Much of what’s been written about memory improvement by self-help gurus is tainted by scams, scammers and shady marketing. Checking on Amazon.com, I found 198,111 results for “memory books” making claims that they could teach me how to “never forget a telephone number or date” or “develop instant recall.” One book even pronounced that it would show the reader how to use the “other 90 percent” of your brain.
But memory improvement has also long been investigated by people whose’s interest in memory is grounded in science and whose research measures up to scientific standards. Academic psychologists have been interested in expanding our natural memory capacities ever since Hermann Ebbinghaus first brought the study of memory into the laboratory in the 1870s.
Moonwalking With Einstein, The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Josh Foer is a book about the year the author spent trying to train his memory, and also trying to understand it – its inner workings, its natural deficiencies, it hidden potential. It’s about how the author learned firsthand that our memories are indeed improvable, with limits, and that the skills memory can be tapped by all of us. It’s also about the scientific study of expertise, and how researchers who study memory champions have discovered general principles of skill acquisition – secrets to improving at just about anything – from how mental athletes train their brains. It is not meant to be a self-help book, but the author hopes you’ll come away with a sense of how one goes about training one’s memory, and how memory techniques can be used in everyday life.
Historically, memory was at the root of all culture, but since humans began painting their memories on cave walls, we’ve gradually transitioned our natural memory to a more complex system(s) of external memory aids – a process that has exploded in recent years. Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that there was nothing to read and all our “clouds” had disappeared. What would become of our lives and work? Literature, education, music, government, law, banking, politics, science, and math: Our world is built of externalized memories.
If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also painfully linked to our own shortcomings as humans. When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of living for ever. The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory becomes devalued. As our culture has transformed from one that was fundamentally based on internal memories to one that is fundamentally based on memories stored outside the brain, what are the implications for ourselves and for our society? What we’ve gained is indisputable. But what have we traded away? What does it mean that we’ve lost our memory?
Foer highlights his own memory training as he does research for the book and chronicles his own skill development as he readies for the U.S. Memory Championships. He also focuses on “memory athletes” he meets in his preparation and research. One such person is Ed Cooke, grand master memorizer from England. Cooke explained to Foer that the competitors see themselves as “participants in an amateur research program” whose aim was to rescue a long-lost tradition of memory training that had disappeared centuries ago. In our past remembering was everything. A trained memory was not just a handy tool, but also a fundamental to a worldly mind and personal intellect. What’s more, memory training was considered a form of character building, a way of developing the virtue of prudence and ultimately ethics. Only through memorizing, the thinking went, could ideas truly be incorporated into one’s psyche and their values absorbed. The techniques existed not just to memorize useless information like decks of playing cards, but also to etch into the brain foundational texts and ideas.
In the 15th century, Gutenberg turned books into mass-produced commodities, and eventually it was no longer all that important to remember what the printed page could remember for you. By the 19th century the skill are art of memory had been relegated to carnival sideshows and tacky self-help books. It is in the the 1990s that the art and skill of memory has been remembered, so to speak, do in-large part to making memory a competition according to Foer.
Tony Buzan (British educator and self-styled guru) founded the World Memory Championship in 1991 and has since established national championships in more than a dozen countries. He says he has been working since the 1970s to get these memory techniques implemented in schools around the world. Buzan believes schools go about teaching all wrong. They pour vast amounts of information into students’ heads, but don’t teach them how to retain it. Memorizing has gotten a bad rap as a mindless way of holding onto facts just long enough to pass the next exam. But it’s not memorization that’s evil, says Buzan; it’s the tradition of boring rote learning that he believes has corrupted Western education. “What we have been doing over the last century is defining memory incorrectly, understanding it incompletely, applying it inappropriately, and condemning it because it doesn’t work and isn’t enjoyable,” Buzan argues. If rote memorization is a way of scratching impressions onto our brains through the brute force of repetition – the old “dill and kill” method – then the art of memory is a more elegant way of remembering through technique. It is faster, less painful, and produces longer lasting memories, Buzan says.
“The brain is like a muscle,” he said, and memory training is a form of mental workout. Over time, like any form of exercise, it’ll make the brain fitter, quicker, and more nimble. It’s an idea that dates back to the very origins of memory training. Roman orators argued that the art of memory – the proper retention and ordering of knowledge- was a vital instrument for the invention of new ideas. Today, the “mental workout” has gained great currency in the popular imagination. Brain gyms and memory boot camps are a growing fad, and brain training software was a $265 million industry in 2008, no doubt in part because of research that shows that older people who keep their minds active with crossword puzzles and chess can stave off Alzheimer’s and dementia, but mostly because of the baby boomer generation’s intense insecurity about losing their minds. But while there is much solid science to back up the dementia defying benefits of an active brain, Buzan’s exaggerated claims about the collateral effects of “brain exercise” should bring a great amount of skepticism.
In his short story “Funes the Memorious,” Forge Luis Borges describes a fictional man with an infallible memory who is crippled by an inability to forget. He can’t distinguish between the trivial and the important. Borges’s character Funes can’t prioritize, can’t generalize. He is “virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas.” His memory was too good. Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.”
Researchers have used MRI scanners on both memory athletes and normal folks (i.e. control group). Not a single significant structural difference in their brains turned up. The brains of the mental memory athletes appear to be indistinguishable from those of the normal folks (comparison group). What’s more, on every single test of general cognitive ability, the mental athletes’ scores came back well within the normal range. The memory champs weren’t smarter, and they didn’t have special brains. They are average people with average memories; they just practice how to consciously convert the information they are being asked to memorize into images, and distribute those images along familiar spatial journeys.
On a personal note, I have used several of the memory approaches Foer highlights in the book and developed my own memory strategies. To date, I can consistently memorize 20 random playing cards in less than one minute (I assign each playing card a visual picture depicting is color and value and use the houses on my hometown street to organize them). I have a system to remember any combination of 4 digit numbers (I have assigned each number from 00 to 99 to my favorite athlete who wore or wears the number). For example to remember 243 I think of Jeff Gordon (drives the #24 race car) racing around the bases and running over Harmon Killebrew (former #3 for the Minnesota Twins) standing at home plate. Not Memory Championship caliber skills yet! The real work is memorizing and remembering your system. It takes lots of consistent practice, but their is much value in remembering. I highly recommend reading Moon Walking with Einstein.