Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

The preliminaries

• The author visited the 2005 USA Memory Championship, where mental athletes were challenged with a slew of tests, such as:
  • Memorizing a fifty-line unpublished poem;
  • Within 15 minutes, memorizing 99 photographic head shots, with first and last names;
  • Within 15 minutes, memorizing 300 random words;
  • Within 5 minutes, memorizing 1,000 random digits;
  • Within 5 minutes, memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards.
• One of the contestants said that anyone could do what they do–it was just a matter of learning to think in more memorable ways
  • Romans used memorization techniques, which flowered in the Middle Ages as a way for the pious to memorize religious texts.
    • But, in the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg made books into mass-produced commodities, and it was no longer that important to memorize.
• Our lives now inundate us with new information, but our brains capture so little of it–and because our culture is built of externalized memories, there seems to be little need to memorize.
  • But memory decline is not necessarily a natural function of being human; we can train ourselves to have better memories.

Our memories, generally

• A memory, at the most basic level, is a pattern of connections between neurons. Every sensation that we remember, every thought, transforms our brains by altering the connections within the vast network of 100 billion neurons.
  • So, if thinking about the word “coffee” makes you think about the color black, breakfast, and bitterness, that’s due to a cascade of electrical impulses moving in a physical pathway inside your brain, which encodes the concept of coffee with concepts of blackness, breakfast, and bitterness.
  • The brain’s nonlinear associative nature makes it impossible to consciously search for memories in an orderly way. A memory only pops directly into consciousness if it is cued by another node.
• Most psychologists think that our brains function as perfect recorders–all our memories are stored somewhere in the cerebral attic. This conviction originated from a set of experiments carried out from 1934 to 1954 by a Canadian neurosurgeon named WIlder Penfield.
  • He used electrical probes to stimulate the brains of epileptic patients, and when the probe touched parts of their temporal lobes, the patients started describing vivid, long-forgotten memories. He believed this meant that the brain permanently recorded everything to which it pays any degree of conscious attention.
  • Despite this, it is clear that the fading, mutating, and eventual disappearance of memories over time is a real phenomenon.
• In 1956, a psychologist named George Miller published a critical paper about memory, where he ultimately concluded that we can only think about roughly seven things at a time.
  • When a new thought enters our head, it doesn’t immediately go to long-term memory. It exists in a temporary limbo known as working memory. Our working memory stinks, but it stinks within very specific parameters.
  • Most people are able to remember seven, plus-or-minus two, digits.
    • Most people memorize these by repeating them over and over again to themselves in the “phonological loop.” The loop acts as an echo, producing a short-term memory buffer that stores sounds for just a couple seconds.
  • Chunking is a way to store information directly in long-term memory.
    • It decreases the number of items to remember by increasing the size of each item.
      • For example, phone numbers are broken into two parts plus an area code, and credit card numbers are split into groups of four.
      • In another example, one mental athlete took the number 3,492 and turned it into 3 minutes and 49 point 2 seconds, which is a near-world-record mile time. 
      • This method–of taking meaningless bits of information, running them through filters that applied meaning to them–makes that information much stickier.
• A Grandmaster of Memory named Ed Cooke explained that to make a name memorable, you have to create a vivid image that anchors your visual memory of the person’s face to a visual memory connected to the person’s name.
  • This mnemonic trick works, as illustrated by the Baker/baker paradox.
    • A researcher shows two people the same photograph of a face and tells one of them that the guy is a baker and the other that his last name is Baker.
    • A few days later, the researcher shows the same people the same photograph, and asks for the accompanying word.
    • The person who was told the man’s profession is much more likely to remember it than the person who was given his last name.
      • When you hear that the guy in the photo is a baker, that fact gets embedded in a whole network of ideas about what it means to be a baker: he cooks bread, wears a big white hat, etc. 
      • Whereas the name Baker is tethered only to a memory of the person’s face.

The most forgetful man in the world

• There’s an 84-year-old man named EP, whose memory extends back only as far as his most recent thought–he is one of the most severe cases of amnesia ever documented.
  • When he was younger, a virus known as a herpes complex chewed through his brain, creating two walnut-sized holes in his medial temporal lobes.
  • Memories reside in the neocortex, but the hippocampal area makes them stick. His hippocampus was destroyed, so he’s like a camcorder without a working tape: he sees, but doesn’t record.
    • He has general knowledge of the world, and his short-term memory is unimpaired. 
    • He has two types of amnesia–anterograde (can’t form new memories) and retrograde (can’t recall old memories, at least not since around 1950).
  • Without memory, EP has fallen completely out of time. He has no stream of consciousness. He lives a sedentary life completely free of worry.
• Our lives are structured by our memories of events.
  • Event X happened just before the big vacation. I was doing Y the first summer after I learned to drive. Z happened the weekend after I got my first job. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events. 
  • Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it.
    • That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, take vacations to new places, and have as many new experiences as possible that can anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.
• EP was still capable of unconscious remembering, though.
  • Scientists generally divide memories into two types: declarative and nondeclarative.
    • Declarative memories are things you know you remember, like the color of your car. EP had lost the ability to make new declarative memories.
      • Within declarative memories, there’s a further distinction between:
        • Semantic memories: memories for facts and concepts; these are located outside of time and space, as free-floating pieces of knowledge.
          • Knowing that breakfast is the first meal of the day is a semantic memory.
        • Episodic memories: memories of the experiences of our own lives. They are located in time and space: they have a where and when attached to them.
          • Remembering that you had pancakes for breakfast is an episodic memory.
    • Nondeclarative memories are things you know unconsciously, like how to ride a bike.
      • This unconscious remembering doesn’t seem to pass through the same short-term memory buffer as declarative memories do. It relies on different parts of the brain.
    • Each time we think about a memory, we integrate it more deeply into our web of other memories, and therefore make it more stable and less likely to be dislodged.
      • But in doing so, we also transform the memory and reshape it, sometimes to the point that our memories of events bear only a passing resemblance to what actually happened.

The memory palace

• The most basic principle of mnemonics is elaborative encoding.
  • Our memories weren’t built for the modern world–they evolved through a process of natural selection in a very different environment.
    • Most of the evolution that shaped our ancestors’ brains began around 1.8 million years ago and ended 10,000 years ago.
    • Our early ancestors needed to remember where to find food and resources, the route home, which plants were edible, etc.
• The principle underlying all memory techniques is that our brains don’t remember all types of information equally well.
  • As excellent as we are at remembering visual imagery, we’re terrible at remembering other kinds of information, like lists of words or numbers.
  • The point of memory techniques is to take the kinds of memories our brains aren’t good at holding onto and transform them into the kinds of memories our brains were built for.
    • So, the goal is to convert something unmemorable, like a string of numbers or a shopping list, into a series of engrossing visual images and mentally arrange them within an imagined space, and suddenly those forgettable items become unforgettable.
  • Natural memory is a memory that’s embedded in our minds, while artificial memory is a memory that’s strengthened by training and discipline.
    • Artificial memory has two basic components: images and places.
      • Images represent what you want to remember. Places, or loci, are where those images are stored.
    • The idea is to create a space in your mind, a place that you know well and can easily visualize, and then fill that place with images representing whatever you want to remember.
      • They can be big or small, indoors or outdoors, real or imaginary, so long as there’s some semblance of order that links one locus to the next.
• The principle of the memory palace is to use your spatial memory to structure and store information whose order comes less naturally.
  • For instance, place the items of your to-do list along a route that snakes around your childhood home. To recall the list, just retrace the steps in your imagination.
  • It’s important to try to remember images multisensorily.
    • The more associative hooks there are, the more securely it gets embedded into the network of things you already know.
  • When creating these memories, the funnier, lewder, and more bizarre, the better.
    • What distinguishes a great mnemonist is the ability to create these sorts of lavish images on the fly–it requires creativity.
    • For the author’s shopping list: An enormous jar of pickled garlic spilling in the driveway, a woman in the living room scrubbing herself with a sponge in a tub of cottage cheese, fish curing on a piano, wine bottles laughing in the kitchen, hula hoops dancing on the dining room table!
• To really utilize this, you need to create a stockpile of memory palaces.
  • The author went for walks around the neighborhood, visited friends’ houses, the local playground, museums, his high school, elementary school, etc., while focusing on wallpaper, the arrangement of furniture, and other details.
    • In each building, he carved a loci that could serve as a place for memories.

The end of remembering

• For early writers, a trained memory wasn’t just about easy access to information; it was about strengthening personal ethics and becoming a more complete person.
  • The question of how to best memorize a piece of text has vexed mnemonists for centuries.
  • Cicero thought that the best way to memorize a speech was point-by-point, not word-by-word, because perfect recall of words is something our brains simply aren’t very good at.
    • Make one image for each major topic you want to cover, and place each of those images at a locus. 
  • Without special training, our memories tend to only pay attention to the big picture.
    • And it makes sense that our brains would work like that. Natural selection has honed it to be efficient at other tasks.
  • The brain is always making mistakes, forgetting, misremembering.
    • Writing is how we overcome those essential biological constraints. Writing allows ideas to be passed across generations, without fear of the kind of natural mutation that is necessarily part of oral traditions.
• But now, our gadgets have eliminated the need to remember such things at all.
  • Forgotten phone numbers and birthdays represent minor erosions of our everyday memory, but they’re part of a larger story of how we’ve supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of technological crutches.
    • These technologies have changed how we think and how we use our brain.

The OK plateau

• In the 1960s, psychologists Paul FItts and Michael Posner described the three stages a person experiences when acquiring a new skill.
  • First is the “cognitive stage,” where you’re intellectualizing the task and figuring out how to accomplish it more proficiently. 
  • Second is the “associative stage,” where you’re concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally getting better at it.
  • Third is the “autonomous stage,” when you figure that you’ve gotten as good as you need to get and you’re basically running on autopilot.
    • Here, you begin to lose conscious control over what you’re doing.
      • This is a nice little feature of evolution–the less you have to focus on the repetitive tasks of everyday life, the more you can concentrate on the stuff that really matters. 
      • In other words, you’ve hit the OK plateau, the point at which you decide you’re OK with how good you are at something and stop improving.
• We all reach OK plateaus in most things we do.
  • But performance psychologists have found over and over again that with the right kind of concerted effort, we can do better.
    • Specifically, you can engage in a very directed, highly focused routine called “deliberate practice:
      • Focusing on their technique;
      • Staying goal-oriented; and 
      • Getting constant and immediate feedback
      • Otherwise put, they force themselves to stay in the “cognitive phase.” 
• With your memory, try to think of it as a skill-based characteristic (like learning an instrument), as opposed to something immutable (you have brown eyes).

Intelligence and memorization

• What does it mean to be intelligent? As the role of memory in the conventional sense has diminished, what should replace it? And for schools, why should we load kids’ memories with facts if they’re ultimately entering a world of externalized memories?
• Memorization drills weren’t just about transferring information from teacher to student; they were thought to have a constructive effect on kids’ brains that would benefit them throughout their lives.
  • And then a group of progressive educators, led by American philosopher John Dewey, began pushing for “child-centered” education, with rote memorization replaced with “experiential learning.” So, for example, students would study biology not by memorizing plant anatomy but by planting seeds.
    • Progressive education reform has discredited memorization as oppressive and stultifying–not only a waste but also harmful.
  • However, this means that students are sent into the world without the basic level of cultural knowledge necessary to be good citizens.
    • If some of the goals of education is to create inquisitive, knowledgeable people, then you need to give students the most basic knowledge to guide them through a life of learning.
• This is what the art of memory was ultimately most useful for. It’s not just for recording but also a tool of invention and composition
  • The goal of memory training is to develop the ability to leap from topic to topic and make new connections between old ideas.
  • Crucially, the more you know, the easier it is to know more.
    • Memory is like a web that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.
    • Memory and intelligence do seem to go hand-in-hand, like a muscular frame and an athletic disposition.
      • There’s a feedback loop between the two. The more tightly any new piece of information can be embedded into the web of information we already know, the more likely it is to be remembered.

• A detailed history of how writing came to be
• The author’s remarkable journey to the USA Memory Championship
• The best way to memorize long strings of numbers (using a technique known as the “Major System”), where you use a code to convert numbers into phonetic sounds
• The author’s meetings with Daniel Tammet, a hyperpolyglot (someone who can speak more than six languages), who could perform complex multiplication and division in his head, and much more
• The author’s meeting with Kim Peek, aka Rain Man, the prodigious savant (inspired Dustin Hoffman’s character in the movie), who arguably has the best memory in the world–the fact that some people can become savants so spontaneously suggests that those exceptional abilities lie dormant, to some degree, in all of us