Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

  Freud thought that infantile amnesia was a matter of adults repressing the hypersexualized fantasies of early childhood, which only become shameful in later life. I’m not sure you could find too many psychologists who still cling to that interpretation. The more likely explanation for this strange early forgetting lies in the fact that our brains are maturing rapidly during the first couple years of life, with unused neural connections getting pruned back, and new connections constantly forming. The neocortex is not fully developed until about the third or fourth year, around the time that children start laying down permanent memories. Anatomy, however, may only tell part of the story. As infants, we also lack schema for interpreting the world and relating the present to the past. Without experience—and perhaps most important, without the essential organizing tool of language—infants lack the capacity to embed their memories in a web of meaning that will make them accessible later in life. Those structures only develop over time, through exposure to the world. The vital learning that we do during the first years of life is virtually entirely of the implicit, nondeclarative kind. In other words, everyone on earth has had some taste of EP’s condition. And like EP, we’ve all forgotten what it’s like.

  I’m curious to see EP’s unconscious, nondeclarative memory at work, so I ask him if he’s interested in taking me on a walk around his neighborhood. He says, “Not really,” so I wait and ask him again a couple minutes later. This time he agrees. We walk out the front door into the high afternoon sun and turn right—his decision, not mine. I ask EP why we’re not turning to the left instead.

  “I’d just rather not go that way. This is just the way I go. I don’t know why,” he says.

  If I asked him to draw a map of the route he takes at least three times a day, he’d never be able to do it. He doesn’t even know his own address, or (almost as improbably for someone from San Diego) which way the ocean is. But after so many years of taking the same walk, the journey has etched itself on his unconscious. His wife, Beverly, now lets him go out alone, even though a single wrong turn would leave him completely lost. Sometimes he comes back from his walks with objects he’s picked up along the way: a stack of round stones, a puppy, somebody’s wallet. He can never explain how they came into his possession.

  “Our neighbors love him because he’ll come up to them and just start talking to them,” Beverly tells me. Even though he thinks he’s meeting them for the first time, he’s learned through force of habit that these are people he should feel comfortable with, and he interprets those unconscious feelings of comfort as a good reason to stop and say hello.

  That EP has learned to like his neighbors without ever learning who they are points to how many of our basic day-to-day actions are guided by implicit values and judgments, independent of declarative memory. I wonder what other things EP has learned through force of habit. What other nondeclarative memories have continued to shape him over the decade and a half since he lost his declarative memory? Surely, he must still have desires and fears, emotions, and cravings—even if his conscious recollection of those feelings is so fleeting that he cannot recognize them for long enough to verbalize them.

  I thought of my own self fifteen years ago, and how much I’ve changed in the same period. The me who exists today and the me who existed then, if put side by side, would look more than vaguely similar. But we are a completely different collection of molecules, with different hairlines and waistlines, and, it sometimes seems, little in common besides our names. What binds that me to this me, and allows me to maintain the illusion that there is continuity from moment to moment and year to year, is some relatively stable but gradually evolving thing at the nucleus of my being. Call it a soul, or a self, or an emergent by-product of a neural network, but whatever you want to call it, that element of continuity is entirely dependent on memory.

  But even if we are at the mercy of our memories in establishing our identities, it is clear that EP is much more than just a soulless golem. In spite of everything he’s lost, there is still a person there, and a personality—a charming personality, in fact—with a unique perspective on the world. Even if a virus wiped clean his memories, it didn’t completely wipe clean his personhood. It just left a hollow, static self that can never grow and can never change.

  We cross the street and walk away from Beverly and Carol, leaving me alone with EP for the first time. He doesn’t know who I am, or what I’m doing at his side, although he seems to sense that I’m there for some good reason. He looks at me and purses his lips, and I can see that he’s searching for something to say. Rather than try to fill the empty silence, I let it linger for a moment to see where the discomfort might lead. I guess I’m hoping for some fleeting recognition of how odd it all must be, this scene without a prologue. But no such recognition comes, or if it does, EP never lets it surface. He is trapped, I realize, in the ultimate existential nightmare, utterly blind to the reality in which he lives. The impulse strikes me to help him escape, at least for a second. I want to take him by the arm and shake him. “You have a rare and debilitating memory disorder,” I want to tell him. “The last fifty years have been lost to you. In less than a minute, you’re going to forget that this conversation ever even happened.” I imagine the horror that would descend upon him, the momentary clarity, the gaping emptiness that would open up in front of him, and close just as quickly. And then the passing car or the singing bird that would snap him back into his oblivious bubble. But of course I don’t do it.

  “We’ve gone far enough,” I tell him, and point him in the direction from which we came. We turn around and walk back down the street whose name he’s forgotten, past the waving neighbors he doesn’t recognize, to a home he doesn’t know. In front of the house sits a car with tinted windows. We turn to look at our reflections. I ask EP what he sees.

  “An old man,” he says. “That’s all.”

  FIVE

  THE MEMORY PALACE

  I had arranged to get together with Ed one last time before he headed back to Europe. He wanted to meet me in Central Park, which he had never seen before, and which he insisted was a vital stop on his tour of America. After taking in the bare late-winter trees and watching the runners do their midday laps around the Reservoir, we ended up at the southern end of the park, directly across the street from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. It was a frigid and brutally windy afternoon—less than ideal conditions for thinking of any kind, much less memorizing. Nevertheless, Ed insisted that we remain outdoors. He handed me his cane and gamely clambered up one of the big boulders near the edge of the park, with what appeared to be some pain in his chronically arthritic joints. After scanning the horizon and commenting on the “perfect sublimity” of the spot, he invited me to join him on top of the rock. He had promised that he could teach me a few basic memory techniques in under an hour. It was hard to imagine we could brave the weather for any longer than that.

  “I have to warn you,” Ed said, as he delicately seated himself crosslegged, “you are shortly going to go from having an awed respect for people with a good memory to saying, ‘Oh, it’s all a stupid trick.’ ” He paused and cocked his head, as if to see if that would in fact be my response. “And you will be wrong. It’s an unfortunate phase you’re just going to have to pass through.”

  He started his lesson with the most basic principle of all mnemonics: “elaborative encoding.” Our memories weren’t built for the modern world, he explained. Like our vision, our capacity for language, our ability to walk upright, and every other one of our biological faculties, our memories evolved through a process of natural selection in an environment that was quite different from the one we live in today.

  Most of the evolution that shaped the primitive brains of our prehuman ancestors into the linguistic, symbolic, neurotic modern brains that serve us (sometimes poorly) today took place during the Pleistocene, an epoch which began about 1.8 million years ago and only ended ten thousand years ago. During that period—and in a few isolated places, still to
this day—our species made its living as huntergatherers, and it was the demands of that lifestyle that sculpted the minds we have today.

  Much as our taste for sugar and fat may have served us well in a world of scarce nutrition, but is now maladaptive in a world of ubiquitous fast food joints, our memories aren’t perfectly adapted for our contemporary information age. The tasks that we often rely on our memories for today simply weren’t relevant in the environment in which the human brain evolved. Our ancestors didn’t need to recall phone numbers, or word-for-word instructions from their bosses, or the Advanced Placement U.S. history curriculum, or (because they lived in relatively small, stable groups) the names of dozens of strangers at a cocktail party.

  What our early human and hominid ancestors did need to remember was where to find food and resources, and the route home, and which plants were edible and which were poisonous. Those are the sorts of vital memory skills that they depended on every day, and it was—at least in part—in order to meet those demands that human memory evolved as it did.

  The principle underlying all memory techniques is that our brains don’t remember all types of information equally well. As exceptional as we are at remembering visual imagery (think of the two-picture recognition test), we’re terrible at remembering other kinds of information, like lists of words or numbers. The point of memory techniques is to do what the synasthete S did instinctually: to take the kinds of memories our brains aren’t good at holding on to and transform them into the kinds of memories our brains were built for.

  “The general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it,” Ed explained to me between breaths into his clenched fists. “That’s what elaborative encoding is. In a moment, we’re going to do this with a list of words, which is just a sort of general exercise for getting ahold of the techniques. Then you’re going to be able to move on to numbers, playing cards, and then, from there, to complex concepts. Basically, when we’re done with you, you’re going to be able to learn anything you want to, really.”

  Ed recounted how on a recent visit to Vienna, he and Lukas had partied until dawn the night before Lukas’s biggest exam of the year, and only stumbled home just before sunrise. “Lukas woke up at noon, learned everything for the exam in a memory blitz, and then passed it,” said Ed. “When you’re that effective at learning, it’s a bit of a temptation to not bother oneself with feelings of academic guilt until the last possible moment. Lukas has figured out that effort is a rather vulgar exercise.”

  Ed tucked his curls behind his ears, and asked me what I wanted to memorize first. “We could start by learning something useful, like the Egyptian pharaohs or the terms of the American presidents,” he offered. “Or perhaps a Romantic poem? We could do the geological epochs, if you’d like.”

  I laughed. “That all sounds very useful.”

  “We could quickly learn all the American football winners for the last century or so, or the point averages of the top baseball stars, if you’d like.”

  “Do you know—really know—all the winners of the Super Bowl?” I asked.

  “Well, no, I don’t. I prefer cricket. But I’d be happy to teach them to you. That’s the point: We can quickly learn anything with these techniques. Look, you tempted or not?”

  “I’m tempted.”

  “Well, I suppose the most obvious, practical use of this technique is the mastery of one’s to-do list. Do you keep a to-do list?”

  “At home, yes. Sort of. From time to time.”

  “I see. Well, I keep a to-do list in my memory at all times. We’ll use mine.”

  Ed asked for a piece of paper, which he then scribbled a few words on. He handed it back to me with a mischievous smirk. It was a list of fifteen items. “Just a few things I’ve got to get done around town before I head upstate for a party a friend of mine is throwing,” he said.

  I read the list aloud:

  Pickled garlic

  Cottage cheese

  Salmon (peat-smoked if poss.)

  Six bottles of white wine

  Socks (x3)

  Three hula-hoops (spare?)

  Snorkel

  Dry ice machine

  E-mail Sophia

  Skin-toned cat suit

  Find Paul Newman film—Somebody Up There Likes Me

  Elk sausages??

  Megaphone and director’s chair

  Harness and ropes

  Barometer

  “This list is from your memory?” I asked incredulously.

  “From my memory it came. Into your memory it shall go,” said Ed.

  “And this is serious?”

  “Well, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to find everything on it. Do you have cottage cheese in New York?”

  “I’m a little more concerned about the elk sausages and the skin-toned cat suit,” I told him. “And besides, aren’t you leaving town to go back to England tomorrow?”

  “Yes, well, I’m prepared to accept that many of these items aren’t absolutely necessary.” He winked. “The point of this exercise, however, is that you are going to commit this list to memory.”

  Ed told me that by learning the techniques he was about to teach, I would be installing myself in a “proud tradition of mnemonists.” That proud tradition began, at least according to legend, in the fifth century B.C. with the poet Simonides of Ceos standing in the rubble of the great banquet hall collapse in Thessaly. As the poet closed his eyes and reconstructed the crumbled building in his imagination, he had an extraordinary realization: He remembered where each of the guests at the ill-fated dinner had been sitting. Even though he had made no conscious effort to memorize the layout of the room, it had nevertheless left a durable impression upon his memory. From that simple observation, Simonides reputedly invented a technique that would form the basis of what came to be known as the art of memory. He realized that if it hadn’t been guests sitting at the banquet table, but rather something else—say, every great Greek dramatist seated in order of their dates of birth—he would have remembered that instead. Or what if, instead of banquet guests, he saw each of the words of one of his poems arrayed around the table? Or every task he needed to accomplish that day? Just about anything that could be imagined, he reckoned, could be imprinted upon one’s memory, and kept in good order, simply by engaging one’s spatial memory in the act of remembering. To use Simonides’ technique, all one has to do is convert something unmemorable, like a string of numbers or a deck of cards or a shopping list or Paradise Lost, into a series of engrossing visual images and mentally arrange them within an imagined space, and suddenly those forgettable items become unforgettable.

  Virtually all the nitty-gritty details we have about classical memory training—indeed, nearly all the memory tricks in the mental athlete’s arsenal—were first described in a short, anonymously authored Latin rhetoric textbook called the Rhetorica ad Herennium, written sometime between 86 and 82 B.C. It is the only truly complete discussion of the memory techniques invented by Simonides to have survived into the Middle Ages. Though the intervening two thousand years have seen quite a few innovations in the art of memory, the basic techniques have remained fundamentally unchanged from those described in the Ad Herennium. “This book is our bible,” Ed told me.

  Ed reads both Latin and ancient Greek (as well as speaking French and German fluently) and fancies himself an amateur classicist. The Ad Herennium was to be the first of several ancient texts he pressed upon me. Before I sampled Tony Buzan’s expansive oeuvre (he’s authored or coauthored over 120 books) or any of the self-help books put out by the top mental athletes, Ed wanted me to start my investigation with the classics. In addition to the Ad Herennium, there would be translated excerpts of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria and Cicero’s De Oratore for me to read, followed by a collection of medieval writings on memory by Thomas A
quinas, Albertus Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor, and Peter of Ravenna.

  The techniques introduced in the Ad Herennium were widely practiced in the ancient world. In fact, in his own writings on the art of memory, Cicero says that the techniques are so well known that he felt he didn’t need to waste ink describing them in detail (hence our reliance on the Ad Herennium). Once upon a time, every literate person was versed in the techniques Ed was about to teach me. Memory training was considered a centerpiece of classical education in the language arts, on par with grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Students were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it.

  In a world with few books, memory was sacrosanct. Just look at Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, the first-century encyclopedia that chronicled all things wondrous and useful for winning bar bets in the classical world, including the most exceptional memories then known to history. “King Cyrus could give the names of all the soldiers in his army,” Pliny reports. “Lucius Scipio knew the names of the whole Roman people. King Pyrrhus’s envoy Cineas knew those of the Senate and knighthood at Rome the day after his arrival ... A person in Greece named Charmadas recited the contents of any volumes in libraries that anyone asked him to quote, just as if he were reading them.” There are plenty of reasons not to take everything Pliny says at face value (he also reported the existence of a race of dog-headed people in India) but the sheer volume of anecdotes about extraordinary memories in the classical world is itself telling. Seneca the Elder could repeat two thousand names in the order they’d been given to him. St. Augustine tells of a friend, Simplicius, who could recite Virgil by heart—backward. (That he could recite it forward seems to have been unremarkable.) A strong memory was seen as the greatest virtue since it represented the internalization of a universe of external knowledge. “Ancient and medieval people reserved their awe for memory. Their greatest geniuses they describe as people of superior memories,” writes Mary Carruthers, the author of two books on the history of memory techniques. Indeed, the single most common theme in the lives of the saints—besides their superhuman goodness—is their often extraordinary memories.