by Joshua Foer
The classic example of how memories shape the perception of experts comes from what would seem to be the least intuitive of fields: chess. Practically since the origins of the modern game in the fifteenth century, chess has been regarded as the ultimate test of cognitive ability. In the 1920s, a group of Russian scientists set out to quantify the intellectual advantages of eight of the world’s best chess players by giving them a battery of basic cognitive and perceptual tests. To their surprise, the researchers found that the grand masters didn’t perform significantly better than average on any of their tests. The greatest chess players in the world didn’t seem to possess a single major cognitive advantage.
But if chess masters aren’t, as a whole, smarter than lesser chess players, then what are they? In the 1940s, a Dutch psychologist and chess aficionado named Adriaan de Groot asked what seemed like a simple question: What separates merely good chess players from those who are world-class? Did the best-class players see more moves ahead? Did they ponder more possible moves? Did they have better tools for analyzing those moves? Did they simply have a better intuitive grasp of the dynamics of the game?
One of the reasons chess is such a satisfying game to play and to study is that your average chess buff can be utterly befuddled by a master’s move. Often the best move seems entirely counterintuitive. Realizing this, De Groot pored through old games between chess masters and selected a handful of board positions where there was definitely one correct, but not obvious, move to be made. He then presented the boards to a group of international chess masters and top club players. He asked them to think aloud while they brooded over the proper move.
What De Groot uncovered was an even bigger surprise than what his Russian predecessors had found. For the most part, the chess experts didn’t look more moves ahead, at least not at first. They didn’t even consider more possible moves. Rather, they behaved in a manner surprisingly similar to the chicken sexers: They tended to see the right moves, and they tended to see them almost right away.
It was as if the chess experts weren’t thinking so much as reacting. When De Groot listened to their verbal reports, he noticed that they described their thoughts in different language than less experienced chess players. They talked about configurations of pieces like “pawn structures” and immediately noticed things that were out of sorts, like exposed rooks. They weren’t seeing the board as thirty-two pieces. They were seeing it as chunks of pieces, and systems of tension.
Grand masters literally see a different board. Studies of their eye movements have found that they look at the edges of squares more than inexperienced players, suggesting that they’re absorbing information from multiple squares at once. Their eyes also dart across greater distances, and linger for less time at any one place. They focus on fewer different spots on the board, and those spots are more likely to be relevant to figuring out the right move.
But the most striking finding of all from these early studies of chess experts was their astounding memories. The experts could memorize entire boards after just a brief glance. And they could reconstruct longago games from memory. In fact, later studies confirmed that the ability to memorize board positions is one of the best overall indicators of how good a chess player somebody is. And these chess positions are not simply encoded in transient short-term memory. Chess experts can remember positions from games for hours, weeks, even years afterward. Indeed, at a certain point in every chess master’s development, keeping mental track of the pieces on the board becomes such a trivial skill that they can take on several opponents at once, entirely in their heads.
As impressive as the chess masters’ memories were for chess games, their memories for everything else were notably unimpressive. When the chess experts were shown random arrangements of chess pieces—ones that couldn’t possibly have been arrived at through an actual game—their memory for the board was only slightly better than chess novices’. They could rarely remember the positions of more than seven pieces. These were the same chess pieces, and the same chessboards. So why were they suddenly limited by the magical number seven?
The chess experiments reveal a telling fact about memory, and about expertise in general: We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context. 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 chunk it. Even to the world’s best chess player it is, in essence, noise.
In the same way that a few pages ago we used our knowledge of historic dates to chunk the twelve-digit number, chess masters use the vast library of chess patterns that they’ve cached away in long-term memory to chunk the board. At the root of the chess master’s skill is that he or she simply has a richer vocabulary of chunks to recognize. Which is why it is so rare for anyone to achieve world-class status in chess—or any other field—without years of experience. Even Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess prodigy of all time, had been playing intensely for nine years before he was recognized as a grand master at age fifteen.
Contrary to all the old wisdom that chess is an intellectual activity based on analysis, many of the chess master’s important decisions about which moves to make happen in the immediate act of perceiving the board. Like the chicken sexer who looks at the chick and simply sees its gender or the SWAT officer who immediately notices the bomb, the chess master looks at the board and simply sees the most promising move. The process usually happens within five seconds, and you can actually see it transpiring in the brain. Using magnetoencephalography, a technique that measures the weak magnetic fields given off by a thinking brain, researchers have found that higher-rated chess players are more likely to engage the frontal and parietal cortices of the brain when they look at the board, which suggests that they are recalling information from long-term memory. Lower-ranked players are more likely to engage the medial temporal lobes, which suggests that they are encoding new information. The experts are interpreting the present board in term of their massive knowledge of past ones. The lower-ranked players are seeing the board as something new.
Though chess might seem like a trivial subject for a psychologist to study—it is, after all, just a game—De Groot believed that his experiments with chess masters had much larger implications. He argued that expertise in “the field of shoemaking, painting, building, [or] confectionary” is the result of the same accumulation of “experiential linkings.” According to Ericsson, what we call expertise is really just “vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain.” In other words, a great memory isn’t just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.
Whether we realize it or not, we are all like those chess masters and chicken sexers, interpreting the present in light of what we’ve learned in the past, and letting our previous experiences shape not only how we perceive our world, but also the moves we end up making in it.
Too often we talk about our memories as if they were banks into which we deposit new information when it comes in, and from which we withdraw old information when we need it. But that metaphor doesn’t reflect the way our memories really work. Our memories are always with us, shaping and being shaped by the information flowing through our senses, in a continuous feedback loop. Everything we see, hear, and smell is inflected by all the things we’ve seen, heard, and smelled in the past.
In ways as obscure as sexing chickens and as profound as diagnosing an illness, who we are and what we do is fundamentally a function of what we remember. But if interpreting the world and acting in it are rolled up in the act of remembering, what about Ed and Lukas and other mental athletes I’d met? How did this supposedly “simple” technique called the memory palace grant them expert memories without their being experts in anything?
Even if Ericsson and his grad students wouldn’t give me the results of all the tests I spent three days laboring on, I took enough notes on my performance t
o escape with some sense of where my baseline abilities stood. My digit span was about nine (above average, but nothing extraordinary), my ability to memorize poetry was abysmal, and I had not a clue when Confucius lived (though I did know what a carburetor was for). When I got back from Tallahassee, there was an e-mail waiting in my in-box from Ed:
Hey there star-pupil, I know that you’ve been keeping training to a minimum until after the Florida people have put you through your paces. Very well done—that’s admirable in at least the sense that it will make for better science. But the next championships aren’t a million miles away so you’re going to have to begin preparing yourself pronto. Better get some pep from me now: You need to get your head towards the grindstone and enjoy leaving it there.
FOUR
THE MOST FORGETFUL MAN IN THE WORLD
Having met some of the best memories in the world, I decided that my next step would be to try to seek out the worst. What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence? I went back to Google in search of Ben Pridmore’s counterpart in the record books of forgetfulness, and dug up an article in The Journal of Neuroscience about an eighty-four-year-old retired lab technician called EP, whose memory extended back only as far as his most recent thought. He had one of the most severe cases of amnesia ever documented.
A few weeks after returning from Tallahassee, I phoned a neuroscientist and memory researcher named Larry Squire at the University of California, San Diego, and the San Diego VA Medical Center. Squire had been studying EP for over a decade, and agreed to bring me along on one of his visits to the bright bungalow in suburban San Diego where EP lives with his wife. We traveled there with Jen Frascino, the research coordinator in Squire’s lab who visits EP regularly to administer cognitive tests. Even though Frascino has been to EP’s home some two hundred times, he greets her as a total stranger every time.
EP is six-foot-two, with perfectly parted white hair and unusually long ears. He’s personable, friendly, gracious. He laughs a lot. He seems at first like your average genial grandfather. Frascino, a tall, athletic blonde, sits down with me and Squire opposite EP at his dining room table and asks a series of questions that are meant to gauge his basic knowledge and common sense. She quizzes him about what continent Brazil is on, the number of weeks in a year, the boiling temperature of water. She wants to demonstrate what a battery of cognitive tests has already proved: EP has a working knowledge of the world. His IQ is 103, and his short-term memory is entirely unimpaired. He patiently answers the questions—all correctly—with roughly the same sense of bemusement I imagine I would have if a total stranger walked into my house and earnestly asked me if I knew the boiling point of water.
“What is the thing to do if you find an envelope in the street that is sealed, addressed, and has a stamp on it?” Frascino asks.
“Well, you’d put it in the mailbox. What else?” He chuckles and shoots me a knowing, sidelong glance, as if to say, “Do these people think I’m an idiot?” But sensing that the situation calls for politeness, he turns back to Frascino and adds, “But that’s a really interesting question you’ve got there. Really interesting.” He has no idea he’s heard it many times before.
“Why do we cook food?”
“Because it’s raw?” The word raw carries his voice clear across the tonal register, his bemusement giving way to incredulity.
I ask EP if he knows the name of the last president.
“I’m afraid it’s slipped my mind. How strange.”
“Does the name Bill Clinton sound familiar?”
“Of course I know Clinton! He’s an old friend of mine, a scientist, a good guy. I worked with him, you know.”
He sees my eyes widen in disbelief and stops himself.
“Unless, that is, there’s another Clinton around that you’re thinking of—”
“Well, you know, the last president was named Bill Clinton also.”
“He was? I’ll be—!” He slaps his thigh and chuckles, but doesn’t seem all that embarrassed.
“Who’s the last president you remember?”
He takes a moment to search his brain. “Let’s see. There was Franklin Roosevelt ...”
“Ever heard of John F. Kennedy?”
“Kennedy? Hmm, I’m afraid I don’t know him.”
Frascino interjects with another question. “Why do we study history?”
“Well, we study history to know what happened in the past.”
“But why do we want to know what happened in the past?”
“Because it’s just interesting, frankly.”
In November 1992, EP came down with what seemed like a mild case of the flu. For five days he lay in bed, feverish and lethargic, unsure of what was wrong, while inside his head a vicious virus known as herpes simplex was chewing its way through his brain, coring it like an apple. By the time the virus had run its course, two walnut-size chunks of brain matter in EP’s medial temporal lobes had disappeared, and with them most of his memory.
The virus struck with freakish precision. The medial temporal lobes—there’s one on each side of the brain—include the hippocampus and several adjacent regions that together perform the magical feat of turning our perceptions into long-term memories. Memories aren’t actually stored in the hippocampus—they reside elsewhere, in the brain’s corrugated outer layers, the neocortex—but the hippocampal area makes them stick. EP’s hippocampus was destroyed, and without it he is like a camcorder without a working tape head. He sees, but he doesn’t record.
EP has two types of amnesia—anterograde, which means he can’t form new memories, and retrograde, which means he can’t recall old memories either, at least not since about 1950. His childhood, his service in the merchant marine, World War II—all that is perfectly vivid. But as far as he knows, gas costs a quarter a gallon, and man never took that small step onto the moon.
Even though EP has been an amnesic for a decade and a half, and his condition has neither worsened nor improved, there’s still much that Squire and his team hope to learn from him. A case like his, in which nature performs a cruel but perfect experiment, is, to put it crassly, a major boon to science. In a field in which so many basic questions are still unanswered, there is a limitless number of tests that can be performed on a mind like EP’s. Indeed, there are only a handful of other individuals in the world in whom both hippocampi and the key adjacent structures have been so precisely notched out of an otherwise intact brain. Another severely amnesic case is Clive Wearing, a former music producer for the BBC who was struck by herpes encephalitis in 1985. Like EP’s, his mind has become a sieve. Each time he greets his wife, it’s as though he hasn’t seen her in twenty years. He leaves her agonizing phone messages begging to be picked up from the nursing home where he lives. He also keeps an exhaustive diary that has become a tangible record of his daily anguish. But even the diary he finds hard to trust since—like every other object in his life—it is completely unfamiliar. Every time he opens it, it must feel like confronting a past life. It is filled with entries like this one:
9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.
Those scratched-out entries suggest an awareness of his condition that EP, perhaps blissfully, lacks. From across the table, Squire asks EP how his memory is doing these days.
“It’s fair. Hard to say it’s real good or bad.”
EP wears a metal medical alert bracelet around his left wrist. Even though it’s obvious what it’s for, I ask him anyway. He turns his wrist over and casually reads it.
“Hmm. It says memory loss.”
EP doesn’t even remember that he has a memory problem. That is something he discovers anew every moment. And since he forgets that he always forgets, every lost thought seems like just a casual slip—an annoyance and nothing more—the same way it would to you or me.
“There’s nothing wrong with him in his mind. That’s a blessing,” his wife, Beverly, tells me later, while EP
sits on the couch, out of earshot. “I suppose he must know something is wrong, but it doesn’t come out in conversation or in his way of life. But underneath he must know. He just must.”
When I hear those words, I’m stung by the realization of how much more than just memories have been lost. Even EP’s own wife can no longer access his most basic emotions and thoughts. Which is not to say that he doesn’t have emotions or thoughts. Moment to moment, he certainly does. When informed of the births of his grandchildren, EP’s eyes welled up each time—and then he promptly forgot that they existed. But without the ability to compare today’s feelings to yesterday’s, he cannot tell any cohesive narrative about himself, or about those around him, which makes him incapable of providing even the most basic psychological sustenance to his family and friends. After all, EP can only remain truly interested in anyone or anything for as long as he can maintain his attention. Any rogue thought that distracts him effectively resets conversation. A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.
Ever since his sickness, space for EP has existed only as far as he can see it. His social universe is only as large as the people in the room. He lives under a narrow spotlight, surrounded by darkness. On a typical morning, EP wakes up, has breakfast, and returns to bed to listen to the radio. But back in bed, it’s not always clear whether he’s just had breakfast or just woken up. Often he’ll have breakfast again, and return to bed to listen to some more radio. Some mornings he’ll have breakfast for a third time. He watches TV, which can be very exciting from second to second, though shows with a clear beginning, middle, and end can pose a problem. He prefers the History Channel, or anything about World War II. He takes walks around the neighborhood, usually several times before lunch, and sometimes for as long as three quarters of an hour. He sits in the yard. He reads the newspaper, which must feel like stepping out of a time machine. Iraq? Internet? By the time EP gets to the end of a headline, he’s usually forgotten how it began. Most of the time, after reading the weather, he just doodles on the paper, drawing mustaches on the photographs or tracing his spoon. When he sees home prices in the real estate section, he invariably announces his shock.