“Moonwalking with Einstein” by Joshua Foer

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

By Joshua Foer
2012
307 pages. Audio: 9 hours and 31 min.
Nonfiction

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Let’s begin this review with a little quiz. I will give you the title of the book, and you try to guess what the book is about. Ready? Okay here’s the book title: Moonwalking with Einstein.

You can have three guesses and, unless you cheat, I’m guessing you won’t get anywhere near the right answer.

Time’s up. The subtitle of the book is The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. I bet you didn’t see that coming. (Well, unless you read the top of this blog post.) This book is about how to improve your memory. Now tell me you don’t need to read this book! Can you even remember your three guesses from moments ago?

Many of you watched this year’s college football and college basketball national championships. Many of you watched the Women’s World Cup. Fewer of you watched the Lacrosse National Championship (Virginia won if you're interested, but I guess if you had been interested you would’ve watched it). But I will wager that you didn't even know that there was a USA Memory Championship which, like a rodeo, has different events in which you can compete.

Our author Joshua Foer was doing research to write an article on this event. Some of the contestants convinced him that with proper training he too could be a world-class memory expert, so instead of just covering the event he decided to compete.

In this book he teaches us many of the techniques he learned, and we also tag along with him as he goes to the competition.

I am always cautious about not wanting to take away the joy of discovery so I won’t go into detail about the specific techniques, which require a good deal of practice but can be learned. If, for instance, as a party trick you want to memorize a whole deck of cards in the correct order, you can do that. It is a cool and impressive trick.

Slightly more useful is a chapter like “How to Memorize a Poem,” and one of the fundamental techniques to remembering most things is called the memory palace, which is where the title of the book comes from. A memory palace brings things you want to remember into unusual and memorable conjunctions so you just stroll through your memory palace and are able to remember things that would ordinarily be unrelated.

There is also a section on how to remember faces and names and get them right. What preacher couldn’t use a little help with that?

This book is both practical and highly entertaining. If you are one of those people like me who thinks they have a terrible memory, you may be surprised at how much better you could get with a few simple techniques. It does require practice, but once you have a certain proficiency with them it almost looks like magic.

And as you come to the end of the book you can’t help but root for this rank amateur as he enters the USA Memory Championships. Does he win? Read the book.