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Moonwalking with Einstein Book Summary
Citation preview
BOOK SUMMARY
How many phone numbers do you know off by heart?
How much do you remember from your high school history classes?
What were the five main points in the last book you read?
What did you eat for lunch last Tuesday?
f you are sitting there
with a blank look on
your face, you are not
alone. As we become
m o r e a n d m o r e
d e p e n d e n t o n
technology, we become
less and less dependent
on the most powerful
technology ever invented
SAY WOT
I
In his fascinating book, Joshua Foer takes us in for a close look
inside an annual event, the geekery of which is unparalleled in this
world: the World Memory Championship However, in the process he
discovers a long lost art that might just be the one thing you could be doing
to transform your entire life. Let’s get started.
Once upon a time, Foer reminds us,
memory was the root of all culture.
It was the way that customs, traditions,
and knowledge got passed from
generation to generation. If you
wanted to ‘know’ something, you
had to commit it to memory. So,
that’s what they did. For thousands
of years, all of history’s great
stories and customs were passed
on by word of mouth – which
is to say that they were
committed to memory.
The History
of Memory
When we (in the 21st century) think of committing something to memory, our first thought is to find a place that we can record it so we can access it at a later date. In the last few hundred years, we would put pen (or printing press) to paper and read it when the time was appropriate.
Then, in the last 5 years or so, we transitioned from bytes on a computer to
In the last 25 years or so, we transitioned from paper to... bytes
on a computer
And if we didn’t record what we are looking for...
bytes on a phone.
Ironically,
with all of this
technology at
our disposal, we
have forgotten
how to
remember. If
you’ve ever tried
to remember a
phone number
that you’ve just
heard for the first
time without the
aid of some
recording device,
you’ll probably
find yourself
repeating it over
and over again
until you think
you’ve
committed to
memory. Then,
when you go to
dial the number,
you realize that
you didn’t
commit it to
memory at all.
Things used to be different. Our predecessors trained their minds on a daily basis. As Foer points out, they trained them not to just remember a bunch of random facts and figures, but to create a system so that they could access them at any time. It would be the difference between a book and a table of contents. They would instantaneously be able to find the information they were looking for in their brains. Consider Peter of Ravenna, a fifteenth-century Italian jurist who authored one ofthat era’s most popular books on memory. Not only did he commit thousands of texts to memory, he was able to “re-read” them from memory while he was on vacation.
When was the last time you did that?
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Memory today has been reduced to
parlour tricks and movies about savants
(Rainman, anybody?). What we don’t
realize is that this has an enormous
impact on our daily lives. The gap
between having something committed to
memory and being able to look it up
(in a book or on the Internet) can’t be
understated.
The Impact of Not Using Your Memory
(12x19)/7a
6x }{ =
Take, for example, the case of Charlie Munger. He is the right hand man to Warren Buffett, and Warren himself admits that Charlie has the best “30 second mind” on the planet. He is able to work through a problem (particularly in finance) in less than 30 seconds that the average financier would probably struggle with for a lifetime. Why? Because he has committed between 80-90 “mental models” to memory that allow him to work through any challenge presented to him.
Munger Memory Powered!
(Warren’s right hand man)
However, most of us are tempted to delightfully forget
almost everything in our lives because we are able to
write it down somewhere where we will access it
later. In place of elaborate systems to remember
things with our minds, we have devised elaborate
systems in order to organize information externally.
There are systems like David Allen’s “Getting Things
Done”, Merlin Mann’s ‘43 Folders’ and thousands of
other books and courses devoted clearing your mind
of things you need to remember.
This is taken to the extreme by a scientist at Microsoft
by the name of Gordon Bell, who has devised a
system that records the entirety of his life, so that he
doesn’t need to remember anything that he’s ever
experienced. He has a little black box that hangs
around his neck that is essentially a camera that never
turns itself off. He also scans all of the paper that
comes into his life so that everything is stored
digitally, where he can access it at a later point
in his life. Why bother to remember anything
when you could just as easily access it later
through your computer?
The strategy of externalizing memories may be a useful tool for the minutia of
daily life. Writing a todo list so you don’t forget the milk on the way
home from work isn’t going to do much damage. However,
when we take it to the extreme like Gordon Bell proposes, we
lose something very important – the
ability to think critically. How many
critically important business situations do
you find yourself in where it’s acceptable to say “hold on
a second while I Google that”?
And what if you find yourself
in a negotiation with somebody like Charlie
Munger? Here is the simple fact: people who have
elaborate systems for externalizing knowledge have
to relearn it every single time they want to have
access to it. The people like Charlie Munger who
don’t relearn the knowledge – they reuse it.
In a world where most people would rather be like
Gordon Bell than Charlie Munger,
you have an incredible opportunity to swim
upstream and reap the rewards.
have committed it to memory
Amazingly, Foer went from journalist at the World Memory Championship to winner of the United States memory championship in 2 years time. If you somehow found yourself competing in one of these memory championships you would be required to remember a poem you’ve never seen before, the exact order of random decks of cards, and other feats that right now you would think are impossible for anybody but the most intelligent people in the world. You’d be wrong. As it turns out, most of the competitors in these competitions are no more remarkable than you and I – they just understand how to use their brains.
How the brain makes
memories
The one technique that is universally accepted in the memory circuit is the technique called
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The
The Memory Palace was first used by the fifth
century BC poet Simonides when he was at a
dinner that ended in disaster – the building
collapsed killing many of the people inside.
Simonides escaped, only to find himself standing
outside the rubble watching a number of people
search the rubble for their loved ones. As he was
standing there, Simonides realized that he
remembered exactly where each of the people at
the dinner party had been sitting, without any
attempt to memorize them beforehand. The layout
of the room and the location of each person within
it was embedded in his memory. He was then able
to help the grieving families find
their loved ones.
MEMORY PALACE
Fast forward 2,500 years or so to present day England and we realize that something interesting was going on in Simonides head. To become a cabbie in London, you need to spend between 2 – 4 years memorizing the more than 25,000 twisting and curving streets of the London area. Incredibly, only 3 out of every 10 people pass the final exam (called “The Knowledge”). A study was done in 2000 by a British neuroscientist to find out what effect all that driving around had on the the cabbies’ brains. The study concluded that the cabbies had a larger right posterior hippocampus than the average human being. The driving and memorizing had actually altered the structure of their brains.
LOLCATZ404
THE KNOWLEDGE
When the researchers moved their focus to the brains of the top
contestants in the World Memory Championships, they found an equally surprising result. When asked to
memorize random series of numbers, they differed from the control group. The parts of the brain that were lighting up
where the parts that are involved in spatial navigation and visual memory, including the same part of the brain that the London
cabbies used. These visual and navigational cues are the key to us remembering and ultimately using the knowledge we obtain
during our lifetimes. Now let’s move on to how you can start using this to your advantage.
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The first step is to choose your palace. The most logical place to start for most people is their current home. If you can close your eyes and take a tour of your current residence in your head right now, you’ve got your first palace. As you get addicted to this technique and want to remember many more things, you’ll have to find a number of places to use. Some memory champions even resort to designing new buildings in their mind in order to store information there. You might move next to your place of work, a street that you are intimately familiar with, or the place you went to school. Save the mental architecture for a later date.
Putting the Memory Palace Into Action
1
The Memory Palace technique essentially consists of placing memorable objects around a familiar place that you can visualize quickly and with great ease.
The second thing to note are the distinctive features in your palace and use those as your “loci” (the places you will put the things you want to remember). This is critical because as you take a tour of your palace at a later date, you’ll want to be able to have the associations you’ve made jump out at you. For instance, although I’m intimately familiar with my own house, the 4’ by 6’ canvas painting I’m staring at right now is much more memorable for me
2
than the drapes that are behind me.
The third thing you’ll want to do is plot a route through your memory palace so that your “tour” happens in the same sequence every time. This way you’ll be able to remember things in the correct order. If you chose your home for your first memory palace, the front door is a logical place to begin.
3
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4Next, it’s time to start associating
visual associations with the loci
around your palace. The key here is
to make your images a memorable
as possible. This should be obvious,
but most people have a hard time
with this. What things are
“memorable”? Things that would
make you stop dead in your tracks
if you saw them in real life. One of
the first things a memory champ
made Foer remember when
training him on this
method was Claudia Schiffer
swimming naked in a huge tub of
cottage cheese.
Now imagine that this happened on your front porch. I dare you to try and forget this image. So, if Foer needed to pick up some cottage cheese at the store, he was very unlikely to ever forget.
If you are having trouble
thinking of things that are
memorable, try crazy, offensive,
sexual and completely non-
sensical imagery. Most of the
memory champions know that the
best in the “game” rely more on their creativity to
create memorable images than they do a genetically
gifted brain. Lastly, once you’ve encoded your
imagery around your memory palace, take a few
trips through to make sure you’ve got everything in
its place. Shore up any deficiencies with a
different (and usually, crazier) image and
you will have stored that in your memory so
that you’ll be able to recall it at a moment’s
notice.
5go crazy
For more information, about this book and our other great book
summaries, please visit:
www.readitfor.me
This is a brave new world
you are wandering into,
and it just may change
your life forever. Not only
will you be able to amaze
your friends at a cocktail
party, you’ll be able to have
a wealth of knowledge at
your fingertips for when
you need it most. And that,
my friends, is a competitive
advantage that almost
nobody in your world will
be able to compete with.
Final logo2007 /10/16