Moonwalking with Einstein

I needed a break.

I am roughly half-way through about 3 books and I wasn't feeling the momentum. I knew I needed a jolt and that was provided by my wife's fascination with a book featured in Discovery magazine. We talked about it and it just seemed like a fascinating topic.

I purchased Moonwalking with Einstein and devoured it. It's a quick read and, most important to me, it adds something to my life.

Josh Foer was a journalist who covered the world memory championship only to discover that none of the mental athletes considered themselves to be savants or anything close. To test the theory that anyone could do what mental athletes could so with training, Foer trained and won the American memory title the very next year.

Most fascinating about this book is that Foer succeeds in walking the reader through some of the techniques. He walks the reader through the process of memorizing a 15-item grocery list and left a vivid picture of that list in my mind. It is very illustrative... to the point that I literally cannot forget this grocery list.

I have been left with images, at our old Virginia home, of the following;

... a man with a snorkel diving into the sink... salmon cooking on the vent of out television with smoking peat providing the heat... an elk screeching at the top of our stairs... socks dancing on the fireplace hearth and a she-male at a desk with Sophia Loren on his/her lap.

I couldn't forget that list if I wanted to. Jen and I ended up memorizing two of our credit card numbers to test the number formula... and it worked.

Although the book is not a self-help book, it gives any ambitious reader the tools to begin tinkering with his or her own brain. I will begin to work on this technique to memorize the presidents in order and my goal is to eventually memorize the Colorado Probate Code so I can work more efficiently.

There is a natural conflict between the ancient memory techniques documented in this book and our modern world and its many memory crutches (like i-phones, the Internet in general, etc.). I tend to believe that, although such tricks may no longer be necessary, there is nothing wrong with sharpening the saw, so to speak. Also, I like a good challenge.

Foer includes information about patients who represent the extremes of the memory spectrum - from the man who could not forget, to people who could not remember anything. He discusses the physiology of memory (what little is really understood) and the study of expertise.

Moonwalking with Einstein is a real feast. I loved it. I have a new leader on the early-season rankings.