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Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer
PDF Download Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer
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Foer's unlikely journey from chronically forgetful science journalist to U.S. Memory Champion frames a revelatory exploration of the vast, hidden impact of memory on every aspect of our lives.
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.
Immersing himself obsessively in a quirky subculture of competitive memorizers, Foer learns to apply techniques that call on imagination as much as determination - showing that memorization can be anything but rote. From the PAO system, which converts numbers into lurid images, to the memory palace, in which memories are stored in the rooms of imaginary structures, Foer's experience shows that the World Memory Championships are less a test of memory than of perseverance and creativity.
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 readers to a profound appreciation of a gift we all possess but that too often slips our minds.
- Sales Rank: #1697 in Audible
- Published on: 2011-03-03
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 573 minutes
Most helpful customer reviews
695 of 728 people found the following review helpful.
Amazingly Interesting and Helpful
By David Sheppard
This is one of those rare books that is not only a joy to read, but also immensely helpful. It can help all of us with something that is at once troublesome and worrisome: our memory. It does this with ease, not teaching us some grueling rote memory technique, but one that is easy, natural and intuitive. Yet Moonwalking with Einstein turns out to not be exclusively a how-to book on memory. So what is it?
Well, yes, it is about memory and how to improve it, but it is at once a history of techniques, a description of what memory is and what can go wrong with it, and also a running narrative of how the author, a journalist himself with no special memory skills, becomes one of the most proficient memory athletes in America.
I'd learned a mnemonic device to aid memorization decades ago while in college, and found it to be helpful, but for some reason I'd abandoned the technique once I graduated. But Moonwalking with Einstein expands the mnemonic technique I learned back then by use of something of which I'd never heard: the "Memory Palace." The Memory Palace exploits our inherent skill for remembering images and spatial locations, harnesses these two abilities we all posses in abundance, and relates them to the memorization of numbers, lists and assortments of other difficult to remember items. The amazing thing is that the Memory Palace not only makes memorization easy, it also makes it fun.
What makes the book so interesting is that it is narrative non-fiction and reads like a novel. The author locks his conflict with his own memory early on, gives a sense of rising tension as he accumulates the forces to overcome its limitations, and resolves this internal conflict at the end when he participates in the US Memory Championship. I didn't read it as urgently as I did today's number one bestseller, Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken, but still, I couldn't put it down.
In Chapter Five, I scanned the "to-do" list of fifteen items on pages 92/3 that the author had to memorize in his initial attempt, and developed the technique for myself as I read about the author memorizing it. As my Memory Palace, I used an old home of a high school friend with which I was still familiar, constructing useful details as I went. When I had finished reading about the author memorizing the list (took me about five minutes), I had memorized it myself, and I found that the items were not only immediately memorable, but that the list of items and their sequence was still with me days later, and so imbedded in my memory that I'm sure I'll ever forget it. All this, I accomplished effortlessly. This is a truly remarkable feat for me because I'm almost seventy years old and have chronic fatigue syndrome, which adversely affects all aspects of my memory.
It has also given me hope that I might finally learn ancient Greek. I tried to learn it several years ago, but found building a vocabulary so difficult that I abandoned the project. Rote memory was just too much trouble. I am interested in all things Greek, and as it turns out, the Memory Palace technique was invented in the fifth century BC by Simonides following his narrow escape from the collapse of a building. This in itself is a story you'll be interested in reading about. The author says that since the time of this ancient Greek, "the art of memory has been about creating architectural spaces in the imagination." Having been to Greece twice, I have all the makings of a superb Greek Memory Palace. While traveling around Greece and the western coast of Turkey for ten weeks, I visited many cities and islands: Athens, Thebes, Delphi, Ithaca, Mykonos, Delos, Santorini, etc. I can't count all the archaeological sites I visited. What I'm creating isn't just any old Memory Palace but actually a Memory Country. Within each location, I can identify as many locations for storing words and meanings as I need. But not only that, I can also use characters from Greek mythology to create actions and images to reinforce the material, as the author suggests. All this constitutes my Greek Memory Palace: the location where I will store ancient Greek words and meanings as I learn the language, in accordance with the instructions learned in Moonwalking with Einstein. None of it was difficult. I picked it up as I read the book.
The author describes how in the past people viewed their minds as something to perfect by loading it with all sorts of intellectual material. "People used to labor to furnish their minds. They invested in the acquisition of memories the same way we invest in the acquisition of things." [page 134] Some even believed that "the art of memory was a secret key to unlocking the occult structure of the universe." [page 151] This has given me an entirely new view of how to perceive my own mind and nourish it in the future.
The author also discusses how we came to lose touch with our ability to remember with the invention of the printed word. The history of that estrangement and how inventions like Wikipedia and the Internet foster that estrangement is a very interesting story. The author makes the reader aware of what is happening to us and provides a way to project ourselves into the future without suffering so much of technology's debilitating effects.
Perhaps the reason this book is so successful is that the reader never loses sight of the practical use of the information the author is providing because the author is discovering it himself and actively making use of it in his quest to make it into the US Memory Championship.
This is an important book. Everyone can benefit from reading it.
David Sheppard
108 of 119 people found the following review helpful.
Personal & Informative
By Man of La Book
"Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything" by Joshua Foer is a memoir of the author's attempted to win the U.S. memory championship. Along the way Mr. Foer attempts to explain some tricks, techniques and the science around memory.
The book follows the gripping journey taken by Joshua Foer as he participates in the U.S. Memory Championship. As a science journalist Foer becomes interested in the champions' secrets as well as the secrets of the brain which we still do not fully understand.
Foer learns how to naturally memorize information with the help of experts and to master techniques which make memorization easier.
"Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything" by Joshua Foer is a fabulous memoir which is not only personal and informative, but also highly entertaining.
As a journalist, Mr. Foer became interested in those "mental athletes" who can memorize random data (order of packs of cards, long lists, etc.) when he covered the U.S. Memory Championship as an assignment. As he researched more into this area he became intrigued and wondered if he could do it also.
At the start of his research, Mr. Foer went to meet psychologist Anders Ericsson who studies those with exceptional memory. "SF" can remember 80 digits after a single hearing, for example. During Foer's attempt, Ericsson would study him - a man without an exceptional memory. However, in a very poignant part of the book he also meets with a man who completely lost his short term memory.
Over the next year Foer studied hard to improve his memory, or rather improve memorizing random stuff (there is a difference as we find out). The path we find ourselves going along with Mr. Foer on his journey is delightful, inventing and funny, the people he meets are interesting and quirky.
Experiment:
Is the human mind really susceptible to the clever tricks Mr. Foer describes in his book?
I attempted to find out.
One of the memorization techniques involves a "memory palace" and is supposedly a very old method. The technique involves imagining yourself walking around a familiar building and placing objects on a list in that building (your home, first grad class, grandma's home, etc.).
Supposedly if you walk your way through that "memory palace" again you should be able to retrieve those items without an issue.
On pages 92-93 Mr. Foer describes his first memorization list given to him in Central Park by English memory champion Ed Cooke (Pickled garlic, Cottage cheese, salmon, six bottles of white wine, socks, three hula hoops, snorkel, dry ice machine, email Sophia, etc.)
As I walked though my home, in my mind, I placed all fifteen items around my house (using quirky stories such as having three Hawaiian dancers perform with hula hoops on my son's train table) and, believe it or not, it worked.
It amazed me so much I came home and asked my wife to do the same thing.
Guess what?
She did and she was amazed as well. Over the next several days we challenged one another, in random places, to name the list.
As it turned out, learning memorization was a part of every school curriculum in the early years of the country - however, from some reason, it has been abandoned.
That's too bad.
77 of 85 people found the following review helpful.
Can memory actually be taught? This book says it can...
By A123
Do you have troubles remembering special days like anniversaries or birthdays? Maybe we all forget these sometimes... How about memorizing two decks of cards in five minutes or less? That is what Joshua Foer did to win the 2006 U.S. Memory Championship.So he knows what he is talking about in this book. He will tell you how to improve your memory.
Foer says: "You could argue that we are nothing more and nothing less than what we remember. Memory is not just this storage vault that we dip into when we need to recall something. It's actually intimately involved in shaping how we move through the world and process the world." I agree. Memory is important. You need it every day.
Memorization is not boring if you know the tricks how to memorize things.
Memory techniques used by the people who are considered to have a good/excellent memory are all about figuring out ways to make otherwise uninteresting information interesting and colorful and meaningful and attention-grabbing and fun!
The author talks about memory places, attaching a mental image to the place you need to remember.
It's actually how Cicero remembered his speeches, and how medieval scholars memorized entire texts.
If someone expects something new, something different than what has been available, then this book is not it. It is just a collection of memory tricks in one book. If you have never tried any of these tricks, then you should try!
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