Moonwalking with Einstein
Book summary
What is it about?
The book follows the adventures of Joshua Foer. He is an average joe who got himself competing at the top of mental athlete competitions. In the book, he explores the wonders of memory and how he managed to pull this off.
How I discovered it?
This past winter, I had an internship at the Canadian Space Agency. There, with other interns, I co-founded a book club. We suggested a couple of books and this is the one that we decided to go for.
Key takeaways
Monotony collapses time. Living a monotone lifestyle feels like speed running through life. The more we get out of our comfort zone, the more memorable our lives are going to be and the more alive we are going to feel. If memories are similar, they are basically going to shrink and separate 2 out of the ordinary events.
Our memory is way more powerful than we think it is: we don’t know how to use it. Our memory retains information in an unorderly way. We need to give some sort of structure to the things we want to remember. A prevalent factor through the book is the use of mental images to remember things. They introduce a technique called the memory palace. You essentially store mental images of things you want to remember in a memory palace. It is essentially a place that you know by heart. For instance, your home can be one. If you want to remember a shopping list, you just have to picture yourself walking in your memory palace and store the elements in different places. You can position the carrots in the living room, the cabbage in the pool, etc. To prepare for competitions, Joshua was literally studying big hotels to store an enormous amount of information.
The more technology advances, the less we need to remember. We have access to pens, paper, phones, the internet, etc. We can simply write down something and not worry about remembering them. Unlike back when writing didn’t exist. They talked about how the invention of spaces in plain text was revolutionary.
The secret to improving at a skill is to retain some degree of conscious control over it while practicing. As soon as you are good enough at a skill, you are going to be stuck on an OK plateau as they call it in the book. For instance, to improve your typing speed, you have to consciously try to improve it. If you try to improve at playing a musical instrument, you have to play new pieces or focus on new exercises.
Who should read it?
People who are interested in the field of memory. People who want to participate in mental athlete training. People who want to enjoy great storytelling.
Concepts worth exploring
Memory palace, Active recall, Spaced repetition
