By Joshua Foer
I read this book years ago and really enjoyed it. I joined a book club that selected this book, so I read it again.
The book ponders the meaning and importance of human memory. It is clearly critical to the experience of life, but extreme stunts of memorization don’t appear to correlate with additional accomplishments or satisfaction. The author won the US Memory Championship but did not dramatically alter his life or reliance on external memory tools. Still, there were some powerful systems explored that showed what a dedicated mind is capable of.
“Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. Most just goes in one ear and out the other. If the point of reading were simply to retain knowledge, it would probably be the single least efficient activity I engage in. I can spend a half dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about. All those facts and anecdotes, even the stuff interesting enough to be worth underlining, have a habit of briefly making an impression on me and then disappearing into who knows where. There are books on my shelf that I can’t even remember whether I’ve read or not.” – page 7
That quote stung. It was an unfamiliar passage in a book I’d already read. There were some interesting parts of the book, especially with savants and individuals that experienced brain injuries that suggested more content is stored in the brain than is regularly accessible. I want to believe that my reading has tucked away some wisdom that will be retrieved when the right triggers call for it, even if I can’t recall it all right now as I summarize my most recent trip through the text.
In a short story titled “Funes the Memorious” by Jorge Luis Borges, the main character remembers everything and as a result cannot prioritize or make sense of the incredible volume of data. “To make sense of the world, we must filter it. ‘To think,’ Borges writes, ‘is to forget.'” – page 37
Real-life memory help of remembering names:
“The trick is deceptively simple. 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.” – page 44
“I’m working on expanding subjective time so that it feels like a live longer,” Ed had mumbled to me on the sidewalk outside the Con Ed headquarters, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. “The idea is to avoid that feeling you have when you get to the end of the year and feel like, where the hell did that go?”
“And how are you going to do that?” I asked.
“By remembering more. By providing my life with more chronological landmarks. By making myself more aware of time’s passage.”
page 75
I think about that pretty regularly myself. The problem with routines is that they cause compression. If you live several very similar days, it gets recorded as a single day. A few days of an adventurous vacation can seem longer in retrospect than weeks of workdays. There’s an interesting counter point to this. A few famously successful people have emphasized the importance of their routines. They eat the same breakfast every day. They wear the same clothes. The point for them is to reduce their cognitive load and avoid decision fatigue. They don’t want to waste brain cycles on choices that aren’t important. Perhaps their other decisions introduce enough variety into their experience that those details are truly trivial. However, others suggest taking different routes to work and changing up the little things in order to be more present and to experience time as Ed described. I’m not sure how to resolve those two competing notions.
As the author continues:
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and lie a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next–and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locals, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.
page 77
Foer is introduced to the memory palace on page 99. It’s such an effective technique that I find I can recall most of Ed’s todo list without trying particularly hard to hold onto it. The ridiculous images distributed through my childhood home are easy handles to store and retrieve.
Mere reading is not necessarily learning… To really learn a text, one had to memorize it. As the early-eighteenth-century Dutch poet Jan Luyken put it, “One book, printed in the Heart’s own wax / Is worth a thousand in the stacks.”
page 110
The power of written language was not immediately apparent:
If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow-men.
Thamus, King of Egypt in Plato’s Phaedrus quoted on page 138
Spaces took a long time to develop!
For a period, Latin scribes actually did try separating words with dots, but in the second century A.D., there was a reversion– a giant and very curious step backward, it would seem–to the old continuous script used by the Greeks. Spaces weren’t seen again in Western writing for another nine hundred years.
page 143
Long and clunky writing did not provide convenient random access. Scrolls must be read from start to finish to get something out of them. Eventually there were books, but they lacked page numbers, indexes, and tables of contents.
Along with page numbers and tables of contents, the index changed what a book was, and what it could do for scholars. The historian Ivan Illich has argued that this represented an invention of such magnitude that “it seems reasonable to speak of the pre- and post-index Middle Ages.”
page 145
It’s tough to read passages like this and ponder how I’m spending my time. I’m reading right now! Is this an exercise in futility!?
Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read. When I read a book, what do I hope will stay with me a year later? If it’s a work of nonfiction, the thesis, maybe, if the book has one. A few savory details, perhaps. If it’s fiction, the broadest outline of the plot, something about the main characters (at least their names), and an overall critical judgement about the book. Even these are likely to fade. Looking up at my shelves, at the books that have drained so many of my waking hours, is always a dispiriting experience.
page 148
Oof. I feel that.
Apparently a guy named Gordon Bell from Microsoft has decided to digitally record everything in his life. The Black Mirror episode The Entire History of You was a sufficient caution against this approach. Our sanity probably depends on the limits of our memory.
Some of the memory tricks applied in competition are quite intense. Like the author, I’m fine with using external memory sources like sticky notes, journals, phone apps, this blog, etc. Still, it’s attractive to have some strategies to retain things when it’s handy to do so. Page 164 introduced the Major System. That seems approachable and useable in daily life without becoming an extreme memory weirdo.
Numbers are converted to consonants so that they can form words or phrases to facilitate memory:
0 – S
1 – T or D
2 – N
3 – M
4 – R
5 – L
6 – Sh or Ch
7 – K or G
8 – F or V
9 – P or B
Gaps can be filled by any vowels. Choosing words that describe objects allows the whole thing to be pictured as an image. After this, the book described the person-action-object approach which makes perfect sense but requires a lot of preparation to store the original set of images to facilitate future memories. I don’t have reason to go that far.
As I burrowed deeper into my mental training, I was starting to wonder if the sort of memorization practiced by mental athletes was not something like the peacock’s tail: impressive not for its utility, but for its profound lack of utility… That has always been the rap against memory techniques: They’re impressive but ultimately useless.
page 188
On page 193 the author discusses studies that showed that memorization training did not significantly alter memory capability. It’s not really like a muscle where having memorized one thing, your memory is stronger for the next thing. Applying techniques works, but the evidence contradicting the brain as a muscle view undercuts a lot of schooling philosophy that assumes there are future gains for practicing memorization of academic facts.
This is somewhat contradicted by Raemon Matthews on page 209:
“Even if facts don’t by themselves lead to understanding, you can’t have understanding without facts. And crucially, the more you know, the easier it is to know more. Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.”
Maybe the key distinction here is that he’s talking about applicable knowledge in life versus the arbitrary memorization of information that might not attach to anything else. At the book club meeting, a couple of the participants were dissatisfied with this book because it didn’t really cover memories from life, how they work, and how they’re applied. It really only addressed memorization stunts.
“In our gross misunderstanding of the function of memory, we thought that memory was operated primarily by rote. In other words, you rammed it in until your head was stuffed with facts. What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus,” says Buzan. “The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.” If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you’ll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.
page 203
Conclusions:
Occasionally, I’d memorize shopping lists, directions, or to-do lists, but only in the rare circumstances when there wasn’t a pen available to jot them down. It’s not that the techniques didn’t work. I am walking proof that they do. It’s that it is so hard to find occasion to use them in the real world in which paper, computers, cell phones, and Post-its can handle the task of remembering for me.
page 269
So why bother investing in one’s memory in an age of externalized memories? The best answer I can give is the one that I received unwittingly from EP, whose memory had been so completely lost that he could not place himself in time or space, or relative to other people. That is: How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory.
At the book club meeting, I made a deliberate effort to overcome my tendency for poor name recollection. We were talking about a book about memory after all. I met:
Shannon
Sharon
Jane
Satya
Heather
Lesley
Mark
Teri
Dominic
Renee
Preston
I think that’s a correct lap around the tables.