Review: Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer -- Is this book about memory memorable?
I’ve always had a decent memory. Not perfect, but give me a few seconds and I can almost always remember where I put my keys. And like every other person who has ever lived, I wouldn’t mind if my memory was better and I’ve learned a few tricks to remember things better. Like after I read a book I write my thoughts and put them up on a blog so that in a few months or years I’ll be able to glance at it and see what I thought of it. Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer is about the people who have taken that to the extreme, and while it discusses some techniques for remembering things they use, this isn’t a book about how to remember everything. It’s a book about the people who write those books.
What is Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer about?
Joshua Foer was a struggling reporter who, after seeing people memorizing entire decks of cards and long lists of names, decided that he would try to learn about it. He was encouraged in this by a group of people, including some who were willing to train him and others who studied him.
The main part of the book covers the time between his discovery of the techniques and competitions for memory improvement to the time that he won the United States memory championship.
But while the ability to memorize a deck of cards is a cool trick, it is in some ways more like a magic trick than it is a real skill. The people who can do it use the way the brain already remembers things by turning a group of random numbers of playing cards into an image in their mind and then creating the memory palace that you have almost certainly heard of.
More interesting to me are the characters. People who have dedicated their lives to memory and yet seem to have no issue getting so drunk they can’t remember what they’ve done for an entire night. Some believe that improved memory is vital to human advancement, others simply enjoy it.
And there is the savant. A possibly autistic man who was in the memory competitions, a profession physic and now claims to be a savant who doesn’t use any of the memory tricks but got his abilities when he had a major seizure, or did he?
Conclusion
This book moved between making me want to learn some techniques and having no interest in them at all. Some of that is because as you understand you learn that many of the ways it’s don’t aren’t worth the effort. I have no doubt that using the techniques that they have developed to learn a phone number in a few minutes could be useful. I also know that in half that time I could type the number into my phone so I don’t have to learn it.
But the book isn’t about those techniques. It’s about the people who use them and it does a good job of showing who they are. And while I can’t claim that this is likely to be the most memorable book ever there are parts of it I enjoyed and will remember and perhaps I may even try some of the basic techniques to remember names better.