Title Moonwalking with Einstein

Author Joshua Foer

Year Published 2011

Kind of Book Science/History/Journalism

How strongly I recommend it 8/10 

My Impressions: This book is to the memory community what "The Game" was to the pick-up artist community. A super popular book about one person's journey into it which exposed a ton of people to the community. This is a great first book for people interested in mnemonics, memory techniques, and the history of memory. It is not a good book for learning HOW to do memory techniques, as he doesn't really get into the how-to very much. Nevertheless, it will likely whet the appetite to learn and Josh Foerers personal story is pretty rad.

Date Read Aug 2019

Practical Takeaways

  • For Remembering names: associate the sound of a person's name with something you can clearly imagine (vivid, lewd, bizarre, funny the better)

  • When remembering names turn Bakers into bakers, Foers into 4's, and Reagans into Ray Guns

  • Change your routines regularly

  • Take vacations

  • Have as many experiences as possible that can serve to anchor your memories

  • Wear a bike helmet when you're riding a bike

  • Make several different memory palaces with different locations to hold different sets of information you want to remember

  • Use the house you grew up in for your first memory palace-

  • Make the images you are trying to remember multi-sensory (smell, see, taste, feel them)

  • To remember to email someone imagine the person you need to email as she-male sending the email

  • Begin collecting architecture for your memory palaces

  • Make memorizing a part of your daily routine

  • Have a 30minute reflection period at sunset everyday

  • Develop the habit of writing in the back of every book a short critical judgement, so as to have some general idea of what the book was about and what you thought of it-Michel de Montaigne

  • In order to stay out of the autonomous stage and in the associative stage;1)always be focusing on your technique 2)stay goal-oriented 3)get constant and immediate feedback on your performance

  • Focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces you're working on

  • Focus on quality of practice, not quantity

  • Watch yourself fail and learn from your mistakes

  • Put yourself in the mind of someone far more competent at the task you're trying to master, and try to figure out how that person works through problems

  • Read essays by the great thinkers and try to reconstruct the authors arguments according to your own logic. Then open up the essay and see how your reconstruction compares to the original-Benjamin Franklin

  • Set the metronome 10 to 20 percent faster than you are comfortable with and try keeping up until gradually you stop making mistakes

  • Force yourself to type faster than feels comfortable and allow yourself to make mistakes

  • Don't use your mother in any lewd mnemonic scenes

  • Memorize quotes (to seem more legitimate)-Samuel Gompers

  • First teach students how to learn, then teach them what to learn-Tony Buzan

Big Ideas

  • Experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience

  • We forget how rarely we forget

  • The more you know, the easier it is to know more

  • The more readily accessible information is (either in a book or online) the less chance our mind will remember it

  • The more we pack our lives with memories, the slower time seems to go

  • Experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience

  • Memory techniques are all about converting things our mind isn't good at remembering (numbers, dates, words) into things our mind has evolved to remember (locations, bizarre images etc.)

  • Writing is a way of externalizing memory and preserving part of ourselves after we die

  • Humans are very, very, good at learning spaces and not so good at remembering abstract things like numbers

  • There is nothing special about mental athletes (they just learn and practice memory techniques)

  • Epic Poems were created because they are easy to memorize due to their rhyme scheme, visual imagery, and how each verse is written in a chunk

  • After years and years of epic poems getting passed down the harder-to-remember parts were forgotten and what was left was easy to remember images, and rhymes

  • Monotony and routine make it feel like time flew by in retrospect

  • Novelty and variation of routine make it feel like a lot of time has passed in retrospect

  • Life seems to speed up as we get older because our lives become more routinized 

Surprising Facts

  • The more we pack our lives with memories, the slower time seems to go

  • There is nothing special about mental athletes (they just learn and practice memory techniques)

  • Socrates feared that writing would lead the culture down a treacherous path toward intellectual and moral decay

Unknown Terms

Memory Palace (journey method,method of loci, ars memorativa): invented by Simonides of Ceos 1.converting something unmemorable into a series of engrossing visual images and mentally arrange them within a space you know well

Baker/Baker paradox: People are more likely to remember that a man is a baker than that his last name is baker. We remember images and professions better than names

Working Memory: a collection of brain systems that hold on to whatever is rattling around in our consciousness at the present moment

Phonological Loop: the little voice we can hear inside our head when we talk to ourselves

Declarative memories (explicit memories): things you know you remember consciously (like the color of your car)

Nondeclarative memories (implicit memories): things you know unconsciously (like how to read a bike)

Ribot's Law: the phenomena where most recent memories blur first in most amnesics, while distant memories retain their clarity. Named after the nineteenth century French psychologist who first noticed it

Infantile Amnesia: Until the age of three or four, almost nothing happens to us that we are able to consciously recall as an adult

Intensive Reading: The reading of one or a couple of books over and over again

Extensive Reading: The reading of many books once without sustained focus

PAO Person-Action-Object: A system for remember numbers in which every two digit number from 00 to 00 is represented by a single image of a person performing an action on an object. The associations are entirely arbitrary and have to be learned in advance

OK plateau: the point at which you decide you're OK with how good you are at something, turn it on autopilot, and stop improving.

Deliberate Practice: 1. refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.2. Not lazy practice-Barbra Oakley

Rote Learning (Rote memorization): a memorization technique based on repetition. The idea is that one will be able to quickly recall the meaning of the material the more one repeats it.

Mind Mapping: a system for notetaking and brainstorming created by Tony Buzan where one draws lines off main points to subsidiary points, which branch out further to tertiary points, and so on. Ideas are distilled into as few words as possible and whenever possible are illustrated with images. It's a kind of outline, exploded radically across the page in a rainbow of colors, a web of associations that look like a prickly bush, or a neuoron's branching dendrites. And because it is full of colorful images arranged in order across the page, it functions as a kind of memory palace scrawled on paper.