Book Notes: Moonwalking with Einstein

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This book was enlightening, covering the world of Memory Championship competitions in the US and abroad. The author starts out as a journalist covering the events, becomes fascinated by the techniques and decides to train for competition himself. He rates his memory as "mediocre at best" before training, and he goes on to win the US competition and compete in the world with a brief year of training. Mr. Foer's tone is light and engaging and his feat is quite remarkable by any measure.
Foer admits there's not much everyday use for memorizing a deck of cards in less than 2 minutes (world record is about 40 seconds), or pages of digits in order, however, viewed as a sport it a competition that requires a skill-set and dedicated training.
Foer introduces some of the main characters of the memory realm and describes his training. I would have given the book a higher rating if I walked away with a better understanding of tools. He describes making a "Palace" in your mind, that as you walk through, you will see these unique images and those images help you remember the shopping list, deck of cards, poem, phone numbers, etc. The training lies in making up your own key for example, "queen equals Elmo, king equals Danny Devito" etc. and for the suites you would add an action "Elmo dancing equals queen of hearts," and any other heart would be "dancing." Even numbers get a visual beyond the number, and he would visualize a roomful of these outrageous scenes, such as Michael Jackson moon walking with Einstein" to help him remember, well anything. One would thing this is all too much work, but if you train in advance, it's comes naturally, according to Foer--along with wearing industrial ear muffs and blinders of course!
Most interesting to me was his conclusion, even after becoming the Memory Champion of the United States he still forgets his shopping list and where he parked the car. He rarely uses the strategies to so much as a remember a phone number, relying like the rest of the world on technology to help think for us. Am I going to try it? Eh, I don't know, it sounds like too much work, and I try to challenge my memory anyway. I will try to catch the next competition on ESPN and I want to look into the correlation between Sevantism and brain injury which sounds fascinating!



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