.
"Splinter skill" savants are those that have memorized a single esoteric body of trivia.
"Talented savants" have developed a more general area of expertise, like drawing or music.
Prodigious savants have abilities that would be spectacular by any standard.
The exaggerated abilities of savants are almost always in right-brain sorts of activities, like visual & spatial skills, and savants almost always have trouble with tasks that are supposed to be primarily the left-brain's domain, such as language.
Some researchers have theorized that shutting off certain left-brain activities somehow liberates right-brain skills that had been latent all along.
The fact that people can become savants so spontaneously suggests that those exceptional abilities must lie dormant in all of us.