#moonwalkingwitheinstein

Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer

I bought this book months ago to send to my friend, Chelsea, but it didn't fit in the package, so I decided to read it before sending it to her. A few months after letting it sit around (like most other books I own), I happened to watch a TED talk by its author. The TED talk was very intriguing and I shared it with a few friends before realizing I already owned the book by him!

It was entertaining, educational, and helped me think about my brain and memory in a different way. It also inspired me to add journaling, memorizing a deck of cards, and knowing stuff about all the U.S. presidents to my list of 101 things.

I finished it during my flight back to LAX and I actually went back to the beginning and started reading it again. I’m excited to recommend it to others and finally mail it to Chelsea!

This is so far the most convincing reason for why it is important to commit a lot of (useful) things to memory.

Joshua Foer explains:

Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas? In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to drawn on. Not just an inventory but an indexed inventory: to find the right information at the right time.

This is what the art of memory was ultimately useful for.

...or, more precisely, the humourists who tried to explain Einstein's theory of relativity were wrong.

This is what you commonly hear:

When you sit next to a pretty girl for one hour, and it feels like a minute. As opposed to when you sit on a hot stove for one minute, and it feels like an hour. That is relativity.

That's got nothing to do with the concept of relativity of time as defined by physics. But it's an example used to explain that time is not constant. The example is used because it turns out that events in our lives do have an effect on our perception of time.

And still that example is not quite that good because it turns out that time with a pretty girl can actually feel like one hour if what you feel is novel enough. Joshua Foer explains:

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

An experiment where a subject spent two months in an underground cave without access to a clock, calender, or sun helped scientists come to this conclusion. Inside the cave the subject lost perception of time because of his monotonous existence. When he was removed from the cave two months after, according to his self-kept diary he had been inside only for a month.

We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.

Grand masters can react to a complex chess board within seconds, novices can't. But arrange the pieces randomly (not by the rules of the game) and they perform just as novices do on remembering which pieces were where.

A board of randomly arranged chess pieces has no context—there are no similar boards to compare it to, no past games that it resembles, no ways to meaningfully way of remembering them. Even to the world’s best chess player it is, in essence, noise.