Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

I read this book because I had started forgetting the names of people I had met the night before, and I wanted to know whether that was fixable or just what getting older feels like. Joshua Foer's answer, which he takes 300 pages to earn, is that most of us are not losing our memories. We are simply not using them. The book is a piece of stunt journalism with a real idea inside it, published by The Penguin Press in 2011, and it is more fun than a book about mnemonics has any right to be.

The smartest man is hard to find

Foer starts as a science journalist covering the U.S. Memory Championship in March 2005. He expects a room full of savants. Instead he finds ordinary people doing extraordinary tricks with decks of cards, strings of numbers, and lists of names. The competitors are not geniuses. They are mostly middle-aged men with day jobs and a shared obsession with technique.

The person who changes his mind is Ed Cooke, a twenty-three-year-old Englishman and Grandmaster of Memory. Cooke insists that memory is a trainable skill, not a gift. He offers to coach Foer. Foer, who is the kind of journalist who cannot resist becoming the story, says yes. The book is the account of that year, and the stunt works because Foer is honest about how much of it is a stunt.

Simonides and the palace

The history lesson arrives early. The poet Simonides of Ceos is at a banquet in Thessaly when he is called outside. The roof collapses and kills everyone inside. Simonides identifies the crushed bodies by remembering where each guest was sitting. That is the origin story of the method of loci, the memory palace.

The technique is simple enough to explain and hard enough to do well. You choose a familiar building, your childhood home or your daily walk. You place vivid images at fixed points along a route. To remember a list, you walk the route and collect the images. The stranger and more multisensory the image, the better it sticks. A shopping list becomes a giant pickle in the hallway, a gallon of milk flooding the kitchen, a loaf of bread wearing a hat in the bedroom.

Foer learns this from Cooke and from a cast of competitors who each have a variation. Gunther Karsten, a German champion, assigns every word to a route point and keeps a private dictionary of images for common words that are hard to visualize. Corinna Draschl, an Austrian competitor, assigns emotions to chunks of text and has to feel what the poet felt. The methods differ. The principle is the same: give the memory a place to live.

Training the ordinary mind

The training chapters are the best part of the book. Foer starts small, memorizing a poem and a shopping list, and works up to a deck of cards. He practices in his parents' house, in his apartment, on the subway. He hits plateaus. He gets bored. He discovers that the hardest part is not the technique but the attention. You cannot remember what you did not notice.

The book is also honest about how silly it looks. Foer walks around his neighborhood muttering to himself, placing imaginary objects in imaginary rooms. His friends think he has lost his mind. His wife is patient. The comedy keeps the book from becoming a manual, and it also makes a serious point: memory training is a practice, not a personality. Anyone can do it, and almost no one wants to.

The science arrives through Anders Ericsson, the Florida State psychologist who studied expert performance. Ericsson's most famous experiment trained a student to remember strings of digits. Most people top out around seven or eight. The student, called SF, worked his way to roughly eighty by chunking the numbers into running times and other meaningful groups. He did not have a bigger memory. He had a better filing system.

Ericsson's larger claim is that expertise comes from deliberate practice, not innate talent. Deliberate practice means working at the edge of your ability, with immediate feedback, on specific weaknesses. Foer uses the idea to explain the OK plateau, the point where a skill becomes automatic and stops improving. The remedy is to stop being automatic. Pay attention again. Make it hard.

The man who remembered too much, and the man who could not remember

Two case studies give the book its emotional range. The first is Kim Peek, the man who inspired Rain Man. Peek could scan two pages at once and seemed to retain everything he read. Foer visits him in Salt Lake City and finds a man who is extraordinary and also limited. Peek's recall is vast but not deep. He can tell you facts. He cannot tell you what they mean. Foer treats the 9,000 books claim with polite skepticism, which is the right call.

The second is EP, a man with severe amnesia whose stable memories stop around 1950. EP cannot form new lasting memories. He lives in a perpetual present. Foer visits him in San Diego and comes away shaken. Memory is not a filing cabinet you can afford to ignore. It is the thing that makes a self. Without it, you cannot keep promises, hold a grudge, or know who loves you. The chapter is the moral center of the book, and it complicates the self-help promise of the rest.

The end of remembering

Foer also writes a cultural history of memory, and this is where the book gets ambitious. He describes oral bards who carried whole epics, manuscripts without punctuation that had to be read aloud, the printing press, and the modern habit of outsourcing memory to paper and phones. He retells Socrates' warning in the Phaedrus that writing will weaken the mind, and he notes that the warning was wrong in some ways and right in others.

The argument is not that we should all memorize more. It is that memory used to be a craft, with techniques and training, and we have mostly forgotten the craft. The loss is not just practical. It changes what we notice. If you cannot remember a poem, you cannot carry it with you. If you cannot remember a name, you cannot make a person feel seen. Foer is careful not to romanticize the past. He just wants us to know what we gave up.

The competition mind

What separates the competitors is not raw intelligence but a set of habits. They practice. They keep notebooks. They analyze their failures. Foer discovers that the memory athletes are, in their way, athletes: they train specific events, they taper before competitions, they have coaches and rivals and superstitions. The book is good at showing how unglamorous expertise is. Nobody in the championship is having a mystical experience. They are walking through imaginary houses and picking up imaginary objects.

The most useful idea in this section is the OK plateau. When you first learn a skill, you improve quickly because everything is new. Then the skill becomes automatic, and improvement stops. You can drive for twenty years and never get better at driving. The memory athletes avoid the plateau by making the task harder, changing the route, adding speed, raising the stakes. Ericsson's research says the same thing about musicians and doctors. Deliberate practice is uncomfortable by design.

Foer also visits Raemon Matthews, a history teacher at a vocational high school in the South Bronx, who teaches his students memory palaces to prepare for the Regents exam. Matthews invokes W.E.B. Du Bois and the Talented Tenth. The chapter could have been a sentimental detour. Instead it is one of the book's more interesting arguments: memory training is not just for contestants. It can be a tool for students who have been told they are bad at school because they cannot hold facts in their heads.

The championship

The narrative climax is the 2006 U.S. Memory Championship. Foer wins. He memorizes a shuffled deck in one minute and forty seconds, a national speed-cards record, and beats a field that includes Chester Santos. The scene is tense and funny, and Foer is self-aware enough to know that winning a memory contest is a weird thing to do with a year.

Then he goes to the World Memory Championship in London and finishes thirteenth. He wins bronze in names and faces. He does not become a Grand Master. The anticlimax is deliberate. Foer wants to show that the techniques work, but he also wants to show their limits. He is a journalist who trained for a year. He is not a savant, and he is not going to become one.

What the book gets right

The book is at its best when it is concrete. The memory palace, the pickle in the hallway, the deck of cards, the eighty digits, the hospital room with EP. Foer has a good eye for the absurdity of the subculture, and he never lets the reader forget that memorizing a deck of cards is a party trick. That honesty keeps the book from becoming a self-help sermon.

It is also good on the difference between memory and understanding. Kim Peek can recall facts he does not understand. EP cannot remember facts at all. Foer's own training makes him faster at recall without making him wiser. The book's conclusion, that memory is a creative and reconstructive act rather than a warehouse, is not a new idea, but it is earned.

What I appreciated most is the refusal to promise genius. Foer does not claim that the memory palace will make you smarter. He claims it will make you better at remembering, which is a narrower and more honest promise. In a genre full of books that promise to unlock your brain, that restraint is refreshing.

What it oversells

The science is thinner than the subtitle suggests. Foer interviews the right people and summarizes the right studies, but he is not a researcher, and some of the claims about deliberate practice are stated more confidently than the evidence supports. The book also has a familiar magazine-feature shape: a quirky subculture, a likable expert, a personal challenge, a contest, a lesson. It works, but you can feel the gears.

The bigger limitation is that the book is about a very specific kind of memory, the kind you use to win contests. It does not have much to say about the memory that matters most, the memory of a friend's face or a child's first year. Foer gestures at that in the EP chapter, then returns to the cards. I wanted more of the former and less of the latter.

There is also a practical catch. The techniques take time. Building a palace for a deck of cards is not the same as remembering where you put your keys. Foer admits that he does not use the method of loci much in daily life, which undercuts the self-help promise a little. The skill is real, but it is a skill for a particular task, and most of us do not need to memorize decks. We need to pay better attention to the people in front of us. The book knows that, even if it spends more time on the cards.

Should you read it

Read it if you have ever forgotten a name and felt bad about it. Read it if you like books about obsession and subcultures. Read it if you want a practical introduction to the memory palace, because the technique is real and Foer explains it well enough to try.

Do not read it as a definitive science book or a life-changing self-help program. It is a smart, funny, slightly melancholy piece of reporting about a strange hobby and the ordinary human desire to be less forgetful. I finished it with a deck of cards and a plan to memorize a poem. I kept the plan for about a week. The book is still on my shelf, which is its own kind of memory.