A review by daniell
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer
4.0
Have you ever wondered where you put that one thing, how you just got lost when you feel like you should know where you are, or what that person's name was again?
Fret no more, the mnemonist is here. His name is Jonathan Foer, he is a journalist, his brother is Jonathan Safran (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Everything is Illuminated), and this is his account of going from, essentially, someone who felt like his memory was average, so someone who still felt like his memory was average. In the process he won the US Memory Championship, but it didn't change his conclusion that his memory was average.
To reach this conclusion, he goes through a lot. This book is a good example of a first person, journalist's account that includes history, interviews, scenes, humor, criticism, and a narrative arc. Foer starts as a journalism interested in the subject of memory, and early on in this process meets with a few people who suggest that anyone can do what they are doing, and that he give it a try himself. Eventually he capitulates, and becomes the subject of his own study.
He starts by detailing some of the events that mental athletes (MAs) complete. Memorize two decks of cards in five minutes. Memorize as many random digits as possible in an hour. Memorize first and last names matched to 100 faces, then seeing only the faces write as many as possible. Memorize a deck of cards in order, as fast as possible. Memorize forty lines of thirty binary digits as fast as possible. To start the process, one needs more than a good memory and more than concentration, though they both help. To do this, one needs a strategy. One needs a palace.
An MA will have dozens of memory palaces, if not hundreds. A memory palace is a place, real or imagined, where memories are stored that is used to memorize any of the above things. The trick is that one must be familiar with whatever place is chosen.
Next, the MA encodes whatever information they need to memorize to create a distinct scene that they can place in their palace, in sequence with other scenes, so that they can recall it later.
For example, the method Foer uses for memorizing playing cards is called PAO, or, person, action, object. For every card there is a distinct person, action, and object. For example, if the King of Hearts is Michael Jackson, moonwalking, white glove, if the Jack of Spades is Mark Cuban, yelling, and a referee, and if the Ace of Spades is Penny Hardaway finding a penny, then the sequence JS, AS, KH would be the image of Mark Cuban finding a white glove. In Foer's competition he decided that he would group cards into sets of three. Before he did that the US standard was to have two elements for each card, and to have element pairs constitute images.
This is an important part of the book, because his paradigm-busting approach to the events relating to cards--incidentally, he got it from European MAs--did a good bit to helping him win the US tournament. At the time he beat the domestic best for this event (since broken) and advanced to the world memory championships where he placed 13/39, behind pretty much every German and Brit, but ahead of the Frenchman and all the Chinese.
The same methods he used for cards can be used for the other events, with, however, a different set of scaffolding. Some of the more advanced European MAs have a distinct PAO for every possible two-card combo, a 100% gain in efficiency. The players that do well at memorizing random numbers use what's called the major system, distinct image for all numbers 00-99. Those that do well at the binary event split the thirty-number lines into thirds, leaving ten digits sets, then apply PAO using their stock of all possible ten-digit binary combinations (2^10=1024!). Every line gets a distinct image, leaving the player with forty distinct images that symbolize thirty characters apiece.
The title of the book comes from one of these PAOs, one that he met in the US championship. This book is consistently interesting and reads like other pop journalism. Some of the other nuggets include interviews with other MAs, self-appointed memory guru Tony Buzan, and savants living and dead. It's worth a look, if only as an encouragement that all it takes is some mental scaffolding to remember quite a bit.
Towards the end of the book the contest is finished and Foer feels exhausted. He goes out with his friends to celebrate, takes the subway home, and realizes that he left his car at the restaurant. Did his cameo as an MA improve his memory? Well yes, but only insofar as he makes conscious effort to remember things. The tricks he used are good for that when coupled with discipline, but that's all; along the way he acquired no special powers, and like most amazing things his achievement was the simple result of applied strategy and perseverance.
I am thinking of a white piece of paper with the amount $5.07 printed on it and the words "verified purchase" at the top. 507-VFP. I now remember my license plate!
Fret no more, the mnemonist is here. His name is Jonathan Foer, he is a journalist, his brother is Jonathan Safran (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Everything is Illuminated), and this is his account of going from, essentially, someone who felt like his memory was average, so someone who still felt like his memory was average. In the process he won the US Memory Championship, but it didn't change his conclusion that his memory was average.
To reach this conclusion, he goes through a lot. This book is a good example of a first person, journalist's account that includes history, interviews, scenes, humor, criticism, and a narrative arc. Foer starts as a journalism interested in the subject of memory, and early on in this process meets with a few people who suggest that anyone can do what they are doing, and that he give it a try himself. Eventually he capitulates, and becomes the subject of his own study.
He starts by detailing some of the events that mental athletes (MAs) complete. Memorize two decks of cards in five minutes. Memorize as many random digits as possible in an hour. Memorize first and last names matched to 100 faces, then seeing only the faces write as many as possible. Memorize a deck of cards in order, as fast as possible. Memorize forty lines of thirty binary digits as fast as possible. To start the process, one needs more than a good memory and more than concentration, though they both help. To do this, one needs a strategy. One needs a palace.
An MA will have dozens of memory palaces, if not hundreds. A memory palace is a place, real or imagined, where memories are stored that is used to memorize any of the above things. The trick is that one must be familiar with whatever place is chosen.
Next, the MA encodes whatever information they need to memorize to create a distinct scene that they can place in their palace, in sequence with other scenes, so that they can recall it later.
For example, the method Foer uses for memorizing playing cards is called PAO, or, person, action, object. For every card there is a distinct person, action, and object. For example, if the King of Hearts is Michael Jackson, moonwalking, white glove, if the Jack of Spades is Mark Cuban, yelling, and a referee, and if the Ace of Spades is Penny Hardaway finding a penny, then the sequence JS, AS, KH would be the image of Mark Cuban finding a white glove. In Foer's competition he decided that he would group cards into sets of three. Before he did that the US standard was to have two elements for each card, and to have element pairs constitute images.
This is an important part of the book, because his paradigm-busting approach to the events relating to cards--incidentally, he got it from European MAs--did a good bit to helping him win the US tournament. At the time he beat the domestic best for this event (since broken) and advanced to the world memory championships where he placed 13/39, behind pretty much every German and Brit, but ahead of the Frenchman and all the Chinese.
The same methods he used for cards can be used for the other events, with, however, a different set of scaffolding. Some of the more advanced European MAs have a distinct PAO for every possible two-card combo, a 100% gain in efficiency. The players that do well at memorizing random numbers use what's called the major system, distinct image for all numbers 00-99. Those that do well at the binary event split the thirty-number lines into thirds, leaving ten digits sets, then apply PAO using their stock of all possible ten-digit binary combinations (2^10=1024!). Every line gets a distinct image, leaving the player with forty distinct images that symbolize thirty characters apiece.
The title of the book comes from one of these PAOs, one that he met in the US championship. This book is consistently interesting and reads like other pop journalism. Some of the other nuggets include interviews with other MAs, self-appointed memory guru Tony Buzan, and savants living and dead. It's worth a look, if only as an encouragement that all it takes is some mental scaffolding to remember quite a bit.
Towards the end of the book the contest is finished and Foer feels exhausted. He goes out with his friends to celebrate, takes the subway home, and realizes that he left his car at the restaurant. Did his cameo as an MA improve his memory? Well yes, but only insofar as he makes conscious effort to remember things. The tricks he used are good for that when coupled with discipline, but that's all; along the way he acquired no special powers, and like most amazing things his achievement was the simple result of applied strategy and perseverance.
I am thinking of a white piece of paper with the amount $5.07 printed on it and the words "verified purchase" at the top. 507-VFP. I now remember my license plate!