Moonwalking with Einstein

Interesting overview of mnemonic practices if you're a total novice on the subject. The shifts between history, report on current state of the field and personal experience make it a light, engaging read. I can imagine it not offering enough to people who already had an interest in the field before reading it.

This was a weird read. Foer sets off to write a book that is part autobiographical, part about the mnemonist community (competitive memorizers) and part about the science of memory. The third part is by far the weakest -- if you've read any other pop science about memory, you've read everything here. The first part is also not that strong: it's mostly Foer hanging around a bunch of mnemonists. And as I quickly learned, mnemonists are not the sort of people I would want to hang out with: self-absorbed, quick to turn things into a lewd reference, under-employed and drunken. But none of that matters, I imagine people mostly come for the act of competitive memorizing.

Foer starts out the book by declaring that people like me don't exist, which was kind of a surreal book start. By people like me, I mean people with naturally strong memories. I've had an unusually strong memory my whole life: when the waiter doubles back to say an ordered dish is out of stock, I can recite the menu verbatim for my dining companions, barely having glanced at it; I work a field that requires memorizing hundreds of rare diseases (many of which I've never actually seen) and the associated features; I spent most of high school memorizing long swathes of poetry for fun (including the entirety of the Wasteland).

Foer's central argument is that everyone has the same memory and that any exceptions are synesthetes who can encode information visually. And that's where I really fell off the rails with him: I'm not a visual processor at all. I remember words. Which, of course, Foer states as impossible. He argues words have to be transformed into visual features to be memorized. For a while, I thought that maybe literally decades of chanting torah and memorizing each vowel sound and trope pattern explained the difference between how my memory works and how he claims the universal memory works, but then I remembered that my father memorizing a thousand digits of pi by remembering the aural patterns. So then I thought maybe as Jews, we've been selected for this by memorizing talmud and torah as a culture, but Foer is also Jewish (and does talk about Torah chanting for his Bar Mitzvah), so who knows.

Why does it matter that this book is aggressively not about me? Because I think it takes something that a small group of mnemonists do and makes it into a universal rule for memorizing: memories have to be visual and obscene. Memorizing a poem or a deck of cards isn't visual or obscene? First memorize an incredibly complex system of how to encode this information as lewd visuals, and then quickly transform one to the other and Bob's your uncle. This seems absurd to me, why not just memorize a poem by...memorizing it? But then I started to think about what I knew about the study of memory, and I know from the educational literature that people remember information that they've needed to transform or encode. I realized it doesn't matter if you transform the deck of cards into lewd visual images, or a rhyming scheme or a patter song, it's engaging with and transforming the content that makes it memorable. Foer considers, but dismisses this, but it's actually a fascinating central point because it's much more universalizable: most people with jobs are not going to spend hours first memorizing schemes that involve pop stars and specific sex acts just in case they need to memorize something else later, but a more flexible, lower upfront cost schema for memorizing is useful. Foer himself talks about how being a mnemonist isn't actually useful in any way -- the mnemonists he encounters (and Foer himself) rudely forget people's names, miss appointments and all of the general scourges of daily memory

Two things that I will operationalize from the book: I am convinced that the idea of a spatial memory is useful. I'd read about memory palaces before but never found them useful. Foer's specific guidance to have multiple, each real life places that you have a strong spatial sense of, and to use them to order information by following a path around the space is very useful. The other is the major rule for memorizing numbers, encoding each digit into a phoneme so that a short number, like a credit card number or a phone number, (or a medical record number!) can become a distinctive word.

I would tell you all the reasons I wasn't overly impressed with this book, but I have forgotten the reasons. Just kidding, it was a decent book, but it certainly dragged on.

I personally would only suggest this book to people who have never read another book on memory or memory competitions before. If you have read other memory related books, this one could be a bit of a snooze.

I saw Josh's Ted Talk on the subject years ago and loved it, so I finally got around to reading the book. As others have noted, this is NOT a how-to book and it is NOT an in depth study of how memory works. It's instead the story of how Josh became a memory champion and the things he learned along the way. That said, I enjoyed the story; and the things he learned were fascinating.

I thought I'd already rated this book, but it looks like I hadn't or else it was a different edition. I loved this book. It was fascinating and opened my eyes to how the brain works with memories. Great story driven content. Definitely recommended reading.

Quick read (~ 3 hours for me) that included not too much I hadn't heard before. But the story telling is fun and reading about the training parts was nice. Now I'm even more sure that memorizing in that way just isn't for me.

I picked this up fairly randomly via Audible but was fascinated within the first chapter. The author, a journalist, covers the U.S. memory competition and becomes interested in how the "memory athletes" actually do their amazing feats of memory, since studies have found that the people who win these events are neither smarter not more successful in their careers than anybody else.. This line of questioning leads him into the world of professional memory competition and along the way he examines the history of memory (including the history of reading and writing, and the history of how we learn anything at all) and why we find some things (like geographic spaces) so much easier to remember than others (like numbers) and the mental tricks that memory athletes use to convert hard to remember things into easy to remember things.

This is not a self help book, it is not intended to teach you all the memory tricks the author investigated, although you'll definitely pick up a few ideas and tricks along the way. It's really a story of the author's exploration of the past and present story of how we remember things, and his year long challenge to improve his own memory. Besides being a really interesting story, this raises a lot of other interesting questions such as how much do we NEED to remember now we have iPhones and external storage? Should the nature of education be changing in line with the continually reducing need to remember anything? It's a thoughtful book that really makes you think about memory, how our own minds work, and what memory really means to us.

Highly recommended for anyone with a bad memory, a good memory, or the slightest interest in how our minds and memories actually work.

I was actually kind of dreading reading this, though it seems like my kind of thing. I guess I was expecting something dry and self-helpy. Yeah, that's right, I said 'self-helpy'.

Foer has a good voice and his experience is interesting enough. What makes this an interesting read for me, though, is his research into the brain, the history of memory, and the education system.

I am very interested in memory. My memory is better than average, and it used to be a lot better than it is now. Ever since I learned there are memory championships, I thought it might be fun to do some memory training, but didn't really know where to start.

This was a great book to read because it gives just enough practical information so I could understand the processes of memorization, but most of the book looked at memory in scientific, historic, and social points of view.

I like hearing about the ins and outs of a group of people who all are interested (or obsessed!) with a certain subject, and this book brought me inside the group.

I also enjoyed Foer's writing style, it was fun and easy to read. He is good at explaining things, and making potentially boring subject matter seem lively.

Because the author did a lot of research on memory to write the book, he mentioned pretty much every book on the subject. Now I have list of more books I can read.

An excellent non-fiction read! A great story intertwined with history, theory, science, and philosophy.

I had learned the major system in my youth after reading Furst's work and used it to memorize multiple decks of cards as well as the first 5,000 digits of pi. Now that I know the POA system exists, perhaps I'll have to improve upon the compression in it and dip my toe back in to the world of memory improvement?

I'm terrifically shocked to realize that in 1990, I was practiced enough that I could have rivaled the US memory champ of 2006! Sadly I haven't practiced in years, so I'd have some significant ground to make up to get back there. Hmmm....