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Moonwalking with Einstein

The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

By Joshua Foer

(30)

| Hardcover | 9781594202292

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Book Description

On average, people squander forty days annually compensating for things they've forgotten. Joshua Foer used to be one of those people. But after a year of memory training, he found himself in the finals of the U.S. Memory Championship. Even more important, Foer found a vital truth we too often forgeContinue

On average, people squander forty days annually compensating for things they've forgotten. Joshua Foer used to be one of those people. But after a year of memory training, he found himself in the finals of the U.S. Memory Championship. Even more important, Foer found a vital truth we too often forget: In every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.

Moonwalking with Einstein draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of memory, and venerable tricks of the mentalist's trade to transform our understanding of human remembering. Under the tutelage of top "mental athletes," he learns ancient techniques once employed by Cicero to memorize his speeches and by Medieval scholars to memorize entire books. Using methods that have been largely forgotten, Foer discovers that we can all dramatically improve our memories.

Immersing himself obsessively in a quirky subculture of competitive memorizers, Foer learns to apply techniques that call on imagination as much as determination-showing that memorization can be anything but rote. From the PAO system, which converts numbers into lurid images, to the memory palace, in which memories are stored in the rooms of imaginary structures, Foer's experience shows that the World Memory Championships are less a test of memory than of perseverance and creativity.

Foer takes his inquiry well beyond the arena of mental athletes-across the country and deep into his own mind. In San Diego, he meets an affable old man with one of the most severe case of amnesia on record, where he learns that memory is at once more elusive and more reliable than we might think. In Salt Lake City, he swaps secrets with a savant who claims to have memorized more than nine thousand books. At a high school in the South Bronx, he finds a history teacher using twenty- five-hundred-year-old memory techniques to give his students an edge in the state Regents exam.

Moonwalking with Einstein brings Joshua Foer to the apex of the U.S. Memory Championship and readers to a profound appreciation of a gift we all possess but that too often slips our minds.

Critics

  • Speak, Memory

    One day, the American journalist Joshua Foer is surfing the net, trying to find the answer to a specific question: who is the most intelligent person in the world? He can’t find a definitive answer. But he sees that a man called Ben Pridmore is the w ... (read full critics)

    spectator published on Fri, 3 Jun 2011

  • Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, By Joshua Foer

    Abook that promises to discuss how we remember everything is a curious thing. After all, we live in a culture of forgetfulness, surely one of the fringe benefits of modernity. Since Gutenberg and the invention of print, we have steadily found the anc ... (read full critics)

    independent published on Fri, 6 May 2011

1 Review

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  • *** This comment contains spoilers! ***

    The book is not exactly what I had expected it to be after reading the front and back flaps. Nevertheless, it's an amazing feat for a journalist to win the US Memory Championship considering that he started only as a journalist to investigate what memory (and memory championship) is !

    In contrary ... (continue)

    The book is not exactly what I had expected it to be after reading the front and back flaps. Nevertheless, it's an amazing feat for a journalist to win the US Memory Championship considering that he started only as a journalist to investigate what memory (and memory championship) is !

    In contrary to what I expected/hoped, the book doesn't really teach you every detail to win a memory championship. It has taught me that our memory can be trained (eg. by creating unusual images for numbers or objects that we want to remember) to remember many more things than we used to. But one needs to work hard in order equip oneself to remember better. The author discusses mostly about the science and psychology of the memory and brain and the characters and experiences of those memory geeks. Almost one chapter is devoted to convince us that Daniel Tammet is not a savant but trained mnemonist, which is the least enjoyable chapter.

    At the end, it's a journalistic journey of his interaction with the scientists and the mnemonists in the year leading up to the US Memory Championship (I've googled it to be Mar. 11, 2006). Apart from the knowledge that image helps us remember, the author doesn't offer us any easy trick to lead to better memory. In fact, at the end, the author has found that his memory in daily life has not been enhanced though he's learnt the techniques to remember structured information. The author has also made us realize that we have outsourced rememberance to various modern tools from paper to cell-phones such that we tend to remember less and less. However, human beings are really what they can remember ! Eroding memory is probably a threat to who we are.

    The one feature that has annoyed me is the endnotes. They should just put a number or symbol next to the words/sentences in the main book where they're relevant and use that number or symbol in the lists of endnotes. But in this book, there is no number nor symbol in the trunk of the book and each of the endnote has a page number associated with a few words or a sentence, but one may need to check the entire page before one can find where the endnote is related to !! Very inefficient. Maybe, the author is testing our memory ?!

    [ I haven't come across typos except probably on p. 119: "like watch cartoon" should be "like watching cartoons" and "bête noir" should be "bête noire"; and on p. 204, I guess "ouevre" should be "oeuvre". ]

    Is this helpful?

    Yip Kin said on Jul 4, 2011 | Add your feedback

Book Details

  • Rating:
    (30)
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  • English Books
  • Hardcover 320 Pages
  • Edition: 1
  • ISBN-10: 159420229X
  • ISBN-13: 9781594202292
  • Publisher: Penguin Press
  • Pub date: Mar 03, 2011
  • Also available as: Others and eBook
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