Book SummaryMoonwalking With Einstein, by Joshua Foer

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Moonwalking With Einstein

In 2005, journalist Joshua Foer (Josh) reported on the US Memory Championships. Many of the competitors he interviewed told him that they weren’t geniuses. They simply used memory techniques, and the techniques were so accessible anyone could learn them—including Josh. Grand Master of Memory Ed Cooke offered to train Josh in the memory arts and Josh, considering it a good journalistic experiment, agreed.

Over the next year, Josh learned the memory arts from Ed but also studied memory more broadly, interviewing famous mnemonists, savants, scientists, and researchers. Moonwalking with Einstein is a compilation of everything he learned and the story of his year training to be a mnemonist, or mental athlete.

What Is Memory and How Does it Work?

Science doesn’t fully understand how memory works yet, but it does know that our brains are a network of neurons, and an individual memory is a group of connections between neurons.

Additionally, memories aren’t stored in any linear way; they’re stored in a web of associations. For example, thinking of the word “baker” would probably also make you think about bread, the smell of yeast, your favorite bakery, and so on.

To remember something consciously, we need a cue. For example, if you’re trying to remember what your friend’s car looks like, you might have to think more generally about your friend or about cars in order to “search” the web of associations that will eventually lead you to the memory of your friend’s car.

There are several different types of memories:

• Internal. Internal memories include the information you keep inside your heads.
• External. External memories include the information you keep outside your heads, such as what you write down on Post-it notes or take pictures of.
• Working. The working memory is in charge of whatever you’re currently focusing on. It’s a filter between your perception and your long term memory. It can only hold about five to nine different things at once.
• Long-term. The long-term memory stores things you need to remember for longer than a few moments.
• Declarative. Declarative memories are individual conscious memories. There are two types of declarative memories:
  • Episodic memories are memories of experiences. They have a place and time attached to them. For example, the time you went surfing in Hawaii is an episodic memory.
  • Semantic memories are memories of concepts and facts. For example, the fact that surfing is a water sport in which you stand on a board is a semantic memory.
• Nondeclarative. Nondeclarative memories are unconscious memories such as motor skills and habits. For example, riding a bike.

Whenever you think or make a memory, you physically change your brain. You can form new neurons or rearrange the neurons you already have. Additionally, it’s possible to improve your memory. While there are some people with naturally incredible memories, such as savants, anyone can improve their memory using memory techniques.

The human memory evolved to be good at remembering images and places because these sorts of memories are important for survival. The brain is also naturally good at remembering things that it finds interesting, such as sex and humor, and things that form patterns, such as songs or rhyming poems.

Memory and Other Mental Faculties

Memory is related to many of the other things that go on in our brains, such as identity, expertise, intelligence, and our perception of time.

Because our memories are stored in a web of associations in our brains, whenever we encounter something new, our interpretation of it is filtered by what we already know. As a result, our memories of the past are constantly influencing our actions in the present. We behave the way we do because of our memories, and, therefore, our memories shape our identities.

Our memories also affect our expertise and intelligence. Interestingly, scientists have discovered that expertise isn’t a function of intuition or intelligence—it’s a matter of perceiving things and relating them to the patterns of associations we already have in our heads. Experts have seen so many versions of the same thing that when they come across a situation, they can instantly remember the most relevant previous experience and apply the correct response without even thinking.

• For example, chess players can look at a board and come up with the ideal move within five seconds. They don’t have to consciously plan out moves in advance or try to predict what their opponent will do because they’re so familiar with board positions, they know how things will play out.

Finally, memory has a large effect on how we perceive the passing of time. Contrary to the old adage about time flying when you’re having fun, time appears to pass more quickly when we’re bored and more slowly when we’re doing interesting new things and making new memories. For example, as you get older, do you feel like time passes more quickly? This is because you’re making fewer memories than you did as a child when you were encountering things for the very first time.

We remember events in relation to other events, so the more memories we can lay down, the denser our network of associations. The denser the web, the more time it feels like we have. Some people make new memories with the express purpose of making their lives feel longer.

Forgetting

Scientists used to think that people remembered everything that had ever happened to them, and memories only became inaccessible because the cues were lost over time. However, this is not the case—memories do fade over time at the cellular level.

Memories fade most quickly in the hours and days after forming. Anything that’s left after a month tends to stay with us long-term. Interestingly, our memories change over time. We tend to remember our oldest memories in third person, as if we were watching...

Moonwalking With Einstein Summary Shortform Introduction

Moonwalking with Einstein is part memoir, part pop science. Author Joshua Foer became interested in memory when he tried to find out who the smartest person in the world was. There wasn’t a quantitive answer—some people measure intelligence by IQ, whereas others use scientific or artistic achievement as the benchmark. However, in his search, Josh did come across someone who was, if not the world’s smartest person, at least a strong candidate: Ben Pridmore, the reigning world memory champion.

At the time, Josh was working as a journalist, and as a result of his new interest in memory, he decided to write a piece for...

Moonwalking With Einstein Summary Part 1: The Science of Memory | Chapter 1: What Is Memory?

Part 1 (Chapters 1-5) covers Josh’s research on memory, including science, history, and culture. Chapter 1 explains what memory is from a scientific perspective.

Our brains are made up of a web of neurons, and physiologically, a memory is an arrangement of connections between neurons. Whenever you think or encounter a sensation, this alters the connections. For example, thinking of the word “chocolate” might also make you think about the taste of sweetness, the color brown, and Valentine’s Day.

However, science doesn’t know yet how cells actually “contain” a memory. No one has seen a memory. Scientists have a good idea of what happens between and inside brain cells, and they can look at which parts of the brain light up when people are thinking, but they don’t know that much about thought and memory themselves.

What science does know is that we only consciously remember things when cued. Because our brains are a web rather than a straight pathway, we can’t search our brains in any linear way. We remember something when we think about something else that’s connected to it in the web of associations. For example, if you met someone whose name you’ve forgotten, you...

Moonwalking With Einstein Summary Chapter 2: Memory and Other Mental Faculties

Having covered memory as its own entity, we can now consider it in relation to many other intangibles such as expertise, identity, and our perception of time.

Expertise and Memory

How are memory and expertise related? Let's say you're an expert cab driver—you have a great memory for directions and you never get lost. Which came first—your great memory for directions, which led you to a career driving a cab? Or your career driving a cab, which required you to develop a great memory for directions?

Before we can understand how memory impacts expertise, we need to understand the general process of becoming an expert. K. Anders Ericsson (who studied SF) has been researching memory and expertise for decades. He’s found that expertise comes from perception and memories, not intuition or reasoning. When an expert encounters a situation, they don’t have to think consciously or analyze; they simply recognize a pattern they’ve seen before. They know what information matters, what doesn’t, and they instinctively know how to apply it in the most appropriate way.

**Experts do a form of chunking—they use memories that are already in their brains to make associations and...

Moonwalking With Einstein Summary Chapter 3: Forgetting

Now that we’ve explored the facets of memory, it’s time to look at its opposite—forgetfulness. Do our brains ever actually forget things, or do memories simply become inaccessible after a certain amount of time? Have our brains permanently and perfectly recorded everything that’s ever happened to us, and we’ve only forgotten because we don’t have the right cue?

In the 1980s, most psychologists believed that we never forgot anything. There were a couple of studies that seemed to support this:

• From 1934 to 1954, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield probed the brains of epileptic patients. He was trying to cure epilepsy, but what he discovered was that when he probed temporal lobes, the patients suddenly remembered things they’d forgotten in vivid detail.
• From 1978 to 1984, psychologist Willem Wagenaar kept a diary of memorable events that occurred each day. In 1984, he looked back at his records and searched his memory for the events. He had no memory of the oldest 20% of memories and asked people he’d been with during the time to cue him. Once cued, he was able to remember the event.

However, over the last 30 years, psychologists have changed their minds. **Neuroscientists...

Moonwalking With Einstein Summary Chapter 4: A History of Memory

It took a long time for humans to learn how our memories work and how to supplement them with external memory aids. Chapter 4 describes the history of memory.

In early human history, there was no alphabet, no paper, no writing system—the only way to retain things was memory. Everything was communicated orally, often through poetry or song, because as we learned in Chapter 1, the brain is better at remembering things with structure. When reciting very structured poetry that includes constraints such as imagery, meter, and alliteration, if you forget a word, there are so few options for what it can be that it comes back to you quickly.

Oral communication, by nature, morphs over time. If an easier-to-remember turn of phrase comes up, that’s the version that’s passed on. Unimportant details or tangents fall away.

For example, critics think that the Odyssey and Iliad are collections of songs that were shared orally and only written down later. Both works contain mnemonic devices such as repetition, and almost every part of the two poems fits into some sort of pattern. For example, Aphrodite is always referred to as “laughing Aphrodite,” regardless of her emotional...

Moonwalking With Einstein Summary Chapter 5: Memory in the Educational System

As we learned in Chapter 4, memory training used to be part of a classical education. Today, the educational system looks down on rote memorization. What happened?

Early education was based on military training, and the military’s goal wasn’t to train people to think, it was to train people to follow orders. Therefore, at the beginning of the twentieth century, rote memorization was the norm. Students memorized all sorts of information including speeches, dates, poetry, and times tables.

Educators used to think that memorization was good for the brain. People weren’t just learning the facts that they were memorizing, they were training their memories. Educators believed in “faculty psychology,” the idea that the mind was made up of individual “faculties” that could be developed individually.

The rote memorization approach had its critics and reformers over time:

• Philosopher Francis Bacon considered the memory arts no more than a party trick.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote a novel about a child who learned by experiencing life rather than going to school and memorizing facts in traditional subjects.
• Dr. Joseph Mayer Rice visited schools in New York and...

Moonwalking With Einstein Summary Part 2: The Arts of Memory | Chapter 6: The Basics of Memory Techniques

We learned in Part 1 that the human brain is naturally good at remembering images and places but bad at remembering semantic memories like lists of numbers of words. In Part 2, we’ll learn how to use memory techniques to transform information into a form that our brain is naturally inclined to remember.

Additionally, we’ll learn to transform information into something meaningful that relates to memories we already have. We remember new things better when we can associate them with what we already remember.

Anyone can learn the arts of memory. Creativity helps because it allows you to quickly create images, but you don’t have to be a genius or a savant. You just need to pay attention to life and learn the techniques.

The Method of Loci and Memory Palaces

The method of loci is a way of organizing memory storage in your brain. Normally, our memories are stored in random, semantic networks, but if we can be intentional about storage, we can more easily recall information. The method of loci is the foundation for most memory techniques.

The method involves two stages: **transforming information into an image and then placing the image into a memory of a...

Shortform Exercise: Create Memorable Images

Our brains are naturally good at remembering images. Transform information into visuals in order to remember it better.

Write down the first three items on your to-do lists. (If you don't currently have a to-do list, you can use this example: 1) buy milk, 2) make a dentist appointment, 3) bake a cake.)

Shortform Exercise: Place Images in Your Memory Palace

Our brains are naturally good at remembering places. Mentally place images into a memory of a real place in order to remember those images better.

Think of a place you know very well, such as your childhood home. Picture it in your mind. What are some important locations in it? Consider the bottom of the driveway, front porch, shower, and so on.

Moonwalking With Einstein Summary Chapter 7: Memorizing Words

In Chapter 6, we learned the fundamental memory technique of the method of loci, which involves creating images to later place in a memory palace. Chapter 7 covers how to transform words into such images.

Our brains aren’t very good at perfect recall because it’s evolutionarily ineffective. The brain uses 20% of the oxygen we breathe and 25% of our glucose even though it only comprises 2% of our body mass. Our brains tend to drop words because the actual words aren’t important—it’s the meaning behind them that matters.

For example, in the Watergate hearings, John Dean reported conversations word-for-word. When compared to a tape recording of the actual conversations (Dean didn’t know about the existence of the recorder), there were discrepancies. Dean didn’t get the quotes word-for-word and sometimes he didn’t even get the content right. Overall, though, he remembered the gist of things correctly.

There were two historical approaches to memorizing a speech or text:

• Memoria rerum, which is remembering the meaning of the words. This was the preferred method.
  • For example, Cicero suggested a speechwriter creating a single image for each topic.
• _Memoria...

Shortform Exercise: Memorize Words Using the Methodical Method

Words are easiest to memorize when you transform them into images.

Consider the sentence, “I like cake.” You could transform this sentence into an image by picturing an eye (“I”) riding a bike (“like” rhymes with “bike”) towards a giant piece of cake. How else could you picture it?

Moonwalking With Einstein Summary Chapter 8: Memorizing Numbers and Cards

Chapter 7 covered how to transform words into images. Chapter 8 covers how to transform numbers and the order of decks of cards into images.

Memorizing Numbers

There are several, ever-evolving systems for memorizing numbers. (Techniques are always evolving because mental athletes push the sport to new levels at every competition.) This summary will discuss two methods: the Major System and PAO. The Major System is useful for things like phone numbers and credit cards, but to do the kind of heavy lifting required for international memory competitions, you’ll need to use PAO.

Major System

The “Major System” was invented by Johann Winkelmann and is a code for translating numbers into words, and then into images. Here are the steps:

• Learn the code. Each number has a letter or choice of two letters assigned to it:
  • 0=S
  • 1=T/D
  • 2=N
  • 3=M
  • 4=R
  • 5=L
  • 6=Sh/Ch
  • 7=K/G
  • 8=F/V
  • 9=P/B
• Transform numbers into sounds.
  • Example #1: 05=SL.
  • Example #2: 3928=MPNV
• Transform the sounds into words. You can add as many vowels as you need for sense, and you can transform...

Shortform Exercise: Employ the Major System

The major system is a method for remembering numbers. Here’s a review of the system:

• 0=S
• 1=T/D
• 2=N
• 3=M
• 4=R
• 5=L
• 6=Sh/Ch
• 7=K/G
• 8=F/V
• 9=P/B

What letters does the number 33 correspond to? How can you add vowels to turn these letters into a word?

Shortform Exercise: Employ the PAO System

The PAO system involves coming up with combinations of people, actions, and objects and assigning them to numbers or cards in order to create images.

Write down a sentence that involves a person acting on an object. (For example, an option might be Michael Phelps swimming in a pool.) Visualize this scene. It will represent the number 11.

Moonwalking With Einstein Summary Part 3: Notable Savants and Mnemonists | Chapter 9: Savants

Part 3 covers some of the characters the author encountered at memory competitions and some of the important people in memory studies and history. Chapter 10 will cover savants and Chapter 11 will cover mnemonists/mental athletes.

A “savant” used to be a person who was very intelligent and knowledgeable in several fields. These days, a savant is a person with a mental disability who has exceptional abilities in a narrow area, often to do with memory.

Dr. Darold Treffert informally divides savants into three categories:

1. Those who know a narrow set of trivia. For example, Treffert has a patient who can identify the model and year of a vacuum cleaner just from its sound.
2. Those who have a more general talent, such as music or art, that’s notable because of their disability.
3. Those who have abilities that would be exceptional even if not accompanied by a disability. These people are “prodigious savants.”

Note that none of these definitions consider whether or not someone has learned memory techniques.

Savantism expresses itself differently in different people, but the main thing savants have in common is damage to the left hemisphere of the brain. As...

Moonwalking With Einstein Summary Chapter 10: Mnemonists

Throughout the author’s year-long exploration of memory, mental athletes were constantly telling him that anyone can learn memory techniques. Unlike savants, there’s nothing unusual about the brains of mnemonists.

However, mnemonists do tend to belong to a particular subculture. They dress unusually, enjoy juggling, often don’t have impressive day jobs, and many of them are male, young, and white.

World-Class Mnemonists

The best mnemonists compete internationally. Here are some notables:

Tony Buzan

Tony Buzan is one of the most notable figures in the memory world, and other mnemonists have mixed feelings about him. Half of them think Buzan is a genius whose methods will transform the educational system, and the other half think he’s an unscientific moneymaker.

When Buzan was a child, his best friend Barry was put in the “dunces’ class” while Buzan was in the most advanced classes. However, Barry was very good with nature and animals—he could identify everything. Buzan realized that there was something wrong with the system—if the school thought Barry wasn’t smart when he clearly was, the system must be misdefining intelligence.

Buzan’s second ah-ha moment...

Moonwalking With Einstein Summary Part 4: Josh’s Story | Chapter 11: A Year of Learning About Memory

In Parts 1-3, we learned about the science, art, and community of memory. In Part 4, we’ll look at the author’s (Josh’s) personal experience learning the arts of memory. Josh started his journey shortly after attending the 2005 US Memory Championship, where he met his memory coach, Ed Cooke.

(Josh mentions in his acknowledgments that he’s slightly rearranged the order of events to better fit the narrative.)

Working With Anders Ericsson

Before Josh started training, he spoke to Anders Ericsson, the expert on experts. Ericsson worked at the Human Performance Lab at Florida State University and he was interested in studying Josh’s journey from beginner to expert. Josh went to Florida to have his memory tested. In exchange, Ericsson would help him with his training.

(Shortform note: To learn about Ericsson’s research on how to become an expert, read our summary of his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.)

The Human Performance Lab tested Josh’s ability to remember numbers, words, and faces. They also tested him on seemingly random things, such as definitions of obscure words and if he could visualize...