Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everyting

ONE - THE SMARTEST MAN IS HARD TO FIND

  • Ed [the memory expert the author consulted at the beginning of his journey into memory olympics] explained to me that the competitors saw themselves as "participants in an amateur research program" whose aim was to rescue a long- lost tradition of memory training that had disappeared centuries ago. Once upon a time, Ed insisted, remembering was everything. A trained memory was not just a handy tool, but a fundamental facet of any worldly mind. What's more, memory training was considered a form of character building, a way of developing the cardinal virtue of prudence and, by extension, ethics. Only through memorizing, the thinking went, could ideas truly be incorporated into one's psyche and their values absorbed.
  • But then, in the fifteenth century, Gutenberg came along and turned books into mass- produced commodities, and eventually it was no longer all that important to remember
  • Buzan believes schools go about teaching all wrong. They pour vast amounts of information into students' heads, but don't teach them how to retain
  • "What we have been doing over the last century is defining memory incorrectly, understanding it incompletely, applying it inappropriately, and condemning it because it doesn't work and isn't enjoyable," Buzan argues. If rote memorization is a way of scratching impressions onto our brains through the brute force of repetition-- the old "drill and kill" method-- then the art of memory is a more elegant way of remembering through technique.
  • Roman orators argued that the art of memory-- the proper retention and ordering of knowledge-- was a vital instrument for the invention of new ideas.
  • This book is about the year I spent trying to train my memory, and also trying to understand it -- its inner workings, its natural deficiencies, its hidden potential.
  • Our memories are indeed improvable, within limits,
  • It's also about the scientific study of expertise, and how researchers who study memory champions have discovered general principles of skill acquisition -- secrets to improving at just about anything -- from how mental athletes train their brains.
  • The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued. Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory.

    TWO - THE MAN WHO REMEMBERED TOO MUCH

  • The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory,
  • [There is ] a memory test known as the two- alternative picture recognition exam.
  • Synesthesia,
  • Because every word summoned up an accompanying synesthetic image -- sometimes also a taste or smell-- S lived in a kind of waking dream, once removed from reality.
  • S was simply unable to think figuratively. An expression like "weigh one's words" evoked images of scales, not prudence.
  • A memory, at the most fundamental physiological level, is a pattern of connections between those neurons.
  • The nonlinear associative nature of our brains makes it impossible for us to consciously search our memories in anorderly way.
  • Each piece of information he memorized was assigned its own address inside his brain.
  • When he wanted to commit something to memory, S would simply take a mental stroll down Gorky Street in Moscow, or his home in Torzhok, or some other place he'd once visited, and install each of his images at a different point when the mental athletes were learning new information, they were engaging several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial navigation,

    THREE - THE EXPERT EXPERT

  • Anders Ericsson, "Exceptional Memorizers: Made, Not Born."
  • Like a computer, our ability to operate in the world, is limited by the amount of information we can juggle at one time. Unless we repeat things over and over, they tend to slip from our grasp.
  • "phonological loop," which is just a fancy name for the little voice that we can hear inside our head when we talk to ourselves.
  • Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item.
  • Notice that the process of chunking takes seemingly meaningless information and reinterprets it in light of information that is already stored away somewhere in our long- term memory.
  • broadly-- what we already know determines what we're able to learn.
  • all experts do: They use their memories to see the world differently. Over many years, they build up a bank of experience that shapes how they perceive new information.
  • In most cases, the skill is not the result of conscious reasoning, but pattern recognition. It is a feat of perception and memory, not analysis.
  • For the most part, the chess experts didn't look more moves ahead, at least not at first. They didn't even consider more possible moves.
  • They tended to see the right moves, and they tended to see them almost right away.
  • They talked about configurations of pieces like "pawn structures" and immediately noticed things that were out of sorts, like exposed rooks. They weren't seeing the board as thirty- two pieces. They were seeing it as chunks of pieces, and systems of tension.
  • Studies of their eye movements have found that they look at the edges of squares more than inexperienced players, suggesting that they're absorbing information from multiple squares at once.
  • They focus on fewer different spots on the board, and those spots are more likely to be relevant to figuring out the right move.
  • could memorize entire boards after just a brief glance.
  • As impressive as the chess masters' memories were for chess games, their memories for everything else were notably unimpressive.
  • We don't remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.
  • 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.
  • interpreting the present in light of what we've learned in the past, and letting our previous experiences shape not only how we perceive our world, but also the moves we end up making in it.
  • who we are and what we do is fundamentally a function of what we remember.

    FOUR - THE MOST FORGETFUL MAN IN THE WORLD

  • Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.
  • (sometimes referred to as explicit and implicit). Declarative memories are things you know you remember, like the color of your car, or what happened yesterday afternoon.
  • Nondeclarative memories are the things you know unconsciously, like how to ride a bike or how to draw a shape while looking at it in a mirror (or what a word flashed rapidly across a computer screen means).
  • most of who we are and how we think -- the core material of our personalities -- is bound up in implicit memories that are off- limits to the conscious brain.
  • It's thought that sleep plays a critical role in this process of consolidating our memories and drawing meaning out of them.
  • That EP has learned to like his neighbors without ever learning who they are points to how many of our basic day- to- day actions are guided by implicit values and judgments, independent of declarative memory.

    FIVE - THE MEMORY PALACE

  • The point of memory techniques is to do what the synasthete S did instinctually: to take the kinds of memories our brains aren't good at holding on to and transform them into the kinds
  • of memories our brains were built for. "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,"
  • To use Simonides' technique, all one has to do is convert something unmemorable, like a string of numbers or a deck of cards or a shopping list or Paradise Lost, into a series of engrossing visual images and mentally arrange them within an imagined space, and suddenly those forgettable items become unforgettable.
  • the Ad Herennium. "This book is our bible," Ed told me.
  • Students were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it.
  • Artificial memory is the software you run on your hardware.
  • In Australia and the American Southwest, Aborigines and Apache Indians independently invented forms of the loci method.
  • "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.
  • The more vivid the image, the more likely it is to cleave to its locus.
  • "Animate images tend to be more memorable than inanimate images."
  • it's difficult to remember last week's lunch because
  • your brain has filed it away with all the other lunches you've ever eaten as just another lunch.
  • And since it's often good to have a bit of supernatural crap going on, too, perhaps you can imagine that there is an elegant ghost inside the socks that is stretching and pulling them. Really try to see it. Imagine the feeling of those soft cotton socks coolly brushing against your forehead."
  • The more abstract the word, the less memorable it is.
  • make e- mail concrete somehow.

    SIX - HOW TO MEMORIZE A POEM

  • The goal, as Ed explained it, was to know these buildings so thoroughly-- to have such a rich and textured set of associations with every corner of every room-- that when it came time to learn some new body of information, I could speed through my palaces, scattering images as quickly as I could sketch them in my imagination.
  • As the early- eighteenth- century Dutch poet Jan Luyken put it, "One book, printed in the Heart's own wax / Is worth a thousand in the stacks."
  • "I believe that they who wish to do easy things without trouble and toil must previously have been trained in more difficult things," he writes.
  • 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.
  • It's said that clichés are the worst sin a writer cancommit, but to an oral bard, they were essential.
  • Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language.
  • The structure writes the poem. Indeed, Metrodorus developed a system of shorthand images that would stand in for conjunctions, articles, and other syntactical connectors. It allowed him to memorize anything he read or heard verbatim. Indeed, Metrodorus's library of symbols seems to have been widely used in ancient Greece.
  • The art of memory was, from its origins, always a bit risqué.
  • William Perkins of Cambridge. He decried the art of memory as idolatrous and "impious, because it calls up absurd thoughts, insolent, prodigious, and the like which stimulate and light up depraved carnal affections." Carnal indeed. Perkins was particularly steamed by Peter of Ravenna's admission that he used the lustful image of a young woman to excite his memory.
  • sentence like "Pick up a pen," it's much more likely to stick if the person literally picks up a pen as they're learning the sentence.

    SEVEN - THE END OF REMEMBERING

  • Our gadgets have eliminated the need to remember such things anymore.
  • they've also changed how we think and how we use our brains.
  • Thomas Aquinas put it, "Things are written down in material books to help the memory." One read in order to remember, and books were the best available tools for impressing information into the mind.
  • In fact, it wasn't until about B.C. that the most basic punctuation marks were invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, the director of the Library of Alexandria, and all they consisted of was a single dot at either the bottom, middle, or top of the line letting readers know how long to pause between sentences.
  • It was probably not until about the ninth century, around the same time that spacing became common and the catalog of punctuation marks grew richer, that the page provided enough information for silent reading to become common.
  • The scroll existed not to hold its contents externally, but rather to help its reader navigate its contents internally.
  • For a period, Latin scribes actually did try separating words with dots, but in the second century A.D., there was a reversion-- a giant and very curious step backward, it would seem-- to the old continuous script used by the Greeks.
  • The ancient Greek word most commonly used to signify "to read" was ánagignósko, which means to "know again," or "to recollect." Reading as an act of remembering:
  • By about the year 400, the parchment codex, with its leaves of pages bound at the spine like a modern hardcover, had all but completely replaced scrolls as the preferred way to read.
  • Whereas an index in the back of a book provides a single address-- a page number-- for each important subject, each subject in the brain has hundreds if not thousands of addresses.
  • The historian Ivan Illich has argued that this represented an invention of such magnitude that "it seems reasonable to speak of the pre- and post- index Middle Ages."
  • As books became easier and easier to consult, the imperative to hold their contents in memory became less and less relevant, and the very notion of what it meant to be erudite began to evolve from possessing information internally to knowing where to find information in the labyrinthine world of external memory.
  • Peter of Ravenna ... authored one of the era's most successful books on memory training ... Titled Phoenix, it was translated into several languages and reprinted all across Europe.
  • "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."
  • Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read.
  • When I read a book, what do I hope will stay with me a year later?
  • Camillo's wooden memory palace was shaped like a Roman amphitheater, but instead of the spectator sitting in the seats looking down on the stage, he stood in the center and looked up at a round, seven- tiered edifice.
  • Dominican friar Giordano Bruno. In his book On the Shadow of Ideas, published in 1582, Bruno promised that his art "will help notonly the memory but also all the powers of the soul." Memory training, for Bruno, was the key to spiritual enlightenment.
  • Bruno imagined a series of concentric wheels, each of which had two- letter pairs around its perimeter,
  • By properly aligning the wheels, any word up to five syllables long could be translated into a unique, vivid image.
  • In 1600, he was burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome and his ashes dispersed in the Tiber River.
  • Total Recall: How the E- Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.

    EIGHT - THE OK PLATEAU

  • In the s, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner attempted to answer this question by describing the three stages that anyone goes through when acquiring a new skill. During the first phase, known as the "cognitive stage," you're intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second "associative stage," you're concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally you reach what Fitts called the "autonomous stage," when you figure that you've gotten as good as you need to get at the task and you're basically running on autopilot.
  • You could call it the "OK plateau," the point at which you decide you're OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving.
  • What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled "deliberate practice." Having studied the best of the best top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development.
  • they force themselves to stay in the "cognitive phase."
  • Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard.
  • To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.
  • Ericsson has found, is to actually practice failing.
  • the single best predictor of an individual's chess skill is not the amount of chess he's played against opponents, but rather the amount of time he's spent sitting alone working through old games.
  • Ericsson
  • metronome
  • metronome to percent faster than that and keep trying at the quicker pace until I stopped making mistakes.
  • What makes surgeons different from mammographers, according to Ericsson, is that the outcome
  • of most surgeries is usually immediately apparent-- the patient either gets better or doesn't-- which means that surgeons are constantly receiving feedback on their performance.
  • regularly be asked to evaluate old cases for which the outcome is already known.
  • That way they can get immediate feedback on their performance.
  • Part of the reason techniques like visual imagery and the memory palace work so well is that they enforce a degree of attention and mindfulness that is normally lacking.

    NINE - THE TALENTED TENTH

  • Memorization drills weren't just about transferring information from teacher to student; they were actually thought to have a constructive effect on kids' brains that would benefit them throughout their lives. Rote drills, it was thought, built up the faculty of memory.
  • Schools have deemphasized raw knowledge (most of which gets forgotten anyway), and instead stressed their role in fostering reasoning ability, creativity, and independent thinking.
  • "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," argues Buzan,
  • "I was trying to get to the essence-- the queen's jelly-- of what note taking was all about," he says. "That led me to codes and symbols, images and arrows, underlining and color." Buzan called his new system Mind Mapping, a term he later trademarked. One creates a Mind Map by drawing lines off main points to subsidiary points, which branch out further to tertiary points, and so on.
  • distilled into as few words as possible and whenever possible are illustrated
  • What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process.
  • 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. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.
  • The Latin root inventio is the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention.
  • Invention was a product of inventorying.
  • Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory.
  • "As an art, memory was most importantly associated in the Middles Ages with composition, not simply with retention," argues Carruthers. "Those who practiced the crafts of memory used them-- as all
  • crafts are used-- to make new things: prayers, meditations, sermons, pictures, hymns, stories, and poems."
  • My own impression of Mind Mapping, having tried the technique to outline a few parts of this book, is that much of its usefulness comes from the mindfulness necessary to create the map.
  • This paradox-- it takes knowledge to gain knowledge-- is captured in a study in which researchers wrote up a detailed description of a half inning of baseball and gave it to a group of baseball fanatics
  • Because they lacked a detailed internal representation of the game, they couldn't process the information they were taking in. They didn't know what was important and what was trivial.
  • Without a conceptual framework in which to embed what they were learning, they were effectively amnesics.
  • Memory is how we transmit virtues and values, and partake of a shared culture.
  • The people whose intellects I most admire always seem to have a fitting anecdote or germane fact at the ready.
  • People who have more associations to hang their memories on are more likely to remember new things, which in turn means they will know more, and be able to learn more.

    TEN - THE LITTLE RAIN MAN IN ALL OF US

  • But even though Kim has access to a larger store of knowledge than perhaps anyone else on the planet, he doesn't seem able to put it toward any end other than itself. He has an IQ of just .
  • There are several very simple calendar calculation formulas, published widely on the Internet. It only takes about an hour of practice to become fluent with them.

    ELEVEN - THE U.S. MEMORY CHAMPIONSHIP

  • "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, ingnore the opposition, have fun. I'm proud of you already. And remember, girls dig scars and glory lasts forever."

    EPILOGUE

  • We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories.
  • All these essentially human acts depend on memory.