by Joshua Foer
After a few drinks, Ed was keen to carry me deeper into the obscure underworld of mental athletic secrets. He offered to introduce me to the rituals of the KL7, a “secret society of memorizers” that he and Lukas cofounded at the Kuala Lumpur championships in 2003, and which, evidently, was not so secret.
“KL, as in Kuala Lumpur?” I asked.
“No, KL as in Knights of Learning, and the seven is because it started with seven of us,” Lukas explained, while sipping one of the three free beers he had just won by memorizing a deck of cards for the waitress. “It’s an international society for the development of education.”
“Membership in our society is an extraordinarily high honor,” Ed added.
Though the club’s endowment of more than a thousand dollars languishes in Lukas’s bank account, Ed conceded that the KL7 has never actually done much of anything, except get drunk together the evening after memory contests (occasionally aided by a sophisticated pressurized keg attachment designed by Lukas that folds up into a suitcase). When I pressed Ed for more information, he offered to demonstrate the society’s single cherished ceremony.
“Just call it a satanic ritual,” he said, and then asked Jonny, his documentarian, to set a timer on his wristwatch. “We each have exactly five minutes to drink two beers, kiss three women, and memorize forty-nine random digits. Why forty-nine digits? It’s seven squared.”
“I was surprised to discover that this is actually quite difficult,” said Lukas. He was wearing a shiny charcoal suit and a shinier tie, and had no trouble convincing the waitress, whom he’d already won over, to give him three pecks on the cheek.
“Technically that’s unsatisfactory, but we’ll count it,” Ed proclaimed, a rivulet of beer running down his chin. From his pocket he pulled out a page of printed numbers and tore it into sections. His finger raced across the scrap until it got to the forty-ninth digit, at which point he stood up and sputtered, “Almost done!” and then limped over to a nearby booth, where he tried to explain his predicament to three silver-haired women who seemed far too old to be enjoying this loud bar. With time running out, and before they could respond to his plea, he had leaned across the table and planted his lips on each of their sunken, flustered cheeks.
Ed returned triumphantly, pumping his fist and soliciting high fives from all of us. He ordered another round for the table.
I didn’t know quite what to make of Ed. He was, I was gradually discovering, an aesthete, in the true Oscar Wilde sense. More than anyone I’d ever met, he seemed to participate in life as if it were art, and to practice a studied, careful carefreeness. His sense of what is worthy seemed to overlap very little with any conventional sense of what is useful, and if there were one precept that could be said to govern his life, it is that one’s highest calling is to engage in enriching escapades at every turn. He was a genuine bon vivant, and yet he approached the subject of his PhD research, the relationship between memory and perception, with a rigor and seriousness that suggested he intended to accomplish big things. He was in no conventional sense handsome, and yet later that night, I watched him approach a woman in the street, ask for a cigarette, and a few minutes later walk away reciting her phone number. His “normal bar trick,” he told me, involves shimmying up to a young lady and inviting her to create an “arbitrarily long number,” and then promising to buy her a bottle of champagne should he successfully remember it.
Over the course of the evening, Ed regaled me with story after story of his adventures and instructive misadventures. There was the time he threw his shoeless self through the window of a bar in New Zealand in order to circumvent a bouncer. The time he crashed a supermodel’s party in London. (“It was easier then, I was in a wheelchair, and I could do a superior wheelie.”) The time he crashed a party at the British embassy in Paris. (“I noticed the ambassador following my dirty shoes all the way across the room.”) And how could he forget the twelve hours he spent panhandling for bus fare in downtown Los Angeles?
At the time, I may have sounded a note of skepticism about these self-mythologizing stories, but that was only because I didn’t yet know Ed well enough to recognize that he very well could have been understating their outrageousness. A few more drinks into the evening, it dawned on me that I’d spent the better part of the day with Ed and Lukas and neither of them had once called me by my name, though I was sure I’d told it to them when I first introduced myself. Ed had referred to me in front of the waitress as “our journalist friend,” and Lukas just hadn’t referred to me. These were evasions I knew well. But Ed had assured me earlier in the day that he could memorize the name and phone number of every girl he ever met. I thought that sounded like the kind of impressive skill that was bound to take one far in life. Bill Clinton is supposed to never forget a name and, well, look where that got him. But it occurred to me now that Ed’s “could” was a bit ambiguous, and might have been of the same nature as “He could count backward from a million”—as in, yeah, if he really wanted to. I asked Ed if he remembered my name.
“Of course. It’s Josh.”
“My last name?”
“Shit. Did you tell it to me?”
“Yes, Foer. Josh Foer. You’re human after all.”
“Ah, well—”
“I thought you were supposed to have a fancy technique for remembering people’s names.”
“In theory, I do. But its utility is inversely proportional to the amount of alcohol I’ve imbibed.”
Ed then explained to me his procedure for making a name memorable, which he had used in the competition to memorize the first and last names associated with ninety-nine different photographic head shots in the names-and-faces event. It was a technique he promised I could use to remember people’s names at parties and meetings. “The trick is actually deceptively simple,” he said. “It is always to associate the sound of a person’s name with something you can clearly imagine. It’s all about creating a vivid image in your mind that anchors your visual memory of the person’s face to a visual memory connected to the person’s name. When you need to reach back and remember the person’s name at some later date, the image you created will simply pop back into your mind ... So, hmm, you said your name was Josh Foer, eh?” He raised an eyebrow and gave his chin a melodramatic stroke. “Well, I’d imagine you joshing me where we first met, outside the competition hall, and I’d imagine myself breaking into four pieces in response. Four/Foer, get it? That little image is more entertaining—to me, at least—than your mere name, and should stick nicely in the mind.” It occurred to me that this was a kind of manufactured synesthesia.
To understand why this sort of mnemonic trick works, you need to know something about a strange kind of forgetfulness that psychologists have dubbed the “Baker/baker paradox.” The paradox goes like this: A researcher shows two people the same photograph of a face and tells one of them that the guy is a baker and the other that his last name is Baker. A couple days later, the researcher shows the same two guys the same photograph and asks for the accompanying word. The person who was told the man’s profession is much more likely to remember it than the person who was given his surname. Why should that be? Same photograph. Same word. Different amount of remembering.
When you hear that the man in the photo is a baker, that fact gets embedded in a whole network of ideas about what it means to be a baker: He cooks bread, he wears a big white hat, he smells good when he comes home from work. The name Baker, on the other hand, is tethered only to a memory of the person’s face. That link is tenuous, and should it dissolve, the name will float off irretrievably into the netherworld of lost memories. (When a word feels like it’s stuck on the tip of the tongue, it’s likely because we’re accessing only part of the neural network that “contains” the idea, but not all of it.) But when it comes to the man’s profession, there are multiple strings to reel the memory back in. Even if you don’t at first remember that the man is a baker, perhaps you get some vague sense of breadiness about him, or see som
e association between his face and a big white hat, or maybe you conjure up a memory of your own neighborhood bakery. There are any number of knots in that tangle of associations that can be traced back to his profession. The secret to success in the names-and-faces event—and to remembering people’s names in the real world—is simply to turn Bakers into bakers—or Foers into fours. Or Reagans into ray guns. It’s a simple trick, but highly effective.
I tried using the technique myself to remember the name of the documentary filmmaker who had been trailing Ed and Lukas around town all week. He introduced himself as Jonny Lowndes. “We call him Pounds Lowndes,” Ed interjected. “He used to be heavyset in high school.” Since my older brother’s childhood nickname was Jonny, I closed my eyes and pictured the two of them together, arm in arm, gobbling up a pound cake.
“You know we could teach you more tricks like that,” Ed said. He turned to Lukas ebulliently. “I’m trying to think if by the end of the night we could have him winning the American championship?”
“I get the sense that you hold the Americans in rather low esteem,” I said.
“On the contrary, they just haven’t had the right coach,” he said, turning back to me. “I reckon you could win the championship next year with an hour’s practice a day.” He looked to Lukas. “Don’t you think that’s right?”
Lukas nodded.
“You and Tony Buzan both,” I said.
“Ah, yes, the estimable Tony Buzan,” Ed scoffed. “Did he try to sell you that nonsense about the brain being a muscle?”
“Um, yes, he did.”
“Anyone who knows the first thing about the respective characteristics of brains and muscles knows how risible that analogy is.” It was my first hint of Ed’s tortured relationship with Buzan. “Look, what you really need to do is bring me on as your coach, trainer, and manager—and, um, spiritual yogi.”
“And what would you get out of this relationship?” I asked.
“I’d get pleasure,” he responded with a smile. “Also, you being a journalist, I wouldn’t mind if, in the course of your writing about this experience, you managed to give the impression that I would be an excellent person to have tutoring your daughter in the Hamptons at, like, a squillion quid an hour.”
I laughed and told Ed that I’d give it some thought. I honestly wasn’t that interested in spending an hour a day pawing through playing cards, or memorizing pages of random numbers, or doing any of the other mental calisthenics that seemed to be involved in becoming a “mental athlete.” I have always embraced my own nerdiness—I was captain of my high school quiz bowl team and have long worn a watch with calculator functions—but this was a bit much even for me. And yet I was curious enough about learning where the limits of my memory lay, and intrigued enough by Ed, to consider this exercise. All the mental athletes I’d met had insisted that anyone was capable of improving his or her memory—that the untapped powers of S are inside all of us. I decided I was going to try to find out if that was really true. That night, when I got home, there was a short e-mail from Ed waiting in my in-box: “So, anyway, can I be your coach?”
THREE
THE EXPERT EXPERT
Though it’s best not to be born a chicken at all, it is especially bad luck to be born a cockerel.
From the perspective of the poultry farmer, male chickens are useless. They can’t lay eggs, their meat is stringy, and they’re ornery to the hens that do all the hard work of putting food on our tables. Commercial hatcheries tend to treat male chicks like fabric cutoffs or scrap metal: the wasteful but necessary by-product of an industrial process. The sooner they can be disposed of—often they’re ground into animal feed—the better. But a costly problem has vexed egg farmers for millennia: It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between male and female chickens until they’re four to six weeks old, when they begin to grow distinctive feathers and secondary sex characteristics like the rooster’s comb. Until then, they’re all just indistinguishable fluff balls that have to be housed and fed—at considerable expense.
Somehow it took until the 1920s before anyone figured out a solution to this costly dilemma. The momentous discovery was made by a group of Japanese veterinary scientists, who realized that just inside the chick’s rear end there is a constellation of folds, marks, spots, and bumps that to the untrained eye appear arbitrary, but when properly read, can divulge the sex of a day-old bird. When this discovery was unveiled at the 1927 World Poultry Congress in Ottawa, it revolutionized the global hatchery industry and eventually lowered the price of eggs worldwide. The professional chicken sexer, equipped with a skill that took years to master, became one of the most valuable workers in agriculture. The best of the best were graduates of the two-year Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School, whose standards were so rigorous that only 5 to 10 percent of students received accreditation. But those who did graduate earned as much as five hundred dollars a day and were shuttled around the world from hatchery to hatchery like top-flight business consultants. A diaspora of Japanese chicken sexers spilled across the globe.
Chicken sexing is a delicate art, requiring Zen-like concentration and a brain surgeon’s dexterity. The bird is cradled in the left hand and given a gentle squeeze that causes it to evacuate its intestines (too tight and the intestines will turn inside out, killing the bird and rendering its gender irrelevant). With his thumb and forefinger, the sexer flips the bird over and parts a small flap on its hindquarters to expose the cloaca, a tiny vent where both the genitals and anus are situated, and peers deep inside. To do this properly, his fingernails have to be precisely trimmed. In the simple cases—the ones that the sexer can actually explain—he’s looking for a barely perceptible protuberance called the “bead,” about the size of a pinhead. If the bead is convex, the bird is a boy, and gets thrown to the left; concave or flat and it’s a girl, sent down a chute to the right. Those cases are easy enough. In fact, a study has shown that amateurs can be taught to identify the bead with only a few minutes of training. But in roughly 80 percent of the chicks, the bead is not obvious and there is no single distinguishing trait the sexer can point to.
By some estimates there are as many as a thousand different vent configurations that a sexer has to learn to become competent. The job is made even more difficult by the fact that the sexer has to diagnose the bird with just a glance. There is no time for conscious reasoning. If he hesitates for even a couple seconds, his grip on the bird can cause a pullet’s vent to swell to look unquestionably like a cockerel’s. Mistakes are costly. In the 1960s, one hatchery paid its sexers a penny for each correctly sexed chick and deducted 35 cents for each one they got wrong. The best in the business can sex 1,200 chicks an hour with 98 to 99 percent accuracy. In Japan, a few superheroes of the industry have learned how to double clutch the chicks and sex them two at a time, at the rate of 1,700 per hour.
What makes chicken sexing such a captivating subject—the reason that academic philosophers and cognitive psychologists have authored dissertations about it, and the reason that my own research into memory had brought me to this arcane skill—is that even the best professional sexers can’t describe how they determine gender in the toughest, most ambiguous cases. Their art is inexplicable. They say that within three seconds they just “know” whether a bird is a boy or a girl, but they can’t say how they know. Even when carefully cross-examined by researchers, they can’t give reasons why one bird is a male and another is female. What they have, they say, is intuition. In some fundamental sense, the expert chicken sexer perceives the world—at least the world of chicken privates—in a way that is completely different from you or me. When they look at a chick’s bottom, they see things that a normal person simply does not see. What does chicken sexing have to do with my memory? Everything.
I decided it would be a good idea to dive (bellyflop, really) into the scientific literature. I was looking for some hard evidence that our memories might really be improvable in the dramatic way that Buzan and the mental athlet
es had promised. I didn’t have to search very hard. As I was combing the scientific literature, one name kept popping up in my research about memory improvement: K. Anders Ericsson. He was a psychology professor at Florida State University and the author of an article titled “Exceptional Memorizers: Made, Not Born.”
Before Tony Buzan mass-marketed the idea of “using your perfect memory,” Ericsson was laying the scientific groundwork for what’s known as “Skilled Memory Theory,” which explains how and why our memory is improvable. In 1981, he and fellow psychologist Bill Chase conducted a now-classic experiment on a Carnegie Mellon undergraduate, who has been immortalized in the literature by his initials, SF. Chase and Ericsson paid SF to spend several hours a week in their lab taking a simple memory test over and over and over again. It was similar to the test that Luria had given to S when he first walked into his office. SF sat in a chair and tried to remember as many numbers as possible as they were read off at the rate of one per second. At the outset, he could only hold about seven digits in his head at a time. By the time the experiment wrapped up—two years and 250 mind-numbing hours later—SF had expanded his ability to remember numbers by a factor of ten. The experiment shattered the old notions that our memory capacities are fixed. How SF did it, Ericsson believes, holds a key to understanding the basic cognitive processes underlying all forms of expertise—from mental athlete memorizers to chess grand masters to chicken sexers.