Book Review: Moonwalking with Einstein

By Joshua Foer

Summarised in one quote:

“How many worthwhile ideas have gone unthought and connections unmade because of my memory shortcomings?” (p.7)

Moonwalking with Einstein promises to expose the techniques behind the extraordinary feats of today’s memory champions who memorise a full deck of cards like it was a walk in the park (in many ways, it is). Joshua Foer wholly delivers on this promise as he traces his own journey from oblivious audience member to USA Memory Championship contender.

Despite Walking with Einstein helping me memorise the numbers on my debit card, it also highlighted that even the best minds misplace their keys. I concluded the true key to memory comes with presence and mindfullness.

Recommended if you want to:

• Discover the extraordinary capabilities of your mind
• Want to learn techniques that will better help you remember numbers, names and objects
• Learn more about the history of memory as a highly regarded discipline
• Understand how the mind stores memories and how this can disrupted
• Feel the need to boast about being the proud owner of multiple mind palaces

Stories to Remember

Most non-fiction books use storytelling to hit home their points. Here is a selection of my favourite anecdotes from this book, and where to find them.

Rebuilding the banquet (p.1)

Story: As fifth-century Greek poet Simonides of Ceos steps out of the banquet hall filled with joyful chatter and boisterous laughter, the structure collapses in a thundering plume of marble shards and dust behind him. Men and woman frantically search through the landscape of rubble for the entombed bodies who emerge dead, and mangled beyond recognition.

Then something remarkable happens. Simonides seals his senses from the chaos around him and reverses time in his mind. The piles of marble return to pillars as he steps backwards into the fully-assembled banquet hall filled with guests oblivious to their fate. He saw Scopas, a Thessalian nobleman, laughing at the head of the table, a fellow poet sitting across from him, another nobleman smirking.

Simonides opens his eyes. He carefully leads each hysterical relative to the spots in the rubble where their loved ones had been sitting.

Meaning: As this moment, the art of memory is born.

The Baker Paradox (p.44)

Story: A researcher shows two people the same photograph of a face and tells one of them that the guy is a baker and the other that his last name is Baker. A couple of days later, the researcher shows the same photographs and asks each participant for the accompanying word. The person who was told the man’s profession is much more likely to remember it that the person who was given his surname.

Meaning: Despite being the exact same word, when we associate ‘baker’ with a profession, it gets embedded in a whole network of ideas about what it means to be a baker: he cooks bread, wears a white hat, he smells of food when he comes home from work. The name Baker, on the other hand, is tethered only to a memory of a person’s face, which is pretty tenuous at best.

The Ancient’s Perception of Memory (p.95)

Story: Pliny the Elder (above), author of the first-century biography, reported that “King Cyrus could given the names of all the soldiers in his army,” and “Lucius Scipio knew the names of the whole Roman people”.

Meaning: The art of memory training was considered a centrepiece of classical education in the language arts, on par with grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

Overcoming the OK Plateau (p.169)

Story: As the author first learns the tricks to speed memorising decks of cards, Joshua Foer found himself consistently getting better. However, he soon hits a point where he observes no more improvement. No matter how many times he practised, he could not memorise a decks of cards any faster.

What his mentor suggested was to jog his mind out of its comfort zone by trying to memorise cards 20% faster than his fastest pace. In other words, he should practice failing. Low and behold Foer starts seeing the steady improvement once again.

Meaning: There is always a point where you decide you are OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot and stop improving. Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard, and only by making mistakes can you identify your weaknesses.

As always, these brief anecdotes cover a small fraction of the themes explored in the full book. If you like what you’re reading, consider buying the book!

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