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A review by lina_bouslimani
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer
4.0
The big stellar idea in this book is something like: your memory has mythical capacities which would enable you to memorize virtually anything, regardless of its size or nature.
Subversive as it is, the idea with the ambiguous claim have left me—alone with the author himself— with a familiar incredulity. Suggesting further that memory is in in a fact an inseparable partition of intelligence, and defying the conventional wisdom even still by linking creativity to having a prior good memory inventory.
“In our gross misunderstanding of the function of memory, we though that memory was operated primarily by rote. In other words, you rammed it in until your head was stuffed with facts. What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus,” says Buzan. “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, in a sense, 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 at your disposal, the better you’ll be at coming up with new ideas.”
“Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.”
While investigating this engrossed claim, Foer (like the other interviewees in the book) did a historical research on Roman and Greek mnemonics on whose techniques was based this memory frenzy, he met with memory champions and gurus like Tony Buzan, under which influences he decided to embark on a journey of self-experiment. Foer then trained for a year, then won the US memory championship.
Like Gladwell in Outliers and Coyle in the talent code, Foer met the infamous neuroscientist Ericson: the expert on experts, in order to trace his progress and make a “contribution to science” at his own words. And thus some of the ideas in this “autobiography” were blissfully familiar to me, in a matter of not repetition nor already-used concepts, but in the different interpretation of those.
The epilogue was a confirmation of sort, to the popular studies extensively repeated in neuroscience, so it struck me as something I read before about talent, success, brain super powers…
It was made clear by the author that this book wasn't a self-help book, but rather more like an autobiography. I am not fully convinced of those grandiose claims, but being a sucker for brain fanatics I very much enjoyed them.
Indeed those claims can come off as exaggeration and even maybe as deceiving, but what I like the most about these books, is not the over-used ideas concluded from research studies, nor the Eureka moments, but the journey itself, the journey or the adventure of starting off to get somewhere promised, and realizing you’ve got way more than you were hoping to get, and now you’re a different person because you know more.
Subversive as it is, the idea with the ambiguous claim have left me—alone with the author himself— with a familiar incredulity. Suggesting further that memory is in in a fact an inseparable partition of intelligence, and defying the conventional wisdom even still by linking creativity to having a prior good memory inventory.
“In our gross misunderstanding of the function of memory, we though that memory was operated primarily by rote. In other words, you rammed it in until your head was stuffed with facts. What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus,” says Buzan. “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, in a sense, 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 at your disposal, the better you’ll be at coming up with new ideas.”
“Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.”
While investigating this engrossed claim, Foer (like the other interviewees in the book) did a historical research on Roman and Greek mnemonics on whose techniques was based this memory frenzy, he met with memory champions and gurus like Tony Buzan, under which influences he decided to embark on a journey of self-experiment. Foer then trained for a year, then won the US memory championship.
Like Gladwell in Outliers and Coyle in the talent code, Foer met the infamous neuroscientist Ericson: the expert on experts, in order to trace his progress and make a “contribution to science” at his own words. And thus some of the ideas in this “autobiography” were blissfully familiar to me, in a matter of not repetition nor already-used concepts, but in the different interpretation of those.
The epilogue was a confirmation of sort, to the popular studies extensively repeated in neuroscience, so it struck me as something I read before about talent, success, brain super powers…
It was made clear by the author that this book wasn't a self-help book, but rather more like an autobiography. I am not fully convinced of those grandiose claims, but being a sucker for brain fanatics I very much enjoyed them.
Indeed those claims can come off as exaggeration and even maybe as deceiving, but what I like the most about these books, is not the over-used ideas concluded from research studies, nor the Eureka moments, but the journey itself, the journey or the adventure of starting off to get somewhere promised, and realizing you’ve got way more than you were hoping to get, and now you’re a different person because you know more.