LA Event: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Machine Project in Los Angeles is hosting a lecture and book launch event with author Joshua Foer on Sunday, March 27th, 2011 at 8pm. It sounds great!

On average, people squander 40 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.

At a time when electronic devices have all but rendered our individual memories obsolete, Foer's bid to resurrect the forgotten art of remembering becomes an urgent quest. Moonwalking with Einstein brings Joshua Foer to the apex of the U.S. Memory Championship, and brings readers to a profound appreciation of a gift that we all possess, but that too often slips our minds.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything -- A lecture and book release with author Joshua Foer

• [Ugly Canuck]

  Before I forget, here’s a song you all may appreciate:

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHvs2hgjBLc

  Sung by old what’s-’is-name…he’s great.

• [Anonymous]

  I learned about the memory palace from Hannibal Lecter.

• [AnthonyC]

  My brain has strange ideas about what is and isn’t worth remembering.
  Random facts from a Discovery Channel special I watched when I was 8? How to spell “Drizzt Do’Urden of House Daermon Na’Shezbaernon of Menzoberranzan?” The story of the Ainulindale? No problem.

  The names of the students in the lab I TA, or that person you introduced me to to whom I’ve been talking for the last half hour? Not a chance. I’m also terrible at keeping track of sources- I’ll know I know a fact, but usually not where I learned it.

• [penguinchris]

  I tried a couple of memory improvement techniques several years ago. Among people who know me I have a famously “eccentric” memory – I forget things easily, but can remember seemingly random things (not things that matter usually) very well.

  I can’t remember more than half an average-length sentence (song lyrics are easier, but I have trouble with those too) or a string of numbers or letters beyond two or three characters. Visual memory is a little different; I can visualize maps, for example, but I don’t think I’m really memorizing the image of a map, I’m memorizing the layout when I do that and reconstructing it.

  None of the memory improvement techniques (including a version of this one, I think – can’t quite remember) did anything. I could tell within a few minutes they weren’t going to work no matter how hard I tried.

  I think it’s better just to recognize that some people are better at rote memorization than others. If you are, it can really help you in many cases. If you aren’t, you have to focus your energy on compensating for it – like Einstein – which I personally think puts you in a better position. You can’t memorize everything ahead of time, but if you know exactly how to find it, you’re better off in almost every situation.

  This put me at a distinct disadvantage for a few exams at university I remember quite vividly – funnily enough, since I couldn’t remember the answers ;) I did OK overall, though, on the strength of my reasoning abilities (and on exams where reference material was available).

  • [jackie31337]

    Among people who know me I have a famously “eccentric” memory – I forget things easily, but can remember seemingly random things (not things that matter usually) very well.

    I’m like that too. I’ve never been good a deliberately memorizing something. I either remember things or I don’t, but what I do remember, I remember with several, or sometimes all 5 senses. For me, recalling a memory involves basically replaying the sensory data. If I’m asked where an object that I remember seeing recently is, I close my eyes and mentally walk through the place where I last saw it until I “find” it. Sometimes memories of some specific thing get stored with a weird association. For example, I might remember that I smelled cinnamon the last time I was holding a piece of paper I’m looking for. In trying to remember where I put the paper, I remember the smell of cinnamon, and from that I remember I had put the paper down in the kitchen. Until a few years ago, I had no idea that this wasn’t how everybody’s memory worked.

    On the other hand, I am largely unable to explicitly memorize things out of context. If I try to study (which I never understood the point of), I end up remembering the experience of reading the material, but not necessarily the contents of what I read.

  • [askjacob]

    You too eh? I thought I was all alone. My memory is a weird and amusing, sometimes (especially for the family) annoying thing.

    I can remember certain things with utmost clarity, but other things almost to the point of ignorance. numbers (including phone numbers) are rare for me to remember. Names are bad (but I don’t forget the face or the dialogue/relationships).

    I always forget birthdays, ages and anniversaries (even my own) so my phone is a great help with it’s calendar.

    Any memory techniques I have tried end up with me obsessing about the technique rather than the actual memory part and they never seem to work. Over time I have figured out how to compensate and where (having a patient wife helps as she is my stand-by memory quite often!)

    Sometimes I will drive somewhere for the 1st time an remeber the route forever more. Other times even if I have done it 10-20 times I still con’t remember where to start or which turn to take. Bugs me a lot (but these modern times a GPS is a wonder and saviour).

    I am also a very visual kind of person – but always struggle to visually count items (I lose track after about 5 or 6) – I even practice daily on the driv eto work by counting the LEDs in tail lights but am still bad at it. Same with finding somethng in a list (think files in a browse box etc).

    Two thumbs up for weird brains that keep everyone on their toes and preventing a dull grey existence for everyone….

• [sapere_aude]

  My memory is weird. I have really good semantic memory, but lousy episodic memory. I can remember facts I’ve learned with almost perfect recall, yet have only vague memories of things that have happened in my life, including people I’ve known. I know the gist of my own life’s story of course (I’m not an amnesiac); but the details can be rather fuzzy. Ask me to recount my biography, and I can give you a pretty good outline of the story of my life; but ask me to tell an anecdote about some specific event in my past, and it’s hit-or-miss at best. There are a few moments I can picture in my mind quite clearly; but most are like a dream half-remembered upon waking.

  I’m great at trivia – so good, in fact, that my friends used to refuse to play Trivial Pursuit with me, or else would insist on everyone else teaming up against me, often accusing me of deliberately memorizing all of the answers. Yet when my friends talk about things we did years ago, it’s almost like I’m hearing the story for the first time. When I’m out in public, it’s quite common for people to speak to me as if they know me, even calling me by name, yet me not recognizing them at all. No matter how hard I rack my brain trying to remember who they are and where I know them from, I just can’t. Just as often, I’ll see someone who looks strangely familiar to me, but I can’t place them and am not entirely sure whether I know them or whether they just remind me of someone else – though I’m never quite sure just who it is they might remind me of. (Often this happens when I see an attractive woman; so I suspect there might be an element of wishful thinking involved in this apparent recognition.)

  Yet I don’t seem to have any problem at all with factual knowledge, and am able to recall even obscure bits of information without any problem (though I have trouble remembering exactly where, when, and how I learned this information). I may struggle with faces and names, but I can still remember the birthdays of lots of people I haven’t seen or spoken to in years. I can quote lines from my favorite movies and TV shows verbatim, with no difficulty; and I’m always a bit puzzled when friends of mine, who have seen these same movies and TV shows as many times as I have, misquote them. And it doesn’t really seem to take any effort at all for me to remember factual information. It certainly doesn’t require any special mnemonic techniques. If I find a piece of information interesting when I first hear it, I’ll usually remember it. If I don’t find it interesting, I’m less likely to remember it. (I guess it helps that I find lots of things interesting.) However, regardless of my interest, the more often I encounter the same piece of information, the more likely I am to remember it.

  So, I guess my only memory “trick” is to (a) be genuinely interested in the information I want to remember, and (b) expose myself to that information repeatedly over an extended period of time, preferably in a “natural” way where I’m not “forcing” the information onto myself, but am simply encountering it by happenstance. I’m not sure if that method will work for everyone; but it works quite well for me. Of course, that will only work for certain types of information. You can’t really memorize a grocery list this way, nor would you want to. In general, I’m not a fan of rote memorization. There are situations where it’s useful to be able to commit long lists of boring information to memory for a short period of time; but it’s important to realize that “memorization” is not the same thing as “learning”.

  As for memorization techniques, I’ve experimented with a few, and they can be fun; but I’ve never really been all that impressed with them. Not because they don’t work: I’m sure that if you really put in the effort to learn these techniques and practice them until they become second nature, you can develop excellent memorization skills like the author of this book. I’m just not convinced that the payoff is really worth all the effort you’d have to put into these techniques in order to develop these memorization skills. If you really want to be able to commit a grocery list to memory, these techniques can help. But I find it much more practical to just use a pen and paper. If your goal is to actually learn stuff, memorization and mnemonic techniques are NOT going to be very helpful, in my opinion.

• [Anonymous]

  3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899

  from memory

• [Rincewind]

  The title seems odd, as I seem to recall the following anecdote about the great man:

  ‘In a popular story about Dr. Albert Einstein, a reporter asks if he can have the great man’s phone number. “Certainly,” replies Einstein. He picks up the phone directory, looks up his number, writes it on a slip of paper, and hands it to the reporter. Dumbfounded, the reporter says, “You’re considered to be the smartest man in the world and you can’t remember your own phone number?”

  Einstein replies, “Why should I memorize something when I know where to find it?”‘

  http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0MNT/is_2_58/ai_n6121325/

  • [Lucifer]

    if you expand this logic further, then we should have very little to remember since we can google/wikipedia a lot of that knowledge.

    And I think we do exactly that.

    It used to be that you were considered smart by how much information you knew as well as how well honed your critical thinking skills were. We once lived in a time where if you did not know the answer to a question, you could not find out that information without some real effort and time (go to the library and look it up or find someone who might know the answer).

    So what is there for us to remember? it seems like we mostly store up entertaining memes and trivial amusement.

  • [g0d5m15t4k3]

    From what you’ve said just now, it seems Einstein would likely support our use of cellphones, email and facebook to keep all our info handy. If its easier to remember how to use a tech gadget than to actually remember the information, then it seems obvious which thing we should pre-occupy ourselves with. The problem is if all the info is easily accessible, how will we keep unwanted people from accessing our info?

• [jramboz]

  I have an absolutely horrible memory (at least for anything that actually matters), and I’m always looking for ways to improve it. Reading the Amazon reviews, though, it sounds like the “big trick” here may just be the age-old Memory Palace schlock. I know people who have had great success with Memory Palaces, but they’ve never, ever worked for me. In fact, I spend more time and mental energy trying to recall the details of my Palace than I would in just trying to remember what it is I was thinking of in the first place.

  Before I waste money on yet another book, can anyone tell me if this is just another Memory Palace book (although with amusing anecdotes), or if there’s anything actually useful in here?

  • [freshacconci]

    I’m with jramboz on this. I have lousy memory and the tricks to helping my memory actually have the opposite effect. I’m not trying to be a naysayer and if it works for others, all the power. However, whenever I’ve tried Memory Palace and other techniques I use up my already poor memory remembering the details of those things that are supposed to prompt what it is I’m trying to remember.

    If that makes any sense.

    When I was a kid I never understood the string on the finger trick. Great, it reminds you to remember something. Now how do you remember what that thing is to begin with?

  • [Anonymous]

    Yes, it’s the memory palace technique. The title is one of the mnemonics the author used.

• [turtlecrk]

  >>On average, people squander 40 days annually compensating for things they’ve forgotten

  Um, this sounds made up, to me. Is there a source for the research?

• [senorglory]

  i’ve just recently wondered at the ability of ancient roman orators to memorize large speeches. nice coincidence. thanks universe.

• [senorglory]

  “You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

  Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet.

  • [senorglory]

    I did not post the Sherlock Holmes quote above from memory, by the way.

• [Ugly Canuck]

  This topic jogs my memory to recall this story, by Borges the Argentine:

  http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/borges.htm

  A beautiful short story, a story of the pain of a too-perfect memory.

  • [Nadreck]

    Yes, a really good memory has it’s drawbacks. Time heals? How when yesteryear is in just as sharp focus as today? I expect that a lot of people with eidetic memories, such as Tesla, were driven nuts by it.

    Not everyone is totally relying on the external memories BTW. I know a young lady who occasionally tries to recite the “Countries of the World” Animaniacs song as a memory check.

• [matthewroedder]

  The ability to memorize is a lousy indication of a person’s intelligence. It is, on the other hand, a good indication of how well people may do on standardized tests, therefore memorization is the only way to gauge intelligence in large classroom environments. Long-term information retention requires a more full understanding of the concepts that are being taught as well as their interplay with other concepts.

  Schooling in our industrialized societies has been ensuring that our institutional knowledge (information passed on from generation to generation) remains stymied by it’s connection to large industries’ interests. We must re-school ourselves and for god sakes stop sending our children to school!

• [Nadreck]

  There’s also a social interaction problem if you have a really good memory. People who have crappy memories (in the sense of a memory system, not memories about bad things) assume that any obscure detail you drag up must have an immense emotional value for you since how else could you remember it? For example, in a discussion about the predictability of TV I mentioned a totally obscure bit of Scooby Doo trivia from 20 years ago. It was then smugly assumed that I was pathetically obsessed with that show whereas I actually hated it and saw only six episodes due to the round-robin control of the Saturday morning TV channel in my youth. It was just a detail like any other that’s easily accessible to me from a single watching of any TV show, or any other random incident, from any decade.

  I often describe my memory as not being eidetic (thank Elvis!), a constantly rolling video tape, but rather as a camera that goes off at random intervals not under my control.

• [aref]

  I’ve invested a small fortune at my local pub in order to forget all this crap. Don’t have any desire to wreck my investment and bring it all back, thank you.

• [Kaleberg]

  The string on one’s finger works pretty well if you are keeping track of your period. Most people have 28 finger segments, so if you move the string in a fixed pattern, you always know where you are in your period or if you are late.