Moonwalking with Einstein

The Quid On

  Moonwalking with Einstein

by Joshua Foer

Preview: 

Do you keep forgetting where you kept your car keys? Did you forget the list of items you had to purchase from the supermarket? Bad memory ails many of us, and we think that nothing can be done about it. However, almost anyone can improve their memory significantly. All that is needed is to learn how to use it correctly. Joshua Foer tells you how he did it, and how you can too! 

About the Author 

Joshua Foer is an American journalist whose work focuses on Science. He is a Yale graduate and was also crowned as the United States memory champion in 2006. He is the co-founder of Atlas Obscura, an online magazine that catalogues unique and unusual travel destinations. 

The Big Idea: Your memory is not a given fixed quantity, you can expand it by following a few simple techniques. 

Human memory, just like our other faculties has undergone a process of natural selection over millions of years. Though it may be hard for us to imagine, up until about 10-12000 years ago, we lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Our system of memory has evolved to serve us well in that world and is not of much use in current times.  

As hunter-gatherers, we needed our memory not to remember words or numbers or to-do lists, but to know our way home, to know which vegetation to eat and which to avoid. Thus, the critical thing to remember is that we don’t remember all types of information particularly well. There are some types we remember more than others. For example, we can understand and remember visual imagery much more than other types of information. 

In this book, Joshua Foer writes about how he became the American memory champion in 2006 and elaborates on fundamental memory techniques which you too can use to become the next memory champion! 

You will learn: 

1)   How human memory works and what it is designed to do 

2)   Why Chess Players can remember board positions even years after a game 

3)   What a memory palace is and how can it help you retain more 

 

Memory training was taught to students in the ancient world. As a field of study, it was at par with the arts, language, and logic! 

The oral tradition of passing down information and wisdom was the norm in ancient times. In a world where there were few written texts to go around, memory served one well. It was a much-valued skill then. This is referenced and corroborated by historical documents of that time. Pliny the Elder, whose encyclopedia chronicled all things akin to Ripley's believe it or not, has reported several people with unimaginable memory capabilities. The Persian king Cyrus could remember the names of all the soldiers in his army, Seneca could also repeat two thousand names given to him in the order in which they were given!  

In contrast, we do not need to remember so much, even though there are more things to remember than ever before. All information is available to us at the click of a button. Even so, several self-help gurus and memory champions dish out innumerable ways to improve one's memory. The most famous of them all, Tony Buzan has authored more than 100 books on the topic and made a tremendous amount of money. Though there have been several innovations in the "art" of memory, the fundamental techniques have remained as they were elaborated in the Rhetorica Ad Herennium, more than 2000 years ago. 

The value of a strong memory diminished with the invention of the printing press and the subsequent explosion in the number of books. 

Socrates was dead against learning to write. He asserted that writing would lead to forgetfulness as well as a moral decline in society in general. Though by the time Gutenberg invented the printing press, written texts were already being produced, their quality and reader-friendliness were far from satisfactory.  

With the invention of the printing press in 1440, Gutenberg ushered in an era of books. With the ease of printing, it was easier than ever before to store information in books and texts and reproduce their copies for wide circulation.  

Books removed the need for people to remember the wisdom and knowledge of the world because now it could just be read out! In the 580 odd years that have passed since the invention of the printing press, we have reduced our dependence on memory even more with the invention and the widespread adoption of consumer electronics like computers, smartphones, hard drives. 

Human memory works in a nonlinear associative fashion 

Our memory doesn’t operate as a single silo of storage. It is an amalgamation of several modules, each of which has its own network of neural connections. Broadly, there is a working memory, which helps you to concentrate on the situation at hand. The working memory can typically hold seven different things at a time. For some people it is a little less, for some it is a little more, but usually, an adult human being can hold seven different things in his or her working memory. That is why it is often challenging to memorize more than seven digits at a time. Then there is long-term memory. However, the way our memory is structured, also gives us hacks to improve its capacity. 

 Human memory works in a nonlinear associative fashion. In other words, you do not need to precisely know where a piece of memory is stored in your brain to access it. That piece is interlinked and associated with several other memories stored in your brain. Hence, as a rule, the more associations a particular experience or memory has in your brain, the less likely it is to be forgotten. 

One simple way of improving your memory is to repeat the stuff you need to remember to yourself. This method of repetition is known as the phonological loop. In a memory study, a particular subject known by his initials SF was rigorously tested. In the beginning, he was able to memorize not more than 7 different digits at a time. Over 2 years, due to repeated memorizations (phonological loops), he was able to "expand" his memory by a factor of 10! 

As it turns out, the way we store information in our brains impacts how we retrieve it. 

Most of our day to day actions are governed by memory which operates from the realms of the unconscious 

Most amnesiacs don’t forget how to speak, or how to ride a bike, but lose the ability to form new memories. This is because different regions of the brain are associated with different types of memory. 

Memory can broadly be divided into declarative and non-declarative. Declarative memory is conscious memory. Like the color of your car. Non-Declarative memory works behind the scenes. It is unconscious. For example, the memory at work when you swim is non-declarative. You don’t consciously remember how to swim when you are swimming, it is an unconscious process 

Studies on amnesia patients, especially those who have lost the ability to form new memories have shown that though the subjects cannot retain information beyond a couple of minutes, they can still do several things which they shouldn’t be able to. For example, a patient known by his initials EP was able to store and retain information only till the next thought came into his mind. Even so, he was able to take a walk in his neighborhood and get back to his house without getting lost! This was because of non-declarative memory. 

Chunk information to remember more  

Why are the 16-digit credit card numbers spilt into groups of 4?  

HOWIWONDERWHATYOUARE, what if you were asked to memorize the 20 letters written at the beginning of this sentence? If you do not speak English, it would be difficult for you. If, however, you are an English speaker, you would easily remember these 20 letters by separating them into six chunks (the normal limit of working memory is seven different things). HOW I WONDER WHAT YOU ARE! If you are aware of the nursery rhyme, then you can remember all the six words as one chunk, and other words/phrases as other chunks to retain the complete rhyme! 

Chess grandmasters are considered by many to be extremely intelligent; however, most of them perform like the average person when given a range of cognitive and aptitude tests. It is in the field of chess that their expertise lies. How? Research has shown that chess grandmasters use memory chunking to interpret the state of the chessboard. Having played and studied thousands of games, the players have the board pieces stored away in their long-term memory as chunks. Hence, what they are looking for in a chessboard, are patterns that they can recognize or interpret, in light of what they already know!  

The process of chunking takes what looks like meaningless information and runs it through a deep web of experiences which endows it with meaning to make it much stickier. 

This is how experts see the world. Their enormous wealth of "experience" provides them with the tools to shape the way they see the world and process new information! 

 

Store information in a "memory palace" to make better use of your memory 

As discussed previously, our spatial memory is much better than other types of memory. To improve your memory almost instantaneously, convert information that is given into a more memorable form. Since we remember visual imagery and are designed to have good spatial memory, it helps if one can construct a "memory palace," a space in one's mind, anything which one is familiar with. It can be your childhood home, it can be your daily jogging route, it can also be your own body! Whatever it is, ensure that you know the space intimately.  

Once you have a "palace," all you have to do is to convert the information given to you in the form of a visually appealing and memorable image and place it at specific points in the mental palace which can form a route you will take through it. This conversion of information into something more memorable, like images, is called elaborative encoding. When you need to "remember something, you can mentally go through the palace, and hopefully, the images (encoded information) will pop into consciousness as you traverse the specific points in the route! 

You can also use such a memory palace to keep related pieces of information in one place, or one room to make better connections. For example, you can store all work-related information and things to remember in one room, say, the living room; and things to remember which are personal in nature in another room, say, the bedroom. It will help if you make the images more memorable by infusing humor and sex into them! 

You can even memorize long poems or speeches by using visual imagery and emotions 

Odyssey and Iliad, two of Homer's epic poems, are a little unusual compared to other pieces of ancient literature. It is widely believed that these poems were composed in the "oral tradition," which means that the poems were written in memory and passed on from generation to generation by the bards. This is evident in their repetitive structure and aid of what seem to be mnemonic aids, like referring to Odysseus as "the clever Odysseus," The poems seem to follow a repetitive structure, and also have weird references to the characters. For example, Odysseus is generally mentioned as the "clever Odysseus," Athena is mentioned as " gray-eyed Athena." These aids helped the bards to reconstruct the poems from memory. Though the versions kept on changing bit by bit due to the inbuilt variability of the oral tradition, the essence and spirit of the lyrics remained intact. 

However, as we will see, it is possible to remember long pieces of text verbatim. As discussed earlier, we remember images far better than other forms of information. You can learn to remember entire epics and long plays by associating chunks of words with pictures. If certain words are difficult to visualize, you can visualize rhyming words which are easier to envision. Gunther Karsten, a famous memory sportsman, has his own lexicon of images that he associated with words. For abstract words, or prepositions, or conjunctions, Karsten visualizes a word which rhymes with the original. For example, "and" sounds similar to the word "rund" in German, which means round. Hence, Karsten associates a "circle" with the word "and." 

Another way to memorize long forms of text is to associate emotions with them. You can chunk out a group of words and associate feelings with a particular chunk. This method replaces images with emotions to make the words more memorable in general, and specific words less abstract. This type of technique is also used by method actors to remember their lines. 

Memory techniques should be taught in schools as they can improve overall learning 

The "Talented Tenth", a socioeconomically underprivileged bunch of kids, who are taught memory techniques by their history teacher Raemon Matthews, not only perform well at the US Memory championships but also fare very well at the high school graduating exams, administered by the New York State Education Department (nearly 85% of the talented tenth score more than 90%). Matthews is a firm believer in the power of developing one's memory. It is like a skill, which can be polished, rather than a given mental or physical attribute.  

Jean Jacques Rousseau expressed disdain for rote learning methods along with institutional education in general in his influential treatise-Emile, or on education. From the turn of the 20th century, school education gradually began to be revamped, and educators started focusing more on experiential learning. While rote memorization has been shown actually to worsen the ability to memorize over a period, the techniques to store information in a way that makes them easier to retrieve have been overlooked. But how can developing one's memory be anything more than just showing off? It surely cannot be of any practical utility. As it turns out, that assumption is incorrect. 

Connecting the dots and human creativity are thought to be opposites of "memorized" systems of thinking. However, human memory serves as the underlying substrate which facilitates the connecting of dots. Where do new ideas come from? They come from a vast bank of existing ideas, many of them unrelated, and suddenly a new connection is made, and a new idea is born.  

In a world where things to remember are available on-demand (click of a button), memory techniques can impart a way to house vast amounts of information in a multi-indexed manner which makes them not only easy to retrieve, but also more useful, especially when unrelated pieces of information can be connected to give birth to new ideas. 

 

Final Summary 

Memory was a valuable skill in ancient times, but its value has decreased over centuries, especially with the invention of devices and media to store our thoughts and knowledge. The fabric of human memory is nonlinear and associative. Many of us think that our memory is a given quantity, however, with the right techniques, many of which were devised more than two thousand years ago, we can improve and expand our memory significantly. We can use our evolved spatial and visual memory along with a few other fundamental techniques to store information in our brains in a manner that makes it easy to retrieve.