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Moonwalking with Einstein
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Moonwalking with Einstein (2011) (edit title/settings)

The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

Foer's unlikely journey from chronically forgetful science journalist to U.S. Memory Champion frames a revelatory exploration of the vast, hidden impact of memory on every aspect of our lives. On average, people squander forty days annually compensating for things they've forgotten. Joshua... read more

Summary edit see section history

In recounting his year in training for the US Memory Championship, journalist Joshua Foer delivers a rich history of memory, beginning with early recorded accounts of "super memory" in ancient Greece. He also shares a few fun mnemonic devices. Need to remember to buy cottage cheese? Build a... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

In recounting his year in training for the US Memory Championship, journalist Joshua Foer delivers a rich history of memory, beginning with early recorded accounts of "super memory" in ancient Greece. He also shares a few fun mnemonic devices. Need to remember to buy cottage cheese? Build a "memory palace" in which you picture Claudia Schiffer swimming in a vat of the stuff. Technology may be rendering such memory training unnecessary, but Foer sees more than a party trick in his new skills. "It's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human."

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “A strong memory was seen as the greatest virtue since it represented the internalization of a universe of external knowledge. (pg 81)”
  • “The natural memory is that memory which is embedded in our minds, born simultaneously with thought. The artificial memory is that memory which is strengthened by a kind of training and system of discipline. (pg 81)”
    from ancient text Ad Herennium
  • “...the World Memory Championship is less a test of memory than of creativity. (pg 85)”
    Tony Buzan
  • “One book printed in the Heart's own wax / Is worth a thousand in the stacks. (pg 92)”
    early 18th century Dutch poet Jan Luyken
  • “The brain is a costly organ. Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body's mass, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and it's where a quarter of all our glucose gets burned. (pg 103)”
  • “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. ... Song is the ultimate structuring device for language. (pg 107)”
  • “It's no coincidence that the art of memory was supposedly invented by Simonides at exactly the moment when the use of writing was on the rise in ancient Greece, around the fifth century B.C. Memory was no longer something that could be taken for granted, as it had been during Greece's preliterate epoch. ... No longer burdened by the requirements of oral transmission, poetry was free to become art. (pg 108)”
  • “You can't read a page a minute, the rate at which you're probably reading this book, and expect to remember what you've read for any considerable length of time. if something is going to be made memorable, it has to be dwelled upon, repeated. (pg 121)”
  • “In his essay "The First Steps Toward a History of Reading", Robert Darnton describes a switch from "intensive" to "extensive" reading that occurred as books began to proliferate. until relatively recently, people read "intensively," says Darnton. "They had only a few books--the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two--and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness.”
    Robert Darnton, author of "The First Steps Toward a History of Reading"
  • “We read and read and read, and we forget and forget and forget. So why do we bother?”
  • “I leaf through books, I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else's. It is only the material from which my judgment is profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget. (pg 122)”
    Michel de Montaigne (in 16th century)
  • “Don't every filter, and never throw anything away. (pg 130)”
    Gordon Bell (author of "Total Recall: how the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything"
  • “Eventually, our brains may be connected directly and seamlessly to our lifelogs, so that our external memories will function and feel as if they are entirely internal. (pg 131)”
  • “... top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development. They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves 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. ... Regular practice simply isn't enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes. .. 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. (pg 139)”
    Anders Ericsson (expert performance psychologist)
  • “There's no reason to think that the most talented athletes alive today possess that much more innate talent than the most talented athletes of the past. ... What's changed is the amount and quality of training that athletes must endure to achieve world-class status. (pg 142)”
  • “There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. (pg 151)”
    Bruce Lee (martial artist)
  • “The dichotomy between "learning" and "memorizing" is false. ... You can't learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can't memorize without learning. (pg 158)”
    Matthews
  • “Memory needs to be taught as a skill in exactly the same way that flexibility and strength and stamina are taught to build up a person's physical health and well being. ... Students need to learn how to learn. First you teach them how to learn, then you teach them what to learn.”
    Tony Buzan
  • “Mind Mapping ... functions as a kind of memory palace scrawled on paper.”
    Tony Buzan
  • “... memory and creativity are two sides of the same coin ... (pg 165)”
  • “... it takes knowledge to gain knowledge ... (pg 169)”
  • “Memory is how we transmit virtues and values, and partake of a shared culture. ... Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new informaton. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. (pg 169)”
  • “Mental athletes always halt their training a week before contests in order to do a spring cleaning of their memory palaces. (pg 193)”
  • “All you have to do is to savor the images, and really enjoy them. So long as you're surprising yourself with their lively goodness, you'll do just fine. don't at any stage worry. Take it easy, ignore the opp9osition, have fun. I'm proud of you already. And remember, girls dig scars and glory lasts forever.”
    Ed's advice
  • “... practice makes perfect. But only if it's the right kind of concentrated, self-conscious, deliberate practice. ... with focus, motivation, and above all, time, the mind can be trained to do extraordinary things. ... What else was I capable of doing, if only I used the right approach?”
  • “... remembering more is only the most obvious benefit of the many months I spent training my memory. What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice. (pg 217)”
  • “How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. (pg 218)”
  • “No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: all these essentially human acts depend on memory. now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. (pg 218)”
  • “Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. 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 lengthens our perception of our lives.
    Highlighted by 2119 Kindle customers
  • Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.
    Highlighted by 1618 Kindle customers
  • “The general idea with most memory techniques is to 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,”
    Highlighted by 1506 Kindle customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 1382 Kindle customers
  • Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item.
    Highlighted by 1376 Kindle customers
  • Cicero agreed that the best way to memorize a speech is point by point, not word by word, by employing memoria rerum. In his De Oratore, he suggests that an orator delivering a speech should make one image for each major topic he wants to cover, and place each of those images at a locus.
    Highlighted by 1146 Kindle customers
  • “Now, it’s very important to try to remember this image multisensorily.” 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.
    Highlighted by 1108 Kindle customers
  • According to Ericsson, what we call expertise is really just “vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain.” In other words, a great memory isn’t just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.
    Highlighted by 1080 Kindle customers
  • The chess experiments reveal a telling fact about memory, and about expertise in general: We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.
    Highlighted by 1069 Kindle customers
  • “There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.”
    Highlighted by 1028 Kindle customers
Show all 39 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

There were no other survivors.

Table of Contents edit see section history

The smartest man is hard to find
The man who remembered too much
The most forgetful man in the world
The expert expert
The memory palace
How to memorize a poem
The end of remembering
The OK plateau
The talented tenth
The little rain man in all of us
The US memory championships.

Glossary edit see section history

  • synesthesia: perceptual disorder in which the senses are intertwined. By one estimate, there are more than a hundred different varieties of the disorder. For example, sounds may conjure up visual imagery. Or numbers may take on a distinctive shape, color, texture, and emotional "tone."

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 4 of 10 in Amazon.com Best Books of March (2011). (authoritative list)
This book is in Amazon.com Best Books of 2011. (authoritative list)
This is book 4 of 10 in Bill Gates Top Ten Books of 2012 That Made Him Think. (authoritative list)
This book is in 2011 Published Books. (community list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Joshua Foer (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Penguin Press
Country: USA
Publication Date: 2011
ISBN: 9781594202292
Page Count: 300

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: BF385 .F64 2011
  • Dewey: 153.14

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • The Memory Book
  • Fooling Houdini

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history

   
  • The Mind of a Mnemonist

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