Joshua Foer won the 2006 US Memory Championship. Moonwalking with Einstein tells the story of his transformation from normal, forgetful human being to champion of recall.
How many phone numbers can you commit to memory? Why bother, you might ask, when it doesn’t take much mental exertion to use a phone book? Well, turn to Joshua Foer for the answer.
A science journalist, Foer was no mnemonics enthusiast, much less someone with a noteworthy power of retention. “Among the things I regularly forget: where I put my car keys (where I put my car, for that matter); the food in the oven; that it’s “its” and not “it’s”; my girlfriend’s birthday...,” writes Foer, an unlikely entrant to the world of memory-mania who went on to win the US Memory Championship in 2006. In Moonwalking with Einstein Foer chronicles his fascinating journey, woven around interesting scientific facts about memory, unravelling some of the most famous mnemonic techniques of all time. Given that the book is an attempt to delve past the complicated frontier of human memory, it helps that the author conforms to the conventions of linear narrative.
Foer was killing time at the Weightlifting Hall of Fame and Museum on his way to the Leigh Valley for a reporting assignment when he read the caption “the strongest man in the world” next to a photo. He found himself idly wondering what would happen if the strongest man in the world met the smartest. Some Googling led him to discover Ben Pridmore, a memory sport champion who could breezily memorise the precise order of 1,528 random digits within an hour, or recall the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards in 32 seconds. It’s Foer’s skilful placement of rendezvous and encounters with the likes of Pridmore — mental athletes, as they prefer to be called — that makes the narrative flow smoothly.
The one encounter that leads up to Foer’s victory in the memory championship is with Ed Cooke. This 24-year-old grand master from England — who was unrelenting in getting Foer to accept him as memory coach — is the archetypal geek. But, for all the memory feats he can perform, Cooke insists that his “memory is quite average”, and that “even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly”. However, an unconvinced Foer decides to test the limits of his own memory.
His quest brings him into contact with Tony Buzan, a 67-year-old British educator and self-styled guru for whom memory, more than anything, is a gainful business (Michael Jackson once spent $343,000 on Buzan’s memory-boosting services). Memory may have made Buzan a lot of money, but it was once a measure of intellect.
Foer’s account of preparing for the memory championship is interspersed with many historical factoids of memory. As he points out, the art of remembering was one of the most hallowed arts of ancient and medieval times. Superior memory was considered a virtue. Memory techniques then “got wrapped up with the occult and esoteric Hermetic traditions of the Renaissance, and by the nineteenth century they had been relegated to carnival sideshows and tacky self-help books — only to be resurrected in the last decades of the twentieth century for this bizarre and singular competition [world and country-specific memory championships]”.
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Even as Foer attempts to improve his recall quotient to win the memory contest, Cooke — yes, relentless pursuing does make him Foer’s coach — introduces him to one of the most intriguing mnemonic techniques of all time. The chapter titled “The Memory Palace” is sure to have even the most forgetful of mortals temporarily shed their misgivings about their memory. Cooke scribbles a long list of assorted items for Foer to memorise. Readers would get a vicarious thrill as Foer, as instructed by Cooke, visualises a familiar edifice (his childhood home, in this case) and places the items — each of which he imagines in an evocative manner — at various places in the imagined structure. The result: a large bottle of “pickled garlic” finds a place in Foer’s driveway, a tub of “cottage cheese” with Claudia Schiffer in it stands at the front door (if it’s vivid, it’s memorable), “peat-smoked salmon” rests on a piano, and so on.
Foer has an intuitive sense of what the reader wants next. Creating and filling in memory palaces is all very well, but what about memorising the order of cards in a pack or long strings of random numbers? “The general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colourful, so exciting, so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it,” Cooke explains to Foer. Interestingly, the oddity of the book’s title springs from Foer’s attempt to reconstruct images in order to speedily recollect the order of a pack of cards — the four of spades, king of hearts and three of diamonds are all embedded in the absurd vision of “moonwalking with Einstein”.
While writing about decoding the mystery behind exceptional memories, Foer deliberately adds a dash of the prosaic to the fantastic. For instance, Cooke, who could recite back 252 random digits with ease, couldn’t call to mind the author’s last name after their first meeting.
Moreover, Foer’s fixation with techniques is not undivided. He admits that for all their uniqueness and old-world charm, memory techniques serve little purpose in today’s fast-paced world. At one juncture, he even draws a comparison between memorisation practices and the peacock’s tail, “impressive not for its utility but for its profound lack of utility”.
Nonetheless, towards the end you will see Foer seated among distinguished mental athletes, competing in the 2006 US Memory Championship — and, lo, he wins. This is where the book hits that rare sweet spot between science journalism and adventure, reality TV-style.
In Moonwalking, Foer instantly strikes you as an unassuming, self-doubting individual. Then he carefully leads you to believe that what he aspires to is within your reach. Foer’s belief in deliberate practice touches you. You find yourself cheering for the dark horse as he battles on. And finally, just when it occurs to you that he has moved far ahead of the ordinary forgetful world by winning the memory battle, you draw comfort from his confession that for all the memory tricks he can pull off, he was “still stuck with the same old shoddy memory that misplaced car and car keys”.
MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN
The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Author: Joshua Foer
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 320
Price: Rs 550
