What do you think?
Rate this book
乇賯氐丞 丕賱賯賲乇 賲毓 丌賷賳卮鬲丕賷賳: 賮賳 賵毓賱賲 鬲匕賰賾乇 賰賱 卮賷亍
欧宝娱乐 Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Nonfiction (2011)賷丨賰賷 賴匕丕 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 賯氐丞 噩賵卮賵丕 賮賵賷乇貙 丕賱氐丨賮賷 丕賱匕賷 匕賴亘 賱鬲睾胤賷丞 亘胤賵賱丞 丕賱毓丕賱賲 賱賱匕丕賰乇丞貙 賵丕賳鬲賴賶 亘賴 丕賱兀賲乇 兀賳 兀氐亘丨 賲賴賵賵爻賸丕 亘兀爻乇丕乇賴丕 賱賷爻鬲賲乇 賮賷 丕賱鬲丿乇賾亘 毓賱賶 鬲賯賳賷丕鬲 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 賱毓丕賲 賰丕賲賱貙 賵賷禺賵囟 乇丨賱丞 睾乇賷亘丞 賵賲孬賷乇丞 賱賱丕賴鬲賲丕賲貙 丨鬲賶 賷毓賵丿 賱賱亘胤賵賱丞 賵賱賰賳 賰賲鬲賳丕賮爻 賮賷賴丕 賵賱賷爻 賰氐丨賮賷. 賷賯賵賱 噩賵卮賵丕: 廿賳 賰丕賳鬲 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 賴賷 胤乇賷賯鬲賳丕 賮賷 丕賱丕丨鬲賮丕馗 亘賲丕 賳毓鬲賯丿 兀賳賴 賲賴賲 賵賯賷賾賲貙 賮廿賳賴丕 兀賷囟賸丕 鬲乇鬲亘胤 亘卮賰賱 賲丐賱賲 亘夭賵丕賱賳丕. 毓賳丿賲丕 賳賲賵鬲貙 鬲賲賵鬲 匕賰乇賷丕鬲賳丕 賲毓賳丕. 賵丨賮馗賳丕 賱兀賮賰丕乇賳丕 賮賷 丕賱賰鬲亘 賵賮賷 丕賱匕丕賰乇丕鬲 丕賱禺丕乇噩賷丞 賴賷 胤乇賷賯丞 兀禺乇賶 賱氐丿 丕賱賮賳丕亍. 賷爻賲丨 賴匕丕 丕賱賳馗丕賲 賱賱兀賮賰丕乇 亘丕賱丕賳鬲賯丕賱 毓亘乇 丕賱夭賲賳 賵丕賱賮囟丕亍貙 賵賱賱賮賰乇丞 丕賱賵丕丨丿丞 亘丕賱氐毓賵丿 毓賱賶 兀禺乇賶 丨鬲賶 鬲氐賱 廿賱賶 毓賯賱 丌禺乇 賵鬲爻鬲賲乇 丕賱兀賮賰丕乇 賮賷 丕賱賳賲賵 賵丕賱鬲賰丕孬乇.
321 pages, Paperback
First published March 3, 2011
9,971 people are currently reading
164k people want to read
About the author
Joshua Foer
4听books1,028听followersPersonal life
Foer is the younger brother of New Republic editor Franklin Foer and novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. He is the son of Esther Foer, president of a public relations firm, and Albert Foer, a think-tank president. He was born in Washington, D.C. and attended Georgetown Day School. He then went on to graduate from Yale University, where he lived in Silliman College, in 2004.
Foer is married to Dinah Herlands, a medical student at Yale, whom he met while an undergraduate at Yale.
Career
Foer sold his first book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, to Penguin for publication in March 2011. He received a $1.2 million advance for the concept when he was just 22 plus a movie option.
In 2006, Foer won the U.S.A. Memory Championship "speed cards" event by memorizing a deck of 52 cards in 1 minute and 40 seconds. Moonwalking with Einstein describes Foer's journey as a participatory journalist to becoming a national champion mnemonist, under the tutelage of British Grand_Master_of_Memory, Ed Cooke.
Foer's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, and The Nation. In 2007, the quarterly art & culture journal Cabinet began publishing Foer's column "A Minor History Of." The column "examines an overlooked cultural phenomenon using a timeline."
Organizations
Foer has organized several websites and organizations based on his interests. He created the Athanasius Kircher Society which had only one session featuring Kim Peek and Joseph Kittinger.". He is the co-founder, along with Dylan Thuras, of the Atlas Obscura, an online compendium of "The World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica". He is also a co-organizer of Sukkah City.
Foer is the younger brother of New Republic editor Franklin Foer and novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. He is the son of Esther Foer, president of a public relations firm, and Albert Foer, a think-tank president. He was born in Washington, D.C. and attended Georgetown Day School. He then went on to graduate from Yale University, where he lived in Silliman College, in 2004.
Foer is married to Dinah Herlands, a medical student at Yale, whom he met while an undergraduate at Yale.
Career
Foer sold his first book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, to Penguin for publication in March 2011. He received a $1.2 million advance for the concept when he was just 22 plus a movie option.
In 2006, Foer won the U.S.A. Memory Championship "speed cards" event by memorizing a deck of 52 cards in 1 minute and 40 seconds. Moonwalking with Einstein describes Foer's journey as a participatory journalist to becoming a national champion mnemonist, under the tutelage of British Grand_Master_of_Memory, Ed Cooke.
Foer's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, and The Nation. In 2007, the quarterly art & culture journal Cabinet began publishing Foer's column "A Minor History Of." The column "examines an overlooked cultural phenomenon using a timeline."
Organizations
Foer has organized several websites and organizations based on his interests. He created the Athanasius Kircher Society which had only one session featuring Kim Peek and Joseph Kittinger.". He is the co-founder, along with Dylan Thuras, of the Atlas Obscura, an online compendium of "The World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica". He is also a co-organizer of Sukkah City.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 7,245 reviews
August 14, 2012
Here鈥檚 the hook. Suppose you want to commit the items on your to-do list to memory because you don鈥檛 have a pencil and paper. The first five items on your list are:
The list may be much longer than this, but the shortened version above will illustrate the point well enough.
Research shows we remember mental images of things much better than we do raw data by rote (things like numbers, playing cards, poems, or list items). Most people can only keep a random sequence of about 7 digits in their heads at a time when first hearing them. Memory experts have found that by transforming any sequence of things into pictures instead, and sticking these pictures in what they call a memory palace, that we can recall them much more effectively. An example should help show this.
First of all, we need to visualize a place we know very well. This is the memory palace. In fact, the home you grew up in, while it may not have been a real palace, is probably rich in the kind of recallable detail that can help in retaining long sequences. We then position the mental images associated with the objects we鈥檙e trying to remember along a path within the home. In my case, that might mean I come to the front door where a little doe 鈥� say Bambi鈥檚 girlfriend Faline 鈥� is resting. You can tell by her eyes that she鈥檚 bored, though. She鈥檚 a 鈥淏ordeaux鈥�. (I know it鈥檚 bad, but this is going to work.) Let the image burn into your brain for a moment. Once inside at the base of the stairs in the foyer I come to a freight car of a model train. It looks ridiculous spotted with pink polka dots, but hey, it鈥檚 a way to remember Trainspotting. Up the stairs on the left is a faux antique table. On it sits our mnemonic for TPS: miniature tepees. And just to make it more memorable, imagine that a teenager lives inside one of them and it was TPed with Charmin. (I was tempted to have Lumbergh say 鈥淯mmm鈥� yeah鈥�. 鈥� at this point, but wasn鈥檛 sure that Office Space was a universal reference.) Then it鈥檚 a quick right into the living room. In the middle of it is a big hot tub, but instead of water inside, it鈥檚 a giant margarita. The drink comes complete with salt around the edge of the tub and a wedge cut from a lime the size of a beach ball. Inside the tub is a miniature ship with a master on board shouting orders. Some of the crew look like they wouldn鈥檛 mind walking the plank. Finally, through the entry way into the kitchen I see Marley鈥檚 ghost (Bob Marley, that is) and he鈥檚 sitting on the table with doctor/writer extraordinaire Abraham Verghese. In case the link to Haile Selassie isn鈥檛 clear, he was also known as Ras Tafari, viewed by many a Jamaican as a messianic figure. Surprisingly enough, Marley is not holding anything rolled up and burning; he鈥檚 got a dove perched on his hand instead and it鈥檚 cooing (which, of course, is auditorially equivalent to coup-ing).
So there鈥檚 our list. Picture it in sequence one more time: the bored doe just inside the door, the spotted train at the base of the stairs, the tepees on the table at the top of the stairs, the ship master in the margarita in the living room, and finally, sitting on the kitchen table, the Selassie worshipper with the author of Cutting for Stone and the cooing dove. I could presumably have had dozens of these images stuck along a path throughout the house. The placement along a set route (say up the stairs and clockwise, hitting every room) helps since that way we aren鈥檛 as apt to skip anything. Experts also say it鈥檚 best to choose images that are ridiculous or racy or in any other way more apt to stick in your head.
That pretty much covers the trick to memorization. To get an entire book out of the deal, though, Foer had to expand the scope. He started out mentioning the remarkable feats the elite memorizers can perform (x digits of pi, y decks of cards, z lines of verse). He then got into the small but interesting world of competitive memorization, including his own involvement. Foer began his investigation on a journalistic whim and ended up, with hard work and a lot of help from memory mentors, becoming the US champion. Even though the end result of his competition is mentioned at the outset, there is drama in how it unfolds.
The competition involves several categories, one of which is memorizing card sequences. The trick in doing that is an offshoot of what I described above. The difference is that every card has a mental image associated with it that you spend days and days drilling into your head beforehand. Each mental image has a subject and a verb. The ace of clubs may be Karl Spackler (the Cinderella boy himself) teeing off at Augusta. The two of clubs may be Groucho Marx lighting a cigar. And so on for each card in the deck. Then, when you want to memorize the randomized order of a deck, you put these images in a fresh memory palace. Only to make fewer images necessary, you can join the subject of one card with the action of the next card into a single image. If the first card is the seven of diamonds (which you may have associated with Einstein twirling the tassel on his mortarboard) and the next one is the jack of spades (which is J.D. Salinger moonwalking, say) then the pair of those cards together would produce an image of Einstein moonwalking. Memorizing the deck would then involve 26 images. There may be variations, but that鈥檚 the basic approach. Sequences of digits are done similarly, only for that you may have 100 different pre-memorized images 鈥� one for each pair in the range from 00 to 99.
Foer points out that our memories don鈥檛 get much of a workout these days. We all know how easy it is to rely on spell checks and Google searches for things we used to keep in our heads. So is it useful to keep more information available for immediate use? Probably. Foer argues that our ideas, abstractions, and arguments depend on recallable units that are the building blocks. What Foer does not do as effectively is demonstrate how the aforementioned devices help with that kind of practical memory. He admits to it, too, though only after he tells his fun story of the US Memory Championship.
The 鈥渕ental athletes鈥� he first encountered were not what he鈥檇 expected. They were not savants, nor did they possess photographic memories. Rather, they鈥檇 all learned these visualization techniques that date back to the ancient Greeks. The top competitors were often the ones with the most creative images. After being coached by several top mnemonists, Foer was able to compete with the best in the US. He said he still loses his keys, though.
There was more to this book as well. However, and I say this with a full appreciation of the irony, I don鈥檛 remember much of it. (It was several months ago.) There was a partial debunking of the savant from 60 Minutes who was 鈥渂orn on a blue day鈥�, there was a bit on the tricks in reciting poems, and there was the blow-by-blow action of the memory competition. My impression at the time was that it was all fairly interesting, but not very useful in the end.
So who remembers the to-do list? Would you have remembered it without the images? I just tested myself and I can recite it back without error, but then I鈥檝e made six rounds of edits to this stupid review. I鈥檇 probably remember it anyway. Besides that, I usually have a pencil and paper.
1. Buy a bottle of Bordeaux for tonight鈥檚 dinner party
2. Put Trainspotting at the front of the Netflix queue
3. Finish the office TPS reports before the weekend
4. Pick up the copy of The Master and Margarita that鈥檚 on hold at the library
5. Check the Haile Selassie wiki entry to see if the account of the attempted coup in Cutting for Stone was factual
The list may be much longer than this, but the shortened version above will illustrate the point well enough.
Research shows we remember mental images of things much better than we do raw data by rote (things like numbers, playing cards, poems, or list items). Most people can only keep a random sequence of about 7 digits in their heads at a time when first hearing them. Memory experts have found that by transforming any sequence of things into pictures instead, and sticking these pictures in what they call a memory palace, that we can recall them much more effectively. An example should help show this.
First of all, we need to visualize a place we know very well. This is the memory palace. In fact, the home you grew up in, while it may not have been a real palace, is probably rich in the kind of recallable detail that can help in retaining long sequences. We then position the mental images associated with the objects we鈥檙e trying to remember along a path within the home. In my case, that might mean I come to the front door where a little doe 鈥� say Bambi鈥檚 girlfriend Faline 鈥� is resting. You can tell by her eyes that she鈥檚 bored, though. She鈥檚 a 鈥淏ordeaux鈥�. (I know it鈥檚 bad, but this is going to work.) Let the image burn into your brain for a moment. Once inside at the base of the stairs in the foyer I come to a freight car of a model train. It looks ridiculous spotted with pink polka dots, but hey, it鈥檚 a way to remember Trainspotting. Up the stairs on the left is a faux antique table. On it sits our mnemonic for TPS: miniature tepees. And just to make it more memorable, imagine that a teenager lives inside one of them and it was TPed with Charmin. (I was tempted to have Lumbergh say 鈥淯mmm鈥� yeah鈥�. 鈥� at this point, but wasn鈥檛 sure that Office Space was a universal reference.) Then it鈥檚 a quick right into the living room. In the middle of it is a big hot tub, but instead of water inside, it鈥檚 a giant margarita. The drink comes complete with salt around the edge of the tub and a wedge cut from a lime the size of a beach ball. Inside the tub is a miniature ship with a master on board shouting orders. Some of the crew look like they wouldn鈥檛 mind walking the plank. Finally, through the entry way into the kitchen I see Marley鈥檚 ghost (Bob Marley, that is) and he鈥檚 sitting on the table with doctor/writer extraordinaire Abraham Verghese. In case the link to Haile Selassie isn鈥檛 clear, he was also known as Ras Tafari, viewed by many a Jamaican as a messianic figure. Surprisingly enough, Marley is not holding anything rolled up and burning; he鈥檚 got a dove perched on his hand instead and it鈥檚 cooing (which, of course, is auditorially equivalent to coup-ing).
So there鈥檚 our list. Picture it in sequence one more time: the bored doe just inside the door, the spotted train at the base of the stairs, the tepees on the table at the top of the stairs, the ship master in the margarita in the living room, and finally, sitting on the kitchen table, the Selassie worshipper with the author of Cutting for Stone and the cooing dove. I could presumably have had dozens of these images stuck along a path throughout the house. The placement along a set route (say up the stairs and clockwise, hitting every room) helps since that way we aren鈥檛 as apt to skip anything. Experts also say it鈥檚 best to choose images that are ridiculous or racy or in any other way more apt to stick in your head.
That pretty much covers the trick to memorization. To get an entire book out of the deal, though, Foer had to expand the scope. He started out mentioning the remarkable feats the elite memorizers can perform (x digits of pi, y decks of cards, z lines of verse). He then got into the small but interesting world of competitive memorization, including his own involvement. Foer began his investigation on a journalistic whim and ended up, with hard work and a lot of help from memory mentors, becoming the US champion. Even though the end result of his competition is mentioned at the outset, there is drama in how it unfolds.
The competition involves several categories, one of which is memorizing card sequences. The trick in doing that is an offshoot of what I described above. The difference is that every card has a mental image associated with it that you spend days and days drilling into your head beforehand. Each mental image has a subject and a verb. The ace of clubs may be Karl Spackler (the Cinderella boy himself) teeing off at Augusta. The two of clubs may be Groucho Marx lighting a cigar. And so on for each card in the deck. Then, when you want to memorize the randomized order of a deck, you put these images in a fresh memory palace. Only to make fewer images necessary, you can join the subject of one card with the action of the next card into a single image. If the first card is the seven of diamonds (which you may have associated with Einstein twirling the tassel on his mortarboard) and the next one is the jack of spades (which is J.D. Salinger moonwalking, say) then the pair of those cards together would produce an image of Einstein moonwalking. Memorizing the deck would then involve 26 images. There may be variations, but that鈥檚 the basic approach. Sequences of digits are done similarly, only for that you may have 100 different pre-memorized images 鈥� one for each pair in the range from 00 to 99.
Foer points out that our memories don鈥檛 get much of a workout these days. We all know how easy it is to rely on spell checks and Google searches for things we used to keep in our heads. So is it useful to keep more information available for immediate use? Probably. Foer argues that our ideas, abstractions, and arguments depend on recallable units that are the building blocks. What Foer does not do as effectively is demonstrate how the aforementioned devices help with that kind of practical memory. He admits to it, too, though only after he tells his fun story of the US Memory Championship.
The 鈥渕ental athletes鈥� he first encountered were not what he鈥檇 expected. They were not savants, nor did they possess photographic memories. Rather, they鈥檇 all learned these visualization techniques that date back to the ancient Greeks. The top competitors were often the ones with the most creative images. After being coached by several top mnemonists, Foer was able to compete with the best in the US. He said he still loses his keys, though.
There was more to this book as well. However, and I say this with a full appreciation of the irony, I don鈥檛 remember much of it. (It was several months ago.) There was a partial debunking of the savant from 60 Minutes who was 鈥渂orn on a blue day鈥�, there was a bit on the tricks in reciting poems, and there was the blow-by-blow action of the memory competition. My impression at the time was that it was all fairly interesting, but not very useful in the end.
So who remembers the to-do list? Would you have remembered it without the images? I just tested myself and I can recite it back without error, but then I鈥檝e made six rounds of edits to this stupid review. I鈥檇 probably remember it anyway. Besides that, I usually have a pencil and paper.
February 10, 2024
This is a book discussing the topic of memory in-depth written by 2006 USA Memory champion, Joshua Foer. These are some of the interesting topics discussed in this book.
Memory Athletes
Memory athletes compete in memorising information like that of names, decks of cards, random numbers, digits of pi. They compete in different memory competitions organised by International Association of Memory and World Memory Sports Council. The USA Memory Championship (USAMC) takes place every year in NYC. It is considered as an Olympiad for mental athletes. The author is describing the various methods like the different mnemonic techniques that the athletes use to memorise for these competitions. We can use some of these methods in our everyday life and academic life effectively. If you have extraordinary memory power USAMC is the adroit way to showcase your talent.
Mind Map
It is a method used to organise information visually. It is a technique popularized by Tony Buzan. It is a simple technique of writing the major ideas in the centre and other ideas branching out from it. They are also called spider diagrams and are very effective in memorising difficult concepts and is very useful for review and recall.
Savant Syndrome
If you have seen the movie Rain Man, you can never forget the character played by Dustin Hoffman, who was suffering from Savant syndrome. It is a condition where someone with mental disabilities has some extraordinary abilities. They usually also have an autism spectrum disorder. Latest DSM-5 has excluded it from mental disorder. Savant skills are usually found in
1) Memory
2) Arithmetic
3) Art
4) Music
5) Spatial skills
Eidetic Memory or Photographic Memory
This is one of the most exciting topics in this book. We always think about how to take a mental snapshot of a page in the textbook (especially during the last minute cramming in the night before the exams). The people with eidetic memory can do that. Is the eidetic memory more a myth than a reality? Joshua Foer is describing it in detail in this book. According to Foer, there is only one proper Scientific study pointing out the existence of a person with Eidetic memory. That was a study done in Harvard by Charles F Stromeyer on a 23-year-old Harvard teacher named Elizabeth.
He wrote in his research that "Her eidetic ability, or photographic memory, is so great that she can hallucinate at will a beard on a clean-shaven man or repeat a page of poetry written in a foreign language verbatim-backwards and forwards-after merely looking at it."
Elizabeth is the only person who had passed the Eidetic memory test. Interestingly, no other study was done on Elizabeth, who later became Stromeyer's wife. So many of the Scientists believe that eidetic memory is an 鈥渦nfounded myth.鈥�
If you are interested in any of the above-discussed topics, you will undoubtedly love this book. Joshua Foer achieved the impossible feat of having a cerebral discussion that is palatable to everyone through this book.
鈥斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌�
You can also follow me on
| | | | | | | |
Memory Athletes
Memory athletes compete in memorising information like that of names, decks of cards, random numbers, digits of pi. They compete in different memory competitions organised by International Association of Memory and World Memory Sports Council. The USA Memory Championship (USAMC) takes place every year in NYC. It is considered as an Olympiad for mental athletes. The author is describing the various methods like the different mnemonic techniques that the athletes use to memorise for these competitions. We can use some of these methods in our everyday life and academic life effectively. If you have extraordinary memory power USAMC is the adroit way to showcase your talent.
Mind Map
It is a method used to organise information visually. It is a technique popularized by Tony Buzan. It is a simple technique of writing the major ideas in the centre and other ideas branching out from it. They are also called spider diagrams and are very effective in memorising difficult concepts and is very useful for review and recall.
Savant Syndrome
If you have seen the movie Rain Man, you can never forget the character played by Dustin Hoffman, who was suffering from Savant syndrome. It is a condition where someone with mental disabilities has some extraordinary abilities. They usually also have an autism spectrum disorder. Latest DSM-5 has excluded it from mental disorder. Savant skills are usually found in
1) Memory
2) Arithmetic
3) Art
4) Music
5) Spatial skills
Eidetic Memory or Photographic Memory
This is one of the most exciting topics in this book. We always think about how to take a mental snapshot of a page in the textbook (especially during the last minute cramming in the night before the exams). The people with eidetic memory can do that. Is the eidetic memory more a myth than a reality? Joshua Foer is describing it in detail in this book. According to Foer, there is only one proper Scientific study pointing out the existence of a person with Eidetic memory. That was a study done in Harvard by Charles F Stromeyer on a 23-year-old Harvard teacher named Elizabeth.
He wrote in his research that "Her eidetic ability, or photographic memory, is so great that she can hallucinate at will a beard on a clean-shaven man or repeat a page of poetry written in a foreign language verbatim-backwards and forwards-after merely looking at it."
Elizabeth is the only person who had passed the Eidetic memory test. Interestingly, no other study was done on Elizabeth, who later became Stromeyer's wife. So many of the Scientists believe that eidetic memory is an 鈥渦nfounded myth.鈥�
If you are interested in any of the above-discussed topics, you will undoubtedly love this book. Joshua Foer achieved the impossible feat of having a cerebral discussion that is palatable to everyone through this book.
鈥斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌斺赌�
You can also follow me on
| | | | | | | |
March 11, 2011
Unimpressive - This is a great example of how misleading a book title can be. I'd give it one and a half stars but it is just not worth two.
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art & Science of Remembering Everything reads like a long magazine article - which is kind of where I found out about the book - The NY Times - last week. Having read the article, I was sufficiently impressed to get online and order the book. It arrived four days later and I couldn't wait to get started.
At the onset of his book - which does have a snappy title - Foer was very clear this is not a 'how to' book but rather, it is an account of his one-year journey from being a journalist-spectator to becoming winner of the US Memory Championship. Maybe that's where I got off track. The NY Times article, detailed as it was, failed to mention that part. Its a critical detail - more than an oversight - in my estimation.
Foer has a decent writing style - again, like a magazine article. This book is written in the vein of Malcolm Gladwell's books and it does have information but not quite as polished or as jam packed. So far, hardly anything that wasn't already mentioned on the NY Times synopsis has been written and little has been added to what I already read so I am feeling just a little bit ripped off - the subtitle seems to imply that the book will talk about, "the art and science of remembering everything..." For the sake of accuracy, it should read; "My year-long journey toward becoming the US Memory champion with a few interesting tidbits about memory thrown in for good measure."
I'd give this book a grade of "B+" for style and an overall grade of "D" because it was not at all what it was hyped to be. The discontinuity between Foer's book title and its content are such that if I ever come across this writer's books again, I am going to be hard-pressed to trust him enough to plop down my hard-earned money because I will be less likely to fall for that trick twice.
Foer's synopsis on the NY Times deserves an "A" - moreover, since he failed to expand the book that's where the material should have stayed.
I am going to be recommending the NY Times synopsis - penned by the author and - which turns out to be $14.00 + shipping cheaper - not to mention, the article is (ironically) more directed at hard examples of just how memory techniques can be applied. I suppose if there is anything redeeming about Foer's book is its extensive bibliography.
Other than that, save your money and check this book out at your local library where you can also photocopy the bibliography because it will offer more detail germane to the topic.
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art & Science of Remembering Everything reads like a long magazine article - which is kind of where I found out about the book - The NY Times - last week. Having read the article, I was sufficiently impressed to get online and order the book. It arrived four days later and I couldn't wait to get started.
At the onset of his book - which does have a snappy title - Foer was very clear this is not a 'how to' book but rather, it is an account of his one-year journey from being a journalist-spectator to becoming winner of the US Memory Championship. Maybe that's where I got off track. The NY Times article, detailed as it was, failed to mention that part. Its a critical detail - more than an oversight - in my estimation.
Foer has a decent writing style - again, like a magazine article. This book is written in the vein of Malcolm Gladwell's books and it does have information but not quite as polished or as jam packed. So far, hardly anything that wasn't already mentioned on the NY Times synopsis has been written and little has been added to what I already read so I am feeling just a little bit ripped off - the subtitle seems to imply that the book will talk about, "the art and science of remembering everything..." For the sake of accuracy, it should read; "My year-long journey toward becoming the US Memory champion with a few interesting tidbits about memory thrown in for good measure."
I'd give this book a grade of "B+" for style and an overall grade of "D" because it was not at all what it was hyped to be. The discontinuity between Foer's book title and its content are such that if I ever come across this writer's books again, I am going to be hard-pressed to trust him enough to plop down my hard-earned money because I will be less likely to fall for that trick twice.
Foer's synopsis on the NY Times deserves an "A" - moreover, since he failed to expand the book that's where the material should have stayed.
I am going to be recommending the NY Times synopsis - penned by the author and - which turns out to be $14.00 + shipping cheaper - not to mention, the article is (ironically) more directed at hard examples of just how memory techniques can be applied. I suppose if there is anything redeeming about Foer's book is its extensive bibliography.
Other than that, save your money and check this book out at your local library where you can also photocopy the bibliography because it will offer more detail germane to the topic.
April 6, 2022
Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything is a nonfiction book by Joshua Foer, first published in 2011. Foer discusses how Daniel Tammet's index finger slides around on a table as he performs mental calculations in a documentary; mental multiplication experts and mnemonists that Foer speaks with imply that Tammet's claims, involving synesthetic morphing shapes and colors standing in for complex numerical feats, are questionable.
鬲丕乇蹖禺 賳禺爻鬲蹖賳 禺賵丕賳卮: 乇賵夭 倬丕賳夭丿賴賲 賲丕賴 噩賵賱丕蹖 爻丕賱2015賲蹖賱丕丿蹖
毓賳賵丕賳: 賯丿賲 夭丿賳 乇賵蹖 賲丕賴 亘丕 丕蹖賳卮鬲蹖賳 毓賱賲 丨丕賮馗賴貙 賴賳乇 亘賴 蹖丕丿 爻倬乇丿賳 賴賲賴 趩蹖夭貨 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴: 噩丕卮賵丕 賮賵卅乇貨 賲鬲乇噩賲 诏蹖鬲蹖 賯丕爻賲 夭丕丿賴貨 鬲賴乇丕賳貙 賴賵乇賲夭丿貙 爻丕賱1393貙 丿乇390氐貙 卮丕亘讴9786006958095貨 賲賵囟賵毓: 鬲賯賵蹖鬲 丨丕賮馗賴 丕夭 賳賵蹖爻賳丿诏丕賳 丕蹖丕賱丕鬲 賲鬲丨丿賴 丌賲乇蹖讴丕 - 爻丿賴20賲
噩丕卮賵丕 賮賵卅乇 賲蹖鈥屭堐屬嗀�: (亘丕 鬲賲乇讴夭貙 丕賳诏蹖夭賴貙 賵 亘丕賱丕鬲乇 丕夭 賴賲賴貙 氐乇賮 夭賲丕賳貙 賲蹖鈥屫堌з� 匕賴賳 乇丕 鬲乇亘蹖鬲 讴乇丿貙 鬲丕 讴丕乇賴丕蹖 亘蹖賲丕賳賳丿 丕賳噩丕賲 丿賴丿貨 丕蹖賳 讴卮賮蹖 亘賵丿 讴賴 亘賴 賲賳 賯丿乇鬲 亘爻蹖丕乇 丿丕丿 賵 亘丕毓孬 卮丿貙 丕蹖賳 倬乇爻卮 乇丕 丕夭 禺賵丿賲 亘倬乇爻賲: 丕诏乇 丿乇 賴乇 夭賲蹖賳賴鈥� 丕蹖貙 卮蹖賵賴鈥� 蹖 丿乇爻鬲 乇丕 亘蹖丕亘賲貙 賵 丿乇 倬蹖卮 亘诏蹖乇賲貙 賯丕丿乇 賴爻鬲賲 趩賴 讴丕乇賴丕蹖 禺丕乇賯鈥屫з勜关ж団€� 蹖 丿蹖诏乇蹖 乇丕 丕賳噩丕賲 丿賴賲責)貨
賳賯賱 丕夭 賲鬲賳: (賲賳 讴賴 鬲丕 丌賳 夭賲丕賳 亘丕 鬲毓丿丕丿蹖 丕夭 亘賴鬲乇蹖賳鈥屬囏й� 丨丕賮馗賴鈥� 丿乇 丿賳蹖丕 丌卮賳丕 卮丿賴 亘賵丿賲貙 鬲氐賲蹖賲 诏乇賮鬲賲 丿乇 诏丕賲 亘毓丿蹖 亘丿鬲乇蹖賳 丨丕賮馗賴鈥屬囏� 乇丕 賲賵乇丿 卮賳丕爻丕蹖蹖 賯乇丕乇 丿賴賲貨 賴賳诏丕賲蹖鈥屭┵� 賲蹖鈥屫堌з囒屬� 卮乇賵毓 亘賴 卮賳丕禺鬲 賲丕賴蹖鬲 賵 賲毓賳丕蹖 丨丕賮馗賴 鈥屰� 丕賳爻丕賳蹖 讴賳蹖賲貙 趩賴 乇丕賴蹖 亘賴鬲乇 丕夭 丕蹖賳 賵噩賵丿 丿丕乇丿 讴賴 毓丿賲 賵噩賵丿 丌賳 乇丕 賲賵乇丿 鬲丨賯蹖賯 賯乇丕乇 丿賴蹖賲責 亘乇丕蹖 丕蹖賳 賲賳馗賵乇貙 亘丕乇 丿蹖诏乇 丿乇 诏賵诏賱 亘賴 噩爻鬲噩賵 倬乇丿丕禺鬲賲貨 丕蹖賳亘丕乇 亘乇丕蹖 蹖丕賮鬲賳 賴賲鬲丕蹖 芦亘賳 倬乇蹖丿賲賵乇禄 丿乇 賯爻賲鬲 賲乇亘賵胤 亘賴 乇讴賵乇丿賴丕蹖 賮乇丕賲賵卮蹖貨 丿乇 賴賳诏丕賲 噩爻鬲噩賵貙 亘賴 賲賯丕賱賴 鈥屫й� 丿乇 賳卮乇蹖賴 鈥屰� 芦毓賱賵賲 丕毓氐丕亘禄 亘乇禺賵乇丿賲貙 讴賴 丿乇亘丕乇賴鈥� 蹖 鬲讴賳蹖爻蹖賳 丌夭賲丕蹖卮诏丕賴 亘丕夭賳卮爻鬲賴鈥� 丕蹖 亘賵丿 亘賴 賳丕賲 芦倬蹖 -丕蹖禄 亘丕 賴卮鬲丕丿 賵 趩賴丕乇 爻丕賱 爻賳貨 丿乇 丌賳 賲賯丕賱賴 丌賲丿賴 亘賵丿 讴賴 馗乇賮蹖鬲 丨丕賮馗賴 鈥屰� 芦倬蹖- 丕蹖禄 賲丨丿賵丿 賲蹖鈥屫簇� 亘賴 賲賵丕乇丿蹖 讴賴 賴賲蹖賳 趩賳丿 賱丨馗賴鈥� 蹖 倬蹖卮 丿乇亘丕乇賴鈥� 蹖 丌賳鈥屬囏� 賮讴乇 讴乇丿賴 亘賵丿貨 丕賵 蹖讴蹖 丕夭 亘丿鬲乇蹖賳 賳賲賵賳賴鈥� 賴丕蹖 賮乇丕賲賵卮蹖 亘賵丿 讴賴 鬲丕 丌賳 夭賲丕賳 孬亘鬲 鈥屫簇� 亘賵丿
趩賳丿 賴賮鬲賴 倬爻 丕夭 亘丕夭诏卮鬲 丕夭 芦鬲丕賱丕賴丕爻蹖禄貙 賲賳 亘丕 蹖讴 丿丕賳卮賲賳丿貙 賵 賲丨賯賯 丿乇 夭賲蹖賳賴鈥� 蹖 毓賱賵賲 丕毓氐丕亘 賵 丨丕賮馗賴貙 鬲賲丕爻 诏乇賮鬲賲貨 賳丕賲 賵蹖 芦賱丕乇蹖 丕爻讴賵丕蹖乇禄 亘賵丿貙 賵 丿乇 丿丕賳卮诏丕賴貙 賵 賲乇讴夭 倬夭卮讴蹖 芦讴丕賱蹖賮乇賳蹖丕禄 丿乇 芦爻丕賳-丿蹖诏賵禄貙 鬲丨賯蹖賯 賵 讴丕乇 賲蹖鈥屭┴必� 丿乇 丌賳 夭賲丕賳 蹖讴 丿賴賴 賲蹖鈥屫簇� 讴賴 芦倬蹖-丕蹖禄貙 鬲丨鬲 賳馗乇 芦丕爻讴賵丕蹖乇禄 亘賵丿貨 芦丕爻讴賵丕蹖乇禄 倬匕蹖乇賮鬲貙 讴賴 丿乇 蹖讴蹖 丕夭 丿蹖丿丕乇賴丕蹖卮貙 賲乇丕 亘賴 賴賲乇丕賴 禺賵丿貙 亘賴 丨賵賲賴鈥� 蹖 芦爻丕賳鈥屫屭埪� 亘亘乇丿貨 噩丕蹖蹖鈥屭┵� 芦倬蹖-丕蹖禄 賴賲乇丕賴 亘丕 賴賲爻乇卮 夭賳丿诏蹖 賲蹖鈥屭┴必� 賲丕 亘賴 賴賲乇丕賴 芦噩賳 賮乇丕爻蹖賳賵禄 亘賴 丌賳噩丕 乇賮鬲蹖賲貨 芦噩賳 賮乇丕爻蹖賳賵禄貙 賴賲丕賴賳诏 鈥屭┵嗁嗀団€� 蹖 鬲丨賯蹖賯鈥屬囏ж� 丿乇 丌夭賲丕蹖卮诏丕賴 芦丕爻讴賵丕蹖乇禄 亘賵丿貙 賵 亘乇丕蹖 丕賳噩丕賲鈥� 丌夭賲賵賳鈥屬囏й� 卮賳丕禺鬲蹖貙 賲乇鬲亘 亘賴 芦倬蹖-丕蹖禄貙 爻乇 賲蹖鈥屫藏� 诏賵蹖丕 芦賮乇丕爻蹖賳賵禄 賳夭丿蹖讴 亘賴 丿賵蹖爻鬲 亘丕乇 亘賴 禺丕賳賴鈥� 蹖 芦倬蹖-丕蹖禄 乇賮鬲賴 亘賵丿貙 丕賲丕 賴乇 亘丕乇 芦倬蹖-丕蹖禄 亘丕 丕賵貙 賲丕賳賳丿 蹖讴 睾乇蹖亘賴 丕丨賵丕賱鈥屬矩必驰� 賲蹖鈥屭┴必�)貨 倬丕蹖丕賳 賳賯賱
鬲丕乇蹖禺 亘賴賳诏丕賲 乇爻丕賳蹖 21/01/1400賴噩乇蹖 禺賵乇卮蹖丿蹖貨 16/01/1401賴噩乇蹖 禺賵乇卮蹖丿蹖貨 丕. 卮乇亘蹖丕賳蹖
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything is a nonfiction book by Joshua Foer, first published in 2011. Foer discusses how Daniel Tammet's index finger slides around on a table as he performs mental calculations in a documentary; mental multiplication experts and mnemonists that Foer speaks with imply that Tammet's claims, involving synesthetic morphing shapes and colors standing in for complex numerical feats, are questionable.
鬲丕乇蹖禺 賳禺爻鬲蹖賳 禺賵丕賳卮: 乇賵夭 倬丕賳夭丿賴賲 賲丕賴 噩賵賱丕蹖 爻丕賱2015賲蹖賱丕丿蹖
毓賳賵丕賳: 賯丿賲 夭丿賳 乇賵蹖 賲丕賴 亘丕 丕蹖賳卮鬲蹖賳 毓賱賲 丨丕賮馗賴貙 賴賳乇 亘賴 蹖丕丿 爻倬乇丿賳 賴賲賴 趩蹖夭貨 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴: 噩丕卮賵丕 賮賵卅乇貨 賲鬲乇噩賲 诏蹖鬲蹖 賯丕爻賲 夭丕丿賴貨 鬲賴乇丕賳貙 賴賵乇賲夭丿貙 爻丕賱1393貙 丿乇390氐貙 卮丕亘讴9786006958095貨 賲賵囟賵毓: 鬲賯賵蹖鬲 丨丕賮馗賴 丕夭 賳賵蹖爻賳丿诏丕賳 丕蹖丕賱丕鬲 賲鬲丨丿賴 丌賲乇蹖讴丕 - 爻丿賴20賲
噩丕卮賵丕 賮賵卅乇 賲蹖鈥屭堐屬嗀�: (亘丕 鬲賲乇讴夭貙 丕賳诏蹖夭賴貙 賵 亘丕賱丕鬲乇 丕夭 賴賲賴貙 氐乇賮 夭賲丕賳貙 賲蹖鈥屫堌з� 匕賴賳 乇丕 鬲乇亘蹖鬲 讴乇丿貙 鬲丕 讴丕乇賴丕蹖 亘蹖賲丕賳賳丿 丕賳噩丕賲 丿賴丿貨 丕蹖賳 讴卮賮蹖 亘賵丿 讴賴 亘賴 賲賳 賯丿乇鬲 亘爻蹖丕乇 丿丕丿 賵 亘丕毓孬 卮丿貙 丕蹖賳 倬乇爻卮 乇丕 丕夭 禺賵丿賲 亘倬乇爻賲: 丕诏乇 丿乇 賴乇 夭賲蹖賳賴鈥� 丕蹖貙 卮蹖賵賴鈥� 蹖 丿乇爻鬲 乇丕 亘蹖丕亘賲貙 賵 丿乇 倬蹖卮 亘诏蹖乇賲貙 賯丕丿乇 賴爻鬲賲 趩賴 讴丕乇賴丕蹖 禺丕乇賯鈥屫з勜关ж団€� 蹖 丿蹖诏乇蹖 乇丕 丕賳噩丕賲 丿賴賲責)貨
賳賯賱 丕夭 賲鬲賳: (賲賳 讴賴 鬲丕 丌賳 夭賲丕賳 亘丕 鬲毓丿丕丿蹖 丕夭 亘賴鬲乇蹖賳鈥屬囏й� 丨丕賮馗賴鈥� 丿乇 丿賳蹖丕 丌卮賳丕 卮丿賴 亘賵丿賲貙 鬲氐賲蹖賲 诏乇賮鬲賲 丿乇 诏丕賲 亘毓丿蹖 亘丿鬲乇蹖賳 丨丕賮馗賴鈥屬囏� 乇丕 賲賵乇丿 卮賳丕爻丕蹖蹖 賯乇丕乇 丿賴賲貨 賴賳诏丕賲蹖鈥屭┵� 賲蹖鈥屫堌з囒屬� 卮乇賵毓 亘賴 卮賳丕禺鬲 賲丕賴蹖鬲 賵 賲毓賳丕蹖 丨丕賮馗賴 鈥屰� 丕賳爻丕賳蹖 讴賳蹖賲貙 趩賴 乇丕賴蹖 亘賴鬲乇 丕夭 丕蹖賳 賵噩賵丿 丿丕乇丿 讴賴 毓丿賲 賵噩賵丿 丌賳 乇丕 賲賵乇丿 鬲丨賯蹖賯 賯乇丕乇 丿賴蹖賲責 亘乇丕蹖 丕蹖賳 賲賳馗賵乇貙 亘丕乇 丿蹖诏乇 丿乇 诏賵诏賱 亘賴 噩爻鬲噩賵 倬乇丿丕禺鬲賲貨 丕蹖賳亘丕乇 亘乇丕蹖 蹖丕賮鬲賳 賴賲鬲丕蹖 芦亘賳 倬乇蹖丿賲賵乇禄 丿乇 賯爻賲鬲 賲乇亘賵胤 亘賴 乇讴賵乇丿賴丕蹖 賮乇丕賲賵卮蹖貨 丿乇 賴賳诏丕賲 噩爻鬲噩賵貙 亘賴 賲賯丕賱賴 鈥屫й� 丿乇 賳卮乇蹖賴 鈥屰� 芦毓賱賵賲 丕毓氐丕亘禄 亘乇禺賵乇丿賲貙 讴賴 丿乇亘丕乇賴鈥� 蹖 鬲讴賳蹖爻蹖賳 丌夭賲丕蹖卮诏丕賴 亘丕夭賳卮爻鬲賴鈥� 丕蹖 亘賵丿 亘賴 賳丕賲 芦倬蹖 -丕蹖禄 亘丕 賴卮鬲丕丿 賵 趩賴丕乇 爻丕賱 爻賳貨 丿乇 丌賳 賲賯丕賱賴 丌賲丿賴 亘賵丿 讴賴 馗乇賮蹖鬲 丨丕賮馗賴 鈥屰� 芦倬蹖- 丕蹖禄 賲丨丿賵丿 賲蹖鈥屫簇� 亘賴 賲賵丕乇丿蹖 讴賴 賴賲蹖賳 趩賳丿 賱丨馗賴鈥� 蹖 倬蹖卮 丿乇亘丕乇賴鈥� 蹖 丌賳鈥屬囏� 賮讴乇 讴乇丿賴 亘賵丿貨 丕賵 蹖讴蹖 丕夭 亘丿鬲乇蹖賳 賳賲賵賳賴鈥� 賴丕蹖 賮乇丕賲賵卮蹖 亘賵丿 讴賴 鬲丕 丌賳 夭賲丕賳 孬亘鬲 鈥屫簇� 亘賵丿
趩賳丿 賴賮鬲賴 倬爻 丕夭 亘丕夭诏卮鬲 丕夭 芦鬲丕賱丕賴丕爻蹖禄貙 賲賳 亘丕 蹖讴 丿丕賳卮賲賳丿貙 賵 賲丨賯賯 丿乇 夭賲蹖賳賴鈥� 蹖 毓賱賵賲 丕毓氐丕亘 賵 丨丕賮馗賴貙 鬲賲丕爻 诏乇賮鬲賲貨 賳丕賲 賵蹖 芦賱丕乇蹖 丕爻讴賵丕蹖乇禄 亘賵丿貙 賵 丿乇 丿丕賳卮诏丕賴貙 賵 賲乇讴夭 倬夭卮讴蹖 芦讴丕賱蹖賮乇賳蹖丕禄 丿乇 芦爻丕賳-丿蹖诏賵禄貙 鬲丨賯蹖賯 賵 讴丕乇 賲蹖鈥屭┴必� 丿乇 丌賳 夭賲丕賳 蹖讴 丿賴賴 賲蹖鈥屫簇� 讴賴 芦倬蹖-丕蹖禄貙 鬲丨鬲 賳馗乇 芦丕爻讴賵丕蹖乇禄 亘賵丿貨 芦丕爻讴賵丕蹖乇禄 倬匕蹖乇賮鬲貙 讴賴 丿乇 蹖讴蹖 丕夭 丿蹖丿丕乇賴丕蹖卮貙 賲乇丕 亘賴 賴賲乇丕賴 禺賵丿貙 亘賴 丨賵賲賴鈥� 蹖 芦爻丕賳鈥屫屭埪� 亘亘乇丿貨 噩丕蹖蹖鈥屭┵� 芦倬蹖-丕蹖禄 賴賲乇丕賴 亘丕 賴賲爻乇卮 夭賳丿诏蹖 賲蹖鈥屭┴必� 賲丕 亘賴 賴賲乇丕賴 芦噩賳 賮乇丕爻蹖賳賵禄 亘賴 丌賳噩丕 乇賮鬲蹖賲貨 芦噩賳 賮乇丕爻蹖賳賵禄貙 賴賲丕賴賳诏 鈥屭┵嗁嗀団€� 蹖 鬲丨賯蹖賯鈥屬囏ж� 丿乇 丌夭賲丕蹖卮诏丕賴 芦丕爻讴賵丕蹖乇禄 亘賵丿貙 賵 亘乇丕蹖 丕賳噩丕賲鈥� 丌夭賲賵賳鈥屬囏й� 卮賳丕禺鬲蹖貙 賲乇鬲亘 亘賴 芦倬蹖-丕蹖禄貙 爻乇 賲蹖鈥屫藏� 诏賵蹖丕 芦賮乇丕爻蹖賳賵禄 賳夭丿蹖讴 亘賴 丿賵蹖爻鬲 亘丕乇 亘賴 禺丕賳賴鈥� 蹖 芦倬蹖-丕蹖禄 乇賮鬲賴 亘賵丿貙 丕賲丕 賴乇 亘丕乇 芦倬蹖-丕蹖禄 亘丕 丕賵貙 賲丕賳賳丿 蹖讴 睾乇蹖亘賴 丕丨賵丕賱鈥屬矩必驰� 賲蹖鈥屭┴必�)貨 倬丕蹖丕賳 賳賯賱
鬲丕乇蹖禺 亘賴賳诏丕賲 乇爻丕賳蹖 21/01/1400賴噩乇蹖 禺賵乇卮蹖丿蹖貨 16/01/1401賴噩乇蹖 禺賵乇卮蹖丿蹖貨 丕. 卮乇亘蹖丕賳蹖
October 30, 2014
Ignore the ridiculous title. Forget the hideous book cover. This is a fun and interesting read once you get past those stumbling blocks. Joshua Foer was a journalist who wrote a story on the U.S. Memory Championship, and he became so intrigued by the chance to improve his memory that he spent a year training to become a "mental athlete."
The book covers his year spent learning about mnemonics and memory palaces and all of the memorable (ahem) characters he met along the way. My favorite sections covered the history of memorization -- it goes back to the ancient Greeks, when Socrates famously complained that writing destroys memory -- and some inspiring passages on how to make your life seem more full:
"Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live 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 locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives."
The last chapter and the epilogue cover the memory championships in which Foer competed, but the outcome of those events really doesn't matter. By then, it was clear that the purpose of a good memory isn't just for party tricks like memorizing a deck of cards; more importantly, it teaches you to become more mindful in your life.
The book covers his year spent learning about mnemonics and memory palaces and all of the memorable (ahem) characters he met along the way. My favorite sections covered the history of memorization -- it goes back to the ancient Greeks, when Socrates famously complained that writing destroys memory -- and some inspiring passages on how to make your life seem more full:
"Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live 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 locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives."
The last chapter and the epilogue cover the memory championships in which Foer competed, but the outcome of those events really doesn't matter. By then, it was clear that the purpose of a good memory isn't just for party tricks like memorizing a deck of cards; more importantly, it teaches you to become more mindful in your life.
December 18, 2011
This wasn鈥檛 a bad book 鈥� I quite enjoyed some of it and the author sometimes had me laughing in the way you can鈥檛 help but laugh the first time you see the last scene of the very first Star Wars movie.
About twenty years ago I first came across Tony Buzan. I read a couple of his books and even learnt enough of his methods to be able to memorise an entire weekly shopping list and to go around the supermarket without paper. The problem was that I quickly came to the conclusion that 鈥榣earning鈥� has very little to do with 鈥榬emembering鈥� 鈥� particularly when 鈥榬emembering鈥� is defined as keeping strings of more or less unconnected facts in mind.
There is quite a lot of this book dedicated to watching the author learn to remember a deck of cards in a very short time. Perhaps, if I was a gambler, this might seem a much more worthwhile task. However, like too many memory feats, this just seems like a waste of life.
Part of this book talks about learning poetry by heart and how hard this can be. But he does say that at least with learning poetry by heart you can bring texts with you wherever you go. This is the desert island scenario, but rather than getting to choose a book to bring with you at the last minute, you in fact spend your life ensuring you always have favourites with you just in case. Now, this is a worthwhile thing to do, there is never a time when you can be bored if you can think your way through a great poem.
For years I used to memorise poems 鈥� I have, more or less by heart 鈥� poems such as The Second Coming, La Figlia Chi Piange (which I do with extravagant hand gestures) and have tried and failed for years to learn Sonnet 129 鈥� the lists of nouns and the inversions trip me every time. But it all comes in handy eventually 鈥� I was talking to my mother the other day about growing older and was able to quote one of my remembered poems to her in full:
The cruel girls we loved
Are over forty,
Their subtle daughters
Have stolen their beauty;
And with a blue stare
Of cool surprise,
They mock their anxious mothers
With their mothers鈥� eyes.
(Now that I鈥檝e checked my memory against the poem it seems I almost remembered it 鈥� but couldn鈥檛 quite remember what kind of surprise they had, I had it as cruel for a second time 鈥� and the line breaks I remembered as fewer 鈥� mine was a poem of four lines in total, but I still knew there was a big break between beauty and And.)
A couple of weeks ago my eldest daughter and I were walking around St Kilda talking about this and that. Now, St Kilda has lots of streets that are named after poets 鈥� and we came to Herbert Street and I told her it was probably named after George Herbert, a poet she didn鈥檛 know and so I started quoting The Collar 鈥� God, I love that poem, I love it so very much. I love how it gets increasingly annoyed with itself and how the end is the calm after the climax. In fact, the rushing urgency of the poem is very much like sex, now I think of it.
Ted Hughes has a wonderful book I can鈥檛 recommend too highly called 鈥� about the poems you should learn by heart and why.
The problem with memory is that we think we know what it is 鈥� but really, memory is much more complicated than we generally imagine. I tend to think there are three kinds of memory: recognition, recall and recollection. Recall is the one that is most 鈥榩rized鈥� 鈥� particularly by the Tony Buzan鈥檚 of the world. Being able to recall pi to 300 decimal places might seem a remarkable thing to some minds 鈥� but as someone who would train huskies to turn and eat their adventurers after they had crossed the first ice field or on the call of the twentieth 鈥榤ush鈥� on their way to the North Pole, I have to say the whole thing seems rather pointless to me. I鈥檝e never really liked the 鈥榖ecause it鈥檚 there鈥� excuse for doing anything. Recall is hard, and is often the only type of memory we bother 鈥榯esting鈥� 鈥� but really, it is hard because it isn鈥檛 something that we humans actually need all that often.
We are infinitely better at recognition. We may not remember names, but by god we remember faces and what those faces have meant to us. Names are a recall task 鈥� faces a recognition task. There is a lovely experiment where people are shown a thousand photographs and asked to remember as many as they can. Generally, people are only able to remember about 2% - our recall is a very weak type of memory. But if you add another thousand photos and show them to the people again and ask which photos they have seen before then you get about 98% right, our recognition ability is almost infallible.. The point being, that if you want to remember something then you need to link it to your recognition memory, and not rely on your recall memory. The memory palaces and techniques described in this book rely on this fact and virtually this fact alone.
The third kind of memory is our most dangerous and also our most interesting. We think we 鈥榬emember鈥� our lives 鈥� in much the same way that these guys spending their time memorising cards remember lists of disconnected facts 鈥� but actually, we don鈥檛 remember disconnected facts in any sense at all well. What we remember is story. And facts tend to get twisted out of recognition if they don't fit with the story we have chosen to tell. Try telling someone about a fight you had between with your partner and not only will the story prove to be rather self-serving, but much more interestingly (if there is a way to compare what you have to say with what actually happened), your 鈥榮tory鈥� will drop facts in ways that make for a good story 鈥� rather than a true story. We re-collect facts to fit our narrative, sometimes adding some to help the story make sense, often dropping some that add nothing or that no longer fit.
I got to witness this happening at the start of the year when I was on a jury. We watched hours of film from hotel security cameras and we listened to people, good people, trying their best to tell the truth, but being repeatedly caught out completely misremembered something. Sometimes the disbelief these witnesses felt in being proven they had misremembered a key fact 鈥� clearly shown on the videotape in complete contradiction to what they had said 鈥� was utterly remarkable to witness. I鈥檝e known for a long time narrative-flow trumps fact every time. But I never knew quite how much that was the case until I sat in that jury box trying to decide if I could reconstruct the truth of what had happened that night from the all-too-fallible memories of a dozen or so 鈥榳itnesses鈥�.
My point is that you can remember as many cards as you like, but recall memory is by far the least interesting of the three types of memory we humans have. By far the most important is recollection 鈥� it is the story we tell ourselves about our lives and therefore the story that structures how we experience the world (past, present and future). This has virtually nothing to do with recall, despite what we tell ourselves 鈥� in some ways we could say recollection is the series of lies we tell to ourselves to help us make sense of our lives, but if they are lies, they are lies we believe implicitly and breathlessly.
Like I said, I quite enjoyed this 鈥� the guy got to compete in various memory events and shows that hard work brings rewards. Buzan repeatedly talks about the 鈥榚ducation revolution鈥� his memory tricks will bring 鈥� you might notice that in the twenty years since I first noticed him his revolution hasn鈥檛 quite gotten off the ground. But then, we鈥檝e waited longer for the second coming of Christ, so if Buzan wishes to slouch his way toward Bethlehem, who am I to stop him? He seems to be making buckets of money in his widening gyre, if nothing else.
About twenty years ago I first came across Tony Buzan. I read a couple of his books and even learnt enough of his methods to be able to memorise an entire weekly shopping list and to go around the supermarket without paper. The problem was that I quickly came to the conclusion that 鈥榣earning鈥� has very little to do with 鈥榬emembering鈥� 鈥� particularly when 鈥榬emembering鈥� is defined as keeping strings of more or less unconnected facts in mind.
There is quite a lot of this book dedicated to watching the author learn to remember a deck of cards in a very short time. Perhaps, if I was a gambler, this might seem a much more worthwhile task. However, like too many memory feats, this just seems like a waste of life.
Part of this book talks about learning poetry by heart and how hard this can be. But he does say that at least with learning poetry by heart you can bring texts with you wherever you go. This is the desert island scenario, but rather than getting to choose a book to bring with you at the last minute, you in fact spend your life ensuring you always have favourites with you just in case. Now, this is a worthwhile thing to do, there is never a time when you can be bored if you can think your way through a great poem.
For years I used to memorise poems 鈥� I have, more or less by heart 鈥� poems such as The Second Coming, La Figlia Chi Piange (which I do with extravagant hand gestures) and have tried and failed for years to learn Sonnet 129 鈥� the lists of nouns and the inversions trip me every time. But it all comes in handy eventually 鈥� I was talking to my mother the other day about growing older and was able to quote one of my remembered poems to her in full:
The cruel girls we loved
Are over forty,
Their subtle daughters
Have stolen their beauty;
And with a blue stare
Of cool surprise,
They mock their anxious mothers
With their mothers鈥� eyes.
(Now that I鈥檝e checked my memory against the poem it seems I almost remembered it 鈥� but couldn鈥檛 quite remember what kind of surprise they had, I had it as cruel for a second time 鈥� and the line breaks I remembered as fewer 鈥� mine was a poem of four lines in total, but I still knew there was a big break between beauty and And.)
A couple of weeks ago my eldest daughter and I were walking around St Kilda talking about this and that. Now, St Kilda has lots of streets that are named after poets 鈥� and we came to Herbert Street and I told her it was probably named after George Herbert, a poet she didn鈥檛 know and so I started quoting The Collar 鈥� God, I love that poem, I love it so very much. I love how it gets increasingly annoyed with itself and how the end is the calm after the climax. In fact, the rushing urgency of the poem is very much like sex, now I think of it.
Ted Hughes has a wonderful book I can鈥檛 recommend too highly called 鈥� about the poems you should learn by heart and why.
The problem with memory is that we think we know what it is 鈥� but really, memory is much more complicated than we generally imagine. I tend to think there are three kinds of memory: recognition, recall and recollection. Recall is the one that is most 鈥榩rized鈥� 鈥� particularly by the Tony Buzan鈥檚 of the world. Being able to recall pi to 300 decimal places might seem a remarkable thing to some minds 鈥� but as someone who would train huskies to turn and eat their adventurers after they had crossed the first ice field or on the call of the twentieth 鈥榤ush鈥� on their way to the North Pole, I have to say the whole thing seems rather pointless to me. I鈥檝e never really liked the 鈥榖ecause it鈥檚 there鈥� excuse for doing anything. Recall is hard, and is often the only type of memory we bother 鈥榯esting鈥� 鈥� but really, it is hard because it isn鈥檛 something that we humans actually need all that often.
We are infinitely better at recognition. We may not remember names, but by god we remember faces and what those faces have meant to us. Names are a recall task 鈥� faces a recognition task. There is a lovely experiment where people are shown a thousand photographs and asked to remember as many as they can. Generally, people are only able to remember about 2% - our recall is a very weak type of memory. But if you add another thousand photos and show them to the people again and ask which photos they have seen before then you get about 98% right, our recognition ability is almost infallible.. The point being, that if you want to remember something then you need to link it to your recognition memory, and not rely on your recall memory. The memory palaces and techniques described in this book rely on this fact and virtually this fact alone.
The third kind of memory is our most dangerous and also our most interesting. We think we 鈥榬emember鈥� our lives 鈥� in much the same way that these guys spending their time memorising cards remember lists of disconnected facts 鈥� but actually, we don鈥檛 remember disconnected facts in any sense at all well. What we remember is story. And facts tend to get twisted out of recognition if they don't fit with the story we have chosen to tell. Try telling someone about a fight you had between with your partner and not only will the story prove to be rather self-serving, but much more interestingly (if there is a way to compare what you have to say with what actually happened), your 鈥榮tory鈥� will drop facts in ways that make for a good story 鈥� rather than a true story. We re-collect facts to fit our narrative, sometimes adding some to help the story make sense, often dropping some that add nothing or that no longer fit.
I got to witness this happening at the start of the year when I was on a jury. We watched hours of film from hotel security cameras and we listened to people, good people, trying their best to tell the truth, but being repeatedly caught out completely misremembered something. Sometimes the disbelief these witnesses felt in being proven they had misremembered a key fact 鈥� clearly shown on the videotape in complete contradiction to what they had said 鈥� was utterly remarkable to witness. I鈥檝e known for a long time narrative-flow trumps fact every time. But I never knew quite how much that was the case until I sat in that jury box trying to decide if I could reconstruct the truth of what had happened that night from the all-too-fallible memories of a dozen or so 鈥榳itnesses鈥�.
My point is that you can remember as many cards as you like, but recall memory is by far the least interesting of the three types of memory we humans have. By far the most important is recollection 鈥� it is the story we tell ourselves about our lives and therefore the story that structures how we experience the world (past, present and future). This has virtually nothing to do with recall, despite what we tell ourselves 鈥� in some ways we could say recollection is the series of lies we tell to ourselves to help us make sense of our lives, but if they are lies, they are lies we believe implicitly and breathlessly.
Like I said, I quite enjoyed this 鈥� the guy got to compete in various memory events and shows that hard work brings rewards. Buzan repeatedly talks about the 鈥榚ducation revolution鈥� his memory tricks will bring 鈥� you might notice that in the twenty years since I first noticed him his revolution hasn鈥檛 quite gotten off the ground. But then, we鈥檝e waited longer for the second coming of Christ, so if Buzan wishes to slouch his way toward Bethlehem, who am I to stop him? He seems to be making buckets of money in his widening gyre, if nothing else.
November 23, 2023
乇賯氐丞 丕賱賯賲乇 賲毓 丌賷賳卮鬲丕賷賳: 賮賳 賵毓賱賲 鬲匕锟斤拷賾乇 賰賱 卮賷亍
乇丨賱丞 丕賱氐丨賮賷 丕賱兀賲乇賷賰賷 噩賵卮賵丕 賮賵賷乇 賲賳 鬲睾胤賷丞 丕賱亘胤賵賱丞 丕賱毓丕賱賲賷丞 賱賱匕丕賰乇丞貙 賵賲賯丕亘賱丞 賲丕 爻賲丕賴賲 毓亘丕賯乇丞 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 廿賱賷 丕賱賴賵爻 亘鬲噩乇亘丞 丕賱賲賳丕賮爻丞 賵丕賱賴賵爻 亘丕賱鬲噩乇亘丞. 賷丿賵乇 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 丨賵賱 鬲賯賳賷丞 賯氐賵乇 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 丕賱鬲賷 丕亘鬲賰乇賴丕 賵兀爻爻 賱賴丕 丕賱卮丕毓乇 爻賷賲賵賳賷丿爻 賮賷 丕賱賯乇賳 丕賱禺丕賲爻 賯亘賱 丕賱賲賷賱丕丿 賵丕爻鬲禺丿賲賴丕 爻丕爻丞 賵賳亘賱丕亍 乇賵賲丕 賱鬲匕賰乇 賵丨賮馗 丕賱禺胤亘 丕賱爻賷丕爻賷丞 賵丕賱卮毓亘賷丞貙 賵賷爻鬲禺丿賲賴丕 賲鬲爻丕亘賯賵 丕賱亘胤賵賱丞 丕賱毓丕賱賲賷丞 賵丕賱兀賲乇賷賰賷丞 賱賱匕丕賰乇丞. 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 賮賷 兀氐賱賴 賷氐賳賮 賰爻賷乇丞 匕丕鬲賷丞 賵賲睾丕賲乇丞 賵鬲丨賯賷賯 氐丨賮賷 賵賲賯丕亘賱丕鬲 兀賰孬乇 賲賳 賰賵賳賴 賰鬲丕亘丕 毓賱賲賷丕 賵鬲丕乇賷禺賷丕 賱賮賳 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞. 乇丨賱丞 賷賰鬲卮賮 賲賳 禺賱丕賱賴丕 丕賱氐丨賮賷 兀賳 鬲賱賰 丕賱賲爻丕亘賯丕鬲 賱丕 鬲丨鬲丕噩 廿賱賶 毓亘賯乇賷丞 賮锟斤拷乇賷丞 賵賱賰賳 鬲丿乇賷亘丕鬲 賲賰孬賮丞貙 賵毓賱賷 丕賱乇睾賲 賲賳 鬲囟丕毓賮 毓丿丿 丕賱毓丿丿 丕賱毓賳丕氐乇 丕賱鬲賷 賷賲賰賳賴 丨賮馗賴丕 賱賰賳 噩賵丿丞 匕丕賰乇鬲賴 賱賲 鬲鬲囟丕毓賮 亘賳賮爻 丕賱賲賯丿丕乇 乇睾賲 賲丕 丨賯賯賴 賮賷 丕賱賲爻丕亘賯丞 丕賱兀賲乇賷賰賷丞 賲賳 丕賳鬲氐丕乇!
賷胤乇丨 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 鬲爻丕丐賱 賲賴賲 賮賷 馗賱 鬲賯丿賲 賵爻丕卅賱 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 丕賱禺丕乇噩賷丞 賮賷 毓氐乇 丕賱賮囟丕亍 : 賱賲丕匕丕 賳夭毓噩 兀賳賮爻賳丕 亘丕賱丕爻鬲孬賲丕乇 賮賷 匕丕賰乇鬲賳丕 丕賱丿丕禺賱賷丞責 賵賷噩賷亘 毓賱賷賴 亘兀賳 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 賴賷 胤乇賷賯鬲賳丕 賱賮賴賲 賲丕 賷丿賵乇 賮賷 丕賱毓丕賱賲 賵丕賱鬲賮丕毓賱 賲毓賴貙 廿賳賴丕 丕賱胤乇賷賯丞 丕賱鬲賷 賳賮賴賲 亘賴丕 賲丕 賷丿賵乇 丨賵賱賳丕貙 丕賱胤乇賷賯丞 丕賱鬲賷 賳鬲卮丕乇賰 亘賴丕 孬賯丕賮鬲賳丕 賵毓丕丿丕鬲賳丕 賵鬲賯丕賱賷丿賳丕貙 廿賴賲丕賱賳丕 匕丕賰乇鬲賳丕 丕賱丿丕禺賱賷丞 賱氐丕賱丨 匕丕賰乇丞 禺丕乇噩賷丞 賷賴丿丿 亘賲夭賷丿 賲賳 丕賱鬲丿賴賵乇 賵賮賯丿丕賳 丕賱賴賵賷丞 賵丕賱卮禺氐賷丞 賵丕賱鬲賮乇丿. 賵賷丨囟乇賳賷 賴賳丕 丨賱賯丕鬲 賲爻賱爻賱 "丕賱賲乇丌丞 丕賱爻賵丿丕亍" 賮賷賲丕 賷丿賵乇 亘鬲賱賰 丕賱賯囟賷丞. 貙 賵賲禺丕賵賮 丕賱廿賳爻丕賳賷丞 賲賳 賲氐賷乇 賲馗賱賲 廿賳 丕爻鬲賲乇 鬲丿賴賵乇 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 賮賷 丕賱鬲賯丿賲 賱氐丕賱丨 丕賱匕丕賰乇丕鬲 丕賱禺丕乇噩賷丞. 賵亘賳丕亍 毓賱賷賴 賮賲賵賯賮 丕賱賰丕鬲亘 賲賳 賲爻丕亘賯丕鬲 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 賵廿賳 賰丕賳鬲 亘毓賷丿丞 毓賳 丕賱賴丿賮 丕賱兀爻丕爻賷 賱賱匕丕賰乇丞 賮廿賳賴 賲賵賯賮 丿賮丕毓賷 賳鬲禺匕賴 囟丿 丕賱賳爻賷丕賳貙 囟丿 賮賯丿 賴賵賷鬲賳丕 賵匕丕賰乇鬲賳丕貙 囟丿 丕賱鬲丿賴賵乇 丕賱乇賴賷亘 賮賷 丕賱毓賯賵丿 丕賱兀禺賷乇丞貙 廿賳賴丕 賵爻賷賱丞 兀禺賷乇丞 賱賱丿賮丕毓 毓賳 廿賳爻丕賳賷鬲賳丕.
賰鬲丕亘 賲賲鬲毓貙 賵乇爻丕賱鬲賴 兀噩賲賱貙 賱賲 兀禺乇噩 賲賳賴 亘賵氐賮丞 賱賱匕丕賰乇丞貙 賱賰賳 禺乇噩鬲 亘鬲卮禺賷氐 噩賷丿貙 賵乇爻丕賱丞 賯賷賲丞
October 5, 2018
Deliberate/cognitive practice! Sounds just like Hank Moody's motto: 'Constant vigilance!'
Q:
The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized. (c)
Q:
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live 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 so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, 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. (c)
Q:
The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it. (c)
Q:
There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. (c)
Q:
Psychologists have discovered that the most efficient method is to force yourself to type 10 to 20 percent faster than your comfort pace and to allow yourself to make mistakes. Only by watching yourself mistype at that faster speed can you figure out the obstacles that are slowing you down and overcome them. By bringing typing out of the autonomous stage and back under conscious control, it is possible to conquer the OK plateau. (c)
Q:
When the point of reading is, as it was for Peter of Ravenna, remembering, you approach a text very differently than most of us do today. Now we put a premium on reading quickly and widely, and that breeds a kind of superficiality in our reading, and in what we seek to get out of books. You can鈥檛 read a page a minute, the rate at which you鈥檙e probably reading this book, and expect to remember what you鈥檝e read for any considerable length of time. If something is going to be made memorable, it has to be dwelled upon, repeated. (c)
Q:
Amateur musicians, for example, are more likely to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros are more likely to work through tedious exercises or focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces. (c)
Q:
The brain is like a muscle,鈥� he said, and memory training is a form of mental workout. Over time, like any form of exercise, it鈥檒l make the brain fitter, quicker, and more nimble. It鈥檚 an idea that dates back to the very origins of memory training. Roman orators argued that the art of memory鈥攖he proper retention and ordering of knowledge鈥攚as a vital instrument for the invention of new ideas. (c)
Q:
The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized. (c)
Q:
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live 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 so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, 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. (c)
Q:
The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it. (c)
Q:
There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. (c)
Q:
Psychologists have discovered that the most efficient method is to force yourself to type 10 to 20 percent faster than your comfort pace and to allow yourself to make mistakes. Only by watching yourself mistype at that faster speed can you figure out the obstacles that are slowing you down and overcome them. By bringing typing out of the autonomous stage and back under conscious control, it is possible to conquer the OK plateau. (c)
Q:
When the point of reading is, as it was for Peter of Ravenna, remembering, you approach a text very differently than most of us do today. Now we put a premium on reading quickly and widely, and that breeds a kind of superficiality in our reading, and in what we seek to get out of books. You can鈥檛 read a page a minute, the rate at which you鈥檙e probably reading this book, and expect to remember what you鈥檝e read for any considerable length of time. If something is going to be made memorable, it has to be dwelled upon, repeated. (c)
Q:
Amateur musicians, for example, are more likely to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros are more likely to work through tedious exercises or focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces. (c)
Q:
The brain is like a muscle,鈥� he said, and memory training is a form of mental workout. Over time, like any form of exercise, it鈥檒l make the brain fitter, quicker, and more nimble. It鈥檚 an idea that dates back to the very origins of memory training. Roman orators argued that the art of memory鈥攖he proper retention and ordering of knowledge鈥攚as a vital instrument for the invention of new ideas. (c)
May 25, 2013
Cross posted at
People do the oddest things in the name of winning.
I鈥檓 a competitive person (as are most of you reviewers out there). A few years ago I would have added the word 鈥渧ery鈥� in front of competitive; I鈥檝e mellowed as I鈥檝e aged but I remember the lengths I went to in order to be the best at whatever I deemed important. But I鈥檓 fairly certain I would not go to such lengths to win a memory competition.
Joshua Foer thought it was a dandy idea鈥�..
Joshua found himself in the world of competitive memory when he decided he wanted to do a journalistic book about the subject and the people in it. Apparently, and I didn鈥檛 know this, there is a world competition for memory. These people memorize long lists of numbers, decks on top of decks of cards, poetry鈥�.ect, all to repeat what they remember to some judges in hopes of winning. My question was why? What purpose could this possibly serve? Who needs a skill like this and when would one have the need to memorize 20 decks of cards?
As the author points out in the book, we no longer need to remember much of anything these days, all our electronic gadgets serve as our external memory. When was the last time you memorized a phone number? Pretty close to 鈥渁 really flippin long time ago鈥� I would guess.
To accomplish the mind boggling feet of, say, memorizing the order of cards in many set of cards in just minutes, they use the technique called mnemonics. What this is, is making a visual backdrop for each card, or number, or object and putting them in 鈥榤emorable鈥� situations doing strange things鈥︹€nd apparently the raunchier the better. Trust me you don鈥檛 want to know what his mind had conjured up for Bill Clinton and a Watermelon, but I will never forget it.
Competition got the better of Foer, and he went from writing a book about memory competitors to being a competitor himself. He wanted the American memory championship bad! So bad he resorted to wearing blacked out goggles with small holes in them to see whatever he studying and to wearing earmuffs to minimize distractions. That's dedication.
People do the oddest things in the name of winning.
I鈥檓 a competitive person (as are most of you reviewers out there). A few years ago I would have added the word 鈥渧ery鈥� in front of competitive; I鈥檝e mellowed as I鈥檝e aged but I remember the lengths I went to in order to be the best at whatever I deemed important. But I鈥檓 fairly certain I would not go to such lengths to win a memory competition.
Joshua Foer thought it was a dandy idea鈥�..
Joshua found himself in the world of competitive memory when he decided he wanted to do a journalistic book about the subject and the people in it. Apparently, and I didn鈥檛 know this, there is a world competition for memory. These people memorize long lists of numbers, decks on top of decks of cards, poetry鈥�.ect, all to repeat what they remember to some judges in hopes of winning. My question was why? What purpose could this possibly serve? Who needs a skill like this and when would one have the need to memorize 20 decks of cards?
As the author points out in the book, we no longer need to remember much of anything these days, all our electronic gadgets serve as our external memory. When was the last time you memorized a phone number? Pretty close to 鈥渁 really flippin long time ago鈥� I would guess.
To accomplish the mind boggling feet of, say, memorizing the order of cards in many set of cards in just minutes, they use the technique called mnemonics. What this is, is making a visual backdrop for each card, or number, or object and putting them in 鈥榤emorable鈥� situations doing strange things鈥︹€nd apparently the raunchier the better. Trust me you don鈥檛 want to know what his mind had conjured up for Bill Clinton and a Watermelon, but I will never forget it.
Competition got the better of Foer, and he went from writing a book about memory competitors to being a competitor himself. He wanted the American memory championship bad! So bad he resorted to wearing blacked out goggles with small holes in them to see whatever he studying and to wearing earmuffs to minimize distractions. That's dedication.
November 11, 2020
This book has motivated me more than any other memory improvement book I'd read before. Maybe because it's positively theoretical and focuses on how to stay motivated through the whole process. It was a great another story of success.
Care to practice your super-memory...
Care to practice your super-memory...
Read
June 11, 2021鈥淢onotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live 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 so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, 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.鈥�
This book blew my mind!
This book blew my mind!
February 23, 2022
禺蹖賱蹖 讴賲 倬蹖卮 賲蹖丕丿 讴鬲丕亘蹖 乇賵 亘禺賵賳賲 讴賴 乇賲丕賳 賳亘丕卮賴! 賲毓賲賵賱丕 爻乇丕睾 讴鬲亘 丕丿亘蹖 賲蹖乇賲 賵 賱丕亘賴鈥屬勜й� 氐賮丨丕鬲貙 丿賳亘丕賱 丕丨爻丕爻丕鬲 诏賲卮丿賴鈥屰� 夭賳丿诏蹖 賴爻鬲賲.
卮丕蹖丿 讴賵丿讴丕賳賴 賵 蹖丕 賳丕卮蹖丕賳賴 亘賴 賳馗乇 亘蹖丕丿 賵賱蹖 讴鬲丕亘蹖 讴賴 夭蹖亘丕蹖蹖鈥屬囏й� 丕丿亘蹖 賳丿丕卮鬲賴 亘丕卮賴貙 蹖丕 賴賲賵賳 亘賴 賯賵賱 賲毓乇賵賮 乇賲丕賳 賳亘丕卮賴貙 賳賲蹖鈥屫堎嗁� 丿乇 丿賱 賲賳 噩丕蹖蹖 丿丕卮鬲賴 亘丕卮賴! :))
賯丿賲 夭丿賳 乇賵蹖 賲丕賴貙 丕夭 丕賵賳 丿爻鬲 讴鬲丕亘鈥屬囏й屰� 亘賵丿 讴賴 丿賵爻鬲卮 賳丿丕卮鬲賲貙 趩賵賳 丕丿亘蹖 賳亘賵丿貙 乇賲丕賳 賳亘賵丿貙 ... 蹖賴鈥屫堌必й屰� 賲蹖鈥屫堌ж池� 毓賱賲蹖 亘丕卮賴 讴賴 禺亘 丿乇 丕賵賳 跇丕賳乇 賴賲 卮讴爻鬲 禺賵乇丿賴 亘賵丿! :))
丕蹖賳 丕孬乇貙 蹖讴 讴鬲丕亘 賳爻亘鬲丕 丨噩蹖賲 丿乇 賲賵乇丿 毓賱賲 丨丕賮馗賴 賵 亘賴 丨丕賮馗賴 爻倬乇丿賳賴! 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 爻毓蹖 讴乇丿賴 蹖賴 爻乇蹖 鬲讴賳蹖讴 賲毓乇賮蹖 賵 鬲丨賱蹖賱 讴賳賴貙 讴賴 亘賴 讴賲讴 丕賵賳 鬲讴賳蹖讴鈥屬囏ж� 賲禺丕胤亘 亘鬲賵賳賴 丕胤賱丕毓丕鬲 賲禺鬲賱賮 乇賵 亘禺丕胤乇 亘爻倬丕乇賴.
讴賴 亘賴鈥屬嗀肛� 卮禺氐蹖 賲賳貙 丿乇 丿賵乇丕賳 诏噩鬲鈥屬囏й� 賴賵卮賲賳丿貙 亘賴 禺丕胤乇 爻倬乇丿賳 趩蹖夭賴丕貙 毓蹖賳 丌亘 丿乇 賴丕賵賳诏 讴賵亘蹖丿賳賴! 賲孬賱丕貙 賵賯鬲蹖 诏賵卮蹖鈥屬囏й� 賲丕 鬲賵丕賳丕蹖蹖 匕禺蹖乇賴 賴夭丕乇丕賳 卮賲丕乇賴 鬲賱賮賳 乇賵 丿丕乇賳貙 賲丕 趩乇丕 亘丕蹖丿 卮賲丕乇賴鈥屬囏� 乇賵 丨賮馗 讴賳賲責!!
亘賳馗乇 賲賳貙 丕蹖賳 鬲讴賳蹖讴鈥屬囏� 賮賯胤 賵丕爻賴 賲爻丕亘賯丕鬲 丨丕賮馗賴 禺賵亘賴貙 賴賲賵賳 賲爻丕亘賯丕鬲蹖 讴賴 禺賵丿賽 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 賴賲 丿乇 丕賵賳丕 卮乇讴鬲 讴乇丿賴! 賵诏乇賳賴 丿乇 夭賳丿诏蹖 乇賵夭賲乇賴 趩賳丿丕賳 讴丕乇丕蹖蹖鈥屫й� 賳丿丕乇賳...!
丿乇讴賱貙 賳賴 讴鬲丕亘 乇賵 丿賵爻鬲 丿丕卮鬲賲貙 賳賴 賲丨鬲賵丕卮 乇賵. 鬲賵氐蹖賴 賳賲蹖鈥屭┵嗁�.
卮丕蹖丿 讴賵丿讴丕賳賴 賵 蹖丕 賳丕卮蹖丕賳賴 亘賴 賳馗乇 亘蹖丕丿 賵賱蹖 讴鬲丕亘蹖 讴賴 夭蹖亘丕蹖蹖鈥屬囏й� 丕丿亘蹖 賳丿丕卮鬲賴 亘丕卮賴貙 蹖丕 賴賲賵賳 亘賴 賯賵賱 賲毓乇賵賮 乇賲丕賳 賳亘丕卮賴貙 賳賲蹖鈥屫堎嗁� 丿乇 丿賱 賲賳 噩丕蹖蹖 丿丕卮鬲賴 亘丕卮賴! :))
賯丿賲 夭丿賳 乇賵蹖 賲丕賴貙 丕夭 丕賵賳 丿爻鬲 讴鬲丕亘鈥屬囏й屰� 亘賵丿 讴賴 丿賵爻鬲卮 賳丿丕卮鬲賲貙 趩賵賳 丕丿亘蹖 賳亘賵丿貙 乇賲丕賳 賳亘賵丿貙 ... 蹖賴鈥屫堌必й屰� 賲蹖鈥屫堌ж池� 毓賱賲蹖 亘丕卮賴 讴賴 禺亘 丿乇 丕賵賳 跇丕賳乇 賴賲 卮讴爻鬲 禺賵乇丿賴 亘賵丿! :))
丕蹖賳 丕孬乇貙 蹖讴 讴鬲丕亘 賳爻亘鬲丕 丨噩蹖賲 丿乇 賲賵乇丿 毓賱賲 丨丕賮馗賴 賵 亘賴 丨丕賮馗賴 爻倬乇丿賳賴! 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 爻毓蹖 讴乇丿賴 蹖賴 爻乇蹖 鬲讴賳蹖讴 賲毓乇賮蹖 賵 鬲丨賱蹖賱 讴賳賴貙 讴賴 亘賴 讴賲讴 丕賵賳 鬲讴賳蹖讴鈥屬囏ж� 賲禺丕胤亘 亘鬲賵賳賴 丕胤賱丕毓丕鬲 賲禺鬲賱賮 乇賵 亘禺丕胤乇 亘爻倬丕乇賴.
讴賴 亘賴鈥屬嗀肛� 卮禺氐蹖 賲賳貙 丿乇 丿賵乇丕賳 诏噩鬲鈥屬囏й� 賴賵卮賲賳丿貙 亘賴 禺丕胤乇 爻倬乇丿賳 趩蹖夭賴丕貙 毓蹖賳 丌亘 丿乇 賴丕賵賳诏 讴賵亘蹖丿賳賴! 賲孬賱丕貙 賵賯鬲蹖 诏賵卮蹖鈥屬囏й� 賲丕 鬲賵丕賳丕蹖蹖 匕禺蹖乇賴 賴夭丕乇丕賳 卮賲丕乇賴 鬲賱賮賳 乇賵 丿丕乇賳貙 賲丕 趩乇丕 亘丕蹖丿 卮賲丕乇賴鈥屬囏� 乇賵 丨賮馗 讴賳賲責!!
亘賳馗乇 賲賳貙 丕蹖賳 鬲讴賳蹖讴鈥屬囏� 賮賯胤 賵丕爻賴 賲爻丕亘賯丕鬲 丨丕賮馗賴 禺賵亘賴貙 賴賲賵賳 賲爻丕亘賯丕鬲蹖 讴賴 禺賵丿賽 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 賴賲 丿乇 丕賵賳丕 卮乇讴鬲 讴乇丿賴! 賵诏乇賳賴 丿乇 夭賳丿诏蹖 乇賵夭賲乇賴 趩賳丿丕賳 讴丕乇丕蹖蹖鈥屫й� 賳丿丕乇賳...!
丿乇讴賱貙 賳賴 讴鬲丕亘 乇賵 丿賵爻鬲 丿丕卮鬲賲貙 賳賴 賲丨鬲賵丕卮 乇賵. 鬲賵氐蹖賴 賳賲蹖鈥屭┵嗁�.
July 5, 2013
Well, I'm not going to lie, this book has already got two strikes: I basically hate the genre of "I did this wacky thing for a year, and then I wrote a book about it!", plus he is the brother of a famouser writer whom I more or less revile. But! OMG you guys, my memory is so laughably bad. And apparently this book might possibly have a side effect of helping me improve that, which would be worth slogging through a middling memoir.
***
Here's another book I'm sad I never found time to review. It was a great case of proving my open-mindedness (ha)鈥攁lthough I went in very ready to hate, I was totally charmed by this. Moonwalking is a strange window into a very strange world; if you didn't know there was a "competitive memory" circuit, you're in for some fun (and some bemused head-shaking). It's actually also a very good use of the "I did this wacky thing for a year, and then I wrote a book about it!" genre, because it's fascinating to watch Joshua completely embrace a new hobby and get totally embroiled in it, but I'm glad he then extricated and went back to (presumably) his normal life.
I'd like to say other things about this book, like to tell you about the very fascinating people you'll meet herein, and the unbelievably intricate lengths people go to to build their competitive-memory chops, such as constructing "memory palaces" completely populated with bizarre statuary and bric-a-brac, which is assigned excruciatingly specific meaning that corresponds to the thing you're trying to remember鈥攂ut look, I read this book over a year ago, and I didn't actually do any of those memory-training exercises, even while I was reading, and so: nope. Nothing much more was retained.
It's a great book, though.
***
Here's another book I'm sad I never found time to review. It was a great case of proving my open-mindedness (ha)鈥攁lthough I went in very ready to hate, I was totally charmed by this. Moonwalking is a strange window into a very strange world; if you didn't know there was a "competitive memory" circuit, you're in for some fun (and some bemused head-shaking). It's actually also a very good use of the "I did this wacky thing for a year, and then I wrote a book about it!" genre, because it's fascinating to watch Joshua completely embrace a new hobby and get totally embroiled in it, but I'm glad he then extricated and went back to (presumably) his normal life.
I'd like to say other things about this book, like to tell you about the very fascinating people you'll meet herein, and the unbelievably intricate lengths people go to to build their competitive-memory chops, such as constructing "memory palaces" completely populated with bizarre statuary and bric-a-brac, which is assigned excruciatingly specific meaning that corresponds to the thing you're trying to remember鈥攂ut look, I read this book over a year ago, and I didn't actually do any of those memory-training exercises, even while I was reading, and so: nope. Nothing much more was retained.
It's a great book, though.
December 29, 2017
This is a book review turned rant. I often hear 'good memory is useless with technology' or 'memory techniques are tricks, but wouldn't add value to my life'. I think both of these are wrong. I've been spending this Christmas understanding more about memory because I think there's significant leverage in being productive with these techniques.
I have varies situational checklists. If I am about to buy something, I ask myself simple questions such as "Would I buy this again if it broke?", "Have I wanted this for more than a month?", "Does this replace something I already have, or does it add a new need?" and "If I get this, will I have to resist the urge to get 10 other things to go along with it?". I have checklists for making decisions: "What would change my mind about this decision?", "What alternatives have been seriously considered?" and "What can we do to get our feet wet, without jumping in heads first?". I have lists of the mental models, principles and cognitive biases that I use on most problems I face: inversion, second-order effects, black swans, survivorship bias, antifragility, conditioning, fundamental attribution error, and so on. I have a 20+ point checklists for reviewing code.
The problem with these lists is that they're stored in an app on my phone. I only run through them on occasion, despite finding value every time I do. It's difficult to condition myself to use them as often as I'd like. In the middle of a discussion, it's disruptive to pull up a list on your phone and work through it. With a memory palace, I can install these checklists in my head to run through at any point in time.
I've started doing this since reading the book and it's provided the impetus to finally adopt memory palaces into my day-to-day. I don't have many of them yet, in fact, the only one is a subset of my list of mental models, principles, and biases. I've built this on a couple of streets in the city I grew up in. I start the memory palace in the parking lot of my kindergarten. There, I see a bunch of people doing headstands. It reminds me to attempt to invert the problem. On the sidewalk, I see a bunch of domino pieces falling. This prompts me to consider second-order and third-order thinking. I look over the fence, inside the kindergarten. There's a tall, blue tower and I see a monkey throwing carrots. That means I should think about what the incentives are in the problem at hand. Do the incentives of the systems line up with those of the individuals? I keep walking and see a massive, exponentially shaped slide, thinking of compounding. Soon enough a black swan jumps out, causing me to think of Taleb's black swan. I see clocks on the pavement and I think of whether everyone is operating on the same time-scale, or if the disagreement is formed because some are thinking on a 1-month time-scale, and others on a 1-year time-scale? I see a barbell, think of antifragility. A plane, and think of survivorship bias. I have about 20 mental models and biases incorporated in this model so far.
This may seem slow, but in fact, I'd be able to name all of the models in seconds. It's extremely fast to run through this list. Adding new models is only getting easier, too.
Remembering numbers and card games isn't particularly useful for me, but these are just easy-to-evaluate tests for a competition format to test how productive someone is with memory palaces. They don't do the techniques justice. As you use these techniques more and more, it becomes easier to form mental images to build palaces. I'm only a week in, and I'm already building small palaces for the books I'm reading and vocabulary I'm currently learning. This makes it easy to go through it when you aren't reading the book.
Fundamentally, as a result of reading this book and other resources on memory, I've come to think of a brain as a data structure with the following strengths:
* Great at building associations
* Extremely visual and spatially oriented
* Good at appending, poor at updating, mediocre at recall
Boiling memory down to these limitations makes it easier for me to understand why palaces are so useful. The brain is poor at lists and numbers unless packaged into visual, spatial and associations鈥攆or which the memory palace is a fantastic technique. If you think of building memories in terms of these strengths, it makes a dramatic difference.
I like the book because it has a compelling narrative. The problem with it is that it doesn't go deep enough into how to use memory day-to-day, despite my hypothesis that it is useful in day-to-day life. Adopting these techniques is hard work, don't read the book if you don't see any use for it. But if you do, this is a fantastic place to start. Something I found incredibly surprising is that we used to be much better at remembering than we are now. In ancient greece, they had perfected these techniques to remember. Before the printing press, getting your hand on a book was rare. When you did, you made sure to memorize as much of it as possible. With Gutenberg, we had the first wave of suppressing the importance of memory. The second wave came with smartphones and the Internet, where everything seems to be just seconds away. I certainly agree that this changes things in terms of what we need to remember, but I feel that strategically applying these techniques would yield great results. I look forward to see if I'm still using them months and years from now.
I have varies situational checklists. If I am about to buy something, I ask myself simple questions such as "Would I buy this again if it broke?", "Have I wanted this for more than a month?", "Does this replace something I already have, or does it add a new need?" and "If I get this, will I have to resist the urge to get 10 other things to go along with it?". I have checklists for making decisions: "What would change my mind about this decision?", "What alternatives have been seriously considered?" and "What can we do to get our feet wet, without jumping in heads first?". I have lists of the mental models, principles and cognitive biases that I use on most problems I face: inversion, second-order effects, black swans, survivorship bias, antifragility, conditioning, fundamental attribution error, and so on. I have a 20+ point checklists for reviewing code.
The problem with these lists is that they're stored in an app on my phone. I only run through them on occasion, despite finding value every time I do. It's difficult to condition myself to use them as often as I'd like. In the middle of a discussion, it's disruptive to pull up a list on your phone and work through it. With a memory palace, I can install these checklists in my head to run through at any point in time.
I've started doing this since reading the book and it's provided the impetus to finally adopt memory palaces into my day-to-day. I don't have many of them yet, in fact, the only one is a subset of my list of mental models, principles, and biases. I've built this on a couple of streets in the city I grew up in. I start the memory palace in the parking lot of my kindergarten. There, I see a bunch of people doing headstands. It reminds me to attempt to invert the problem. On the sidewalk, I see a bunch of domino pieces falling. This prompts me to consider second-order and third-order thinking. I look over the fence, inside the kindergarten. There's a tall, blue tower and I see a monkey throwing carrots. That means I should think about what the incentives are in the problem at hand. Do the incentives of the systems line up with those of the individuals? I keep walking and see a massive, exponentially shaped slide, thinking of compounding. Soon enough a black swan jumps out, causing me to think of Taleb's black swan. I see clocks on the pavement and I think of whether everyone is operating on the same time-scale, or if the disagreement is formed because some are thinking on a 1-month time-scale, and others on a 1-year time-scale? I see a barbell, think of antifragility. A plane, and think of survivorship bias. I have about 20 mental models and biases incorporated in this model so far.
This may seem slow, but in fact, I'd be able to name all of the models in seconds. It's extremely fast to run through this list. Adding new models is only getting easier, too.
Remembering numbers and card games isn't particularly useful for me, but these are just easy-to-evaluate tests for a competition format to test how productive someone is with memory palaces. They don't do the techniques justice. As you use these techniques more and more, it becomes easier to form mental images to build palaces. I'm only a week in, and I'm already building small palaces for the books I'm reading and vocabulary I'm currently learning. This makes it easy to go through it when you aren't reading the book.
Fundamentally, as a result of reading this book and other resources on memory, I've come to think of a brain as a data structure with the following strengths:
* Great at building associations
* Extremely visual and spatially oriented
* Good at appending, poor at updating, mediocre at recall
Boiling memory down to these limitations makes it easier for me to understand why palaces are so useful. The brain is poor at lists and numbers unless packaged into visual, spatial and associations鈥攆or which the memory palace is a fantastic technique. If you think of building memories in terms of these strengths, it makes a dramatic difference.
I like the book because it has a compelling narrative. The problem with it is that it doesn't go deep enough into how to use memory day-to-day, despite my hypothesis that it is useful in day-to-day life. Adopting these techniques is hard work, don't read the book if you don't see any use for it. But if you do, this is a fantastic place to start. Something I found incredibly surprising is that we used to be much better at remembering than we are now. In ancient greece, they had perfected these techniques to remember. Before the printing press, getting your hand on a book was rare. When you did, you made sure to memorize as much of it as possible. With Gutenberg, we had the first wave of suppressing the importance of memory. The second wave came with smartphones and the Internet, where everything seems to be just seconds away. I certainly agree that this changes things in terms of what we need to remember, but I feel that strategically applying these techniques would yield great results. I look forward to see if I'm still using them months and years from now.
September 21, 2011
Joshua Foer begins exploring memory at the US Memory Competition, where he watches people who claim to have normal memory capacity memorize lists of phone numbers, the order of decks of cards, and poems in mere minutes. Intrigued, he eventually decides to compete in the competition himself and receives help from leaders in memory techniques along the way.
Foer weaves his experience in memory training with research and a history of the practice. With a casual, story-telling style he takes you on a meandering but fascinating journey. I enjoyed that he was able to take himself seriously while also poking some fun at himself and his memory competitors. While he begins as an outsider looking in, by the end, he really seemed to become a part of this eclectic community.
I came to this book curious to know how I could improve my own unreliable memory. Foer does make a serious case that most people who dedicate themselves to learning memory techniques could learn how to do some pretty awesome party tricks. However, once I learned what that dedication required, I lost interest in doing any sort of serious memory training.
However, I think this book makes a strong point that being more aware of what we're taking in, and finding ways to record it on our external memory devices like computers and notebooks, can improve our own creative output. I found it an interesting commentary on what we may have lost along the way as we have gained more ways to store and record information.
Foer weaves his experience in memory training with research and a history of the practice. With a casual, story-telling style he takes you on a meandering but fascinating journey. I enjoyed that he was able to take himself seriously while also poking some fun at himself and his memory competitors. While he begins as an outsider looking in, by the end, he really seemed to become a part of this eclectic community.
I came to this book curious to know how I could improve my own unreliable memory. Foer does make a serious case that most people who dedicate themselves to learning memory techniques could learn how to do some pretty awesome party tricks. However, once I learned what that dedication required, I lost interest in doing any sort of serious memory training.
However, I think this book makes a strong point that being more aware of what we're taking in, and finding ways to record it on our external memory devices like computers and notebooks, can improve our own creative output. I found it an interesting commentary on what we may have lost along the way as we have gained more ways to store and record information.
July 17, 2019
讴鬲丕亘 丨噩賲 夭蹖丕丿蹖 丿丕乇賴 賵 亘丕 賲胤丕賱亘 賲賮蹖丿 讴賲 貙 賳賲蹖卮賴 诏賮鬲 噩夭賵 讴鬲丕亘 賴丕蹖 夭乇丿 亘賴 丨爻丕亘 賲蹖丕丿 趩賵賳 丕氐賱丕 讴鬲丕亘 賳蹖爻鬲 亘賱讴賴 蹖 诏夭丕乇卮 賳丕賲賴 丕爻鬲 蹖 诏夭丕乇卮 賳丕賲賴 350 氐賮丨賴 丕蹖
噩丕卮 蹖 禺亘乇賳诏丕乇賴 讴賴 亘乇丕蹖 鬲賴蹖賴 诏夭丕乇卮 亘賴 賲丨賱 亘乇诏夭丕乇蹖 賯賴乇賲丕賳蹖 丨丕賮馗賴 爻丕賱 2005 丕蹖丕賱丕鬲 賲鬲丨丿賴 賲蹖乇賴 賵 亘丕 賲氐丕丨亘賴 亘丕 亘乇賳丿诏丕賳 賵 卮乇讴鬲 讴賳賳丿诏丕賳 賲爻丕亘賯賴 胤蹖 蹖讴 倬乇賵爻賴 胤賵賱丕賳蹖 賵 禺爻鬲賴 讴賳賳丿賴 賮賵鬲 賮賳 卮乇讴鬲 讴賳賳丿诏丕賳 乇賵 蹖丕丿 賲蹖诏蹖乇賴 賵 亘丕 鬲賲乇蹖賳 乇賵卮 賴丕蹖 鬲賯賵蹖鬲 丨丕賮馗賴 爻丕賱 2006 賳賮乇 丕賵賱 賲爻丕亘賯丕鬲 丨丕賮馗賴 賲蹖卮賴
丿賵爻鬲丕賳 爻賵丕賱 倬乇爻蹖丿賳 讴鬲丕亘 讴丕乇亘乇丿蹖賴責 丌乇賴 趩乇丕 讴賴 賳賴 賵賱蹖 亘爻鬲诏蹖 丿丕乇賴 亘禺賵丕蹖 賮賯胤 賲胤賱亘 乇賵 丨賮馗 讴賳蹖 賵 蹖丕 丕賵賳 乇賵 蹖丕丿 亘诏蹖乇蹖.亘賴 賴蹖趩 賵噩賴 乇賵卮 賴丕蹖 丕乇丕卅賴 卮丿賴 亘賴 丿乇丿 蹖丕丿诏蹖乇蹖 賳賲蹖禺賵乇賴
蹖讴蹖 丕夭 乇賵卮 賴丕蹖 丕乇丕卅賴 卮丿賴 乇賵卮 鬲賯胤蹖毓 賳丕賲 丿丕乇賴 讴賴 亘蹖卮鬲乇 亘賴 丿乇丿 丨賮馗 讴乇丿賳 卮賲丕乇賴 鬲賱賮賳 賴丕 賲蹖禺賵乇賴 卮賲丕 丿乇 丕蹖賳 乇賵卮 亘賴 噩丕蹖 丨賮馗 讴乇丿賳 讴丕賲賱 蹖讴 卮賲丕乇賴 丕賵賳 乇賵 丿賵鬲丕 丿賵鬲丕 噩丿丕 讴乇丿賴 賵 亘毓丿 丨賮馗 讴賳蹖丿 賲孬丕賱:
98 21 86 57 47 1
乇賵卮 丿蹖诏乇 丕爻鬲賮丕丿賴 丕夭 讴丕禺 丨丕賮馗賴 丕爻鬲 讴賴 讴鬲丕亘 亘蹖卮鬲乇 乇賵蹖 丕蹖賳 乇賵卮 賲丕賳賵乇 丿丕丿賴 乇賵卮 禺賵亘蹖賴 讴丕乇亘乇丿 賴賲 丿丕乇賴 賵賱蹖 亘賴 卮丿鬲 賵賯鬲 诏蹖乇賴
丕诏賴 亘禺賵丕蹖丿 賲毓賳蹖 蹖 讴賱賲賴 丕賳诏賱蹖爻蹖 乇丕 亘賴 丨丕賮馗賴 亘爻倬丕乇蹖丿 胤亘賯 丕蹖賳 乇賵卮 亘丕蹖丿 丌賳 讴賱賲賴 乇賵 亘 鬲氐賵蹖乇 鬲亘丿蹖賱 讴賳蹖丿 賵 丕賳 鬲氐賵蹖乇 乇丕 丿乇 噩丕蹖 賲卮禺氐蹖 丿乇 讴丕禺 賯乇丕乇 亘丿賴蹖丿
亘毓丿 丕夭 鬲氐賵蹖乇 爻丕夭蹖 賲蹖卮賴 丕賵賳 鬲氐賵蹖乇 乇賵 鬲賵 賯爻賲鬲蹖 丕夭 讴丕禺 匕賴賳蹖 賯乇丕乇丿丕丿
讴丕乇亘乇丿蹖 賴爻鬲 賵賱蹖 亘賴 卮丿鬲 夭賲丕賳 诏蹖乇
賲孬賱丕 亘乇丕蹖 丨賮馗 蹖讴 賱蹖爻鬲 禺乇蹖丿 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 丕蹖賳 诏賵賳賴 丌賳 乇丕 鬲氐賵蹖乇爻丕夭蹖 賲蹖 讴賳丿
丕亘鬲丿丕 讴丕禺 匕賴賳蹖 乇賵 鬲氐賵乇 賲蹖讴賳丿 :胤亘賯 鬲賵氐蹖賴 丕賵賱蹖賳 讴丕禺 丨丕賮馗賴 賲蹖鬲賵丕賳丿 禺丕賳賴 卮賲丕 亘丕卮丿
丨丕賱丕 卮蹖卮賴 蹖 鬲乇卮蹖 亘夭乇诏蹖 亘丕 丿爻鬲 賵 倬丕 乇丕 鬲氐賵乇 賲蹖 讴賳丿 讴賴 丿賲 丿乇 禺賵賳賴 丕蹖爻鬲丕丿賴
丕爻鬲禺乇蹖 倬乇 丕夭 倬賳蹖乇 鬲氐賵乇 賲蹖 讴賳丿 讴賴 蹖讴蹖 丿丕乇賴 鬲賵卮 卮賳丕 賲蹖讴賳賴
賲丕賴蹖 爻丕賲賵賳 乇賵 鬲氐賵乇 賲蹖 讴賳丿 讴賴 乇賵蹖 倬蹖丕賳賵 賯乇丕乇 丿丕乇賴 賵 亘賵卮 賴賲賴 噩丕乇賵 亘乇丿丕卮鬲賴
亘乇丕蹖 亘 蹖丕丿賲賵賳丿賳 卮卮 亘胤乇蹖 賳賵卮蹖丿賳蹖 丌賳 賴丕乇丕 鬲氐賵乇 賲蹖 讴賳丿 讴賴 亘丕賴賲 賵爻馗 倬匕蹖乇丕蹖蹖 丿乇 丨丕賱 丿毓賵丕 賴爻鬲賳丿
亘丕乇蹖 噩賵乇丕亘 鬲氐賵乇 賲蹖讴賳丿 蹖讴 乇賵丨 丿乇 丕鬲丕賯 禺賵丕亘 丿賵 噩賮鬲 噩賵乇丕亘 丿乇 丿爻鬲 丿丕乇丿 賵 丿丕乇丿 亘丕 丌賳 亘丕夭蹖 賲蹖讴賳丿
賵...
賵賯鬲蹖 丕蹖賳 乇賵卮 賴丕乇賵 賲蹖 禺賵賳丿賲 亘賴 賳馗乇賲 讴丕賲賱丕 亘蹖賴賵丿賴 賲蹖 丕賵賲丿賳丿 趩賵賳 賲蹖卮賴 賱蹖爻鬲 禺乇蹖丿 乇賵 蹖 鬲蹖讴賴 讴丕睾匕 蹖丕 鬲賵 诏賵卮蹖 匕禺蹖乇賴 讴乇丿 鬲丕 丕蹖賳 賴賲賴 丿乇丿爻乇 賳讴卮蹖丿
噩丕卮 蹖 禺亘乇賳诏丕乇賴 讴賴 亘乇丕蹖 鬲賴蹖賴 诏夭丕乇卮 亘賴 賲丨賱 亘乇诏夭丕乇蹖 賯賴乇賲丕賳蹖 丨丕賮馗賴 爻丕賱 2005 丕蹖丕賱丕鬲 賲鬲丨丿賴 賲蹖乇賴 賵 亘丕 賲氐丕丨亘賴 亘丕 亘乇賳丿诏丕賳 賵 卮乇讴鬲 讴賳賳丿诏丕賳 賲爻丕亘賯賴 胤蹖 蹖讴 倬乇賵爻賴 胤賵賱丕賳蹖 賵 禺爻鬲賴 讴賳賳丿賴 賮賵鬲 賮賳 卮乇讴鬲 讴賳賳丿诏丕賳 乇賵 蹖丕丿 賲蹖诏蹖乇賴 賵 亘丕 鬲賲乇蹖賳 乇賵卮 賴丕蹖 鬲賯賵蹖鬲 丨丕賮馗賴 爻丕賱 2006 賳賮乇 丕賵賱 賲爻丕亘賯丕鬲 丨丕賮馗賴 賲蹖卮賴
丿賵爻鬲丕賳 爻賵丕賱 倬乇爻蹖丿賳 讴鬲丕亘 讴丕乇亘乇丿蹖賴責 丌乇賴 趩乇丕 讴賴 賳賴 賵賱蹖 亘爻鬲诏蹖 丿丕乇賴 亘禺賵丕蹖 賮賯胤 賲胤賱亘 乇賵 丨賮馗 讴賳蹖 賵 蹖丕 丕賵賳 乇賵 蹖丕丿 亘诏蹖乇蹖.亘賴 賴蹖趩 賵噩賴 乇賵卮 賴丕蹖 丕乇丕卅賴 卮丿賴 亘賴 丿乇丿 蹖丕丿诏蹖乇蹖 賳賲蹖禺賵乇賴
蹖讴蹖 丕夭 乇賵卮 賴丕蹖 丕乇丕卅賴 卮丿賴 乇賵卮 鬲賯胤蹖毓 賳丕賲 丿丕乇賴 讴賴 亘蹖卮鬲乇 亘賴 丿乇丿 丨賮馗 讴乇丿賳 卮賲丕乇賴 鬲賱賮賳 賴丕 賲蹖禺賵乇賴 卮賲丕 丿乇 丕蹖賳 乇賵卮 亘賴 噩丕蹖 丨賮馗 讴乇丿賳 讴丕賲賱 蹖讴 卮賲丕乇賴 丕賵賳 乇賵 丿賵鬲丕 丿賵鬲丕 噩丿丕 讴乇丿賴 賵 亘毓丿 丨賮馗 讴賳蹖丿 賲孬丕賱:
98 21 86 57 47 1
乇賵卮 丿蹖诏乇 丕爻鬲賮丕丿賴 丕夭 讴丕禺 丨丕賮馗賴 丕爻鬲 讴賴 讴鬲丕亘 亘蹖卮鬲乇 乇賵蹖 丕蹖賳 乇賵卮 賲丕賳賵乇 丿丕丿賴 乇賵卮 禺賵亘蹖賴 讴丕乇亘乇丿 賴賲 丿丕乇賴 賵賱蹖 亘賴 卮丿鬲 賵賯鬲 诏蹖乇賴
丕诏賴 亘禺賵丕蹖丿 賲毓賳蹖 蹖 讴賱賲賴 丕賳诏賱蹖爻蹖 乇丕 亘賴 丨丕賮馗賴 亘爻倬丕乇蹖丿 胤亘賯 丕蹖賳 乇賵卮 亘丕蹖丿 丌賳 讴賱賲賴 乇賵 亘 鬲氐賵蹖乇 鬲亘丿蹖賱 讴賳蹖丿 賵 丕賳 鬲氐賵蹖乇 乇丕 丿乇 噩丕蹖 賲卮禺氐蹖 丿乇 讴丕禺 賯乇丕乇 亘丿賴蹖丿
亘毓丿 丕夭 鬲氐賵蹖乇 爻丕夭蹖 賲蹖卮賴 丕賵賳 鬲氐賵蹖乇 乇賵 鬲賵 賯爻賲鬲蹖 丕夭 讴丕禺 匕賴賳蹖 賯乇丕乇丿丕丿
讴丕乇亘乇丿蹖 賴爻鬲 賵賱蹖 亘賴 卮丿鬲 夭賲丕賳 诏蹖乇
賲孬賱丕 亘乇丕蹖 丨賮馗 蹖讴 賱蹖爻鬲 禺乇蹖丿 賳賵蹖爻賳丿賴 丕蹖賳 诏賵賳賴 丌賳 乇丕 鬲氐賵蹖乇爻丕夭蹖 賲蹖 讴賳丿
丕亘鬲丿丕 讴丕禺 匕賴賳蹖 乇賵 鬲氐賵乇 賲蹖讴賳丿 :胤亘賯 鬲賵氐蹖賴 丕賵賱蹖賳 讴丕禺 丨丕賮馗賴 賲蹖鬲賵丕賳丿 禺丕賳賴 卮賲丕 亘丕卮丿
丨丕賱丕 卮蹖卮賴 蹖 鬲乇卮蹖 亘夭乇诏蹖 亘丕 丿爻鬲 賵 倬丕 乇丕 鬲氐賵乇 賲蹖 讴賳丿 讴賴 丿賲 丿乇 禺賵賳賴 丕蹖爻鬲丕丿賴
丕爻鬲禺乇蹖 倬乇 丕夭 倬賳蹖乇 鬲氐賵乇 賲蹖 讴賳丿 讴賴 蹖讴蹖 丿丕乇賴 鬲賵卮 卮賳丕 賲蹖讴賳賴
賲丕賴蹖 爻丕賲賵賳 乇賵 鬲氐賵乇 賲蹖 讴賳丿 讴賴 乇賵蹖 倬蹖丕賳賵 賯乇丕乇 丿丕乇賴 賵 亘賵卮 賴賲賴 噩丕乇賵 亘乇丿丕卮鬲賴
亘乇丕蹖 亘 蹖丕丿賲賵賳丿賳 卮卮 亘胤乇蹖 賳賵卮蹖丿賳蹖 丌賳 賴丕乇丕 鬲氐賵乇 賲蹖 讴賳丿 讴賴 亘丕賴賲 賵爻馗 倬匕蹖乇丕蹖蹖 丿乇 丨丕賱 丿毓賵丕 賴爻鬲賳丿
亘丕乇蹖 噩賵乇丕亘 鬲氐賵乇 賲蹖讴賳丿 蹖讴 乇賵丨 丿乇 丕鬲丕賯 禺賵丕亘 丿賵 噩賮鬲 噩賵乇丕亘 丿乇 丿爻鬲 丿丕乇丿 賵 丿丕乇丿 亘丕 丌賳 亘丕夭蹖 賲蹖讴賳丿
賵...
賵賯鬲蹖 丕蹖賳 乇賵卮 賴丕乇賵 賲蹖 禺賵賳丿賲 亘賴 賳馗乇賲 讴丕賲賱丕 亘蹖賴賵丿賴 賲蹖 丕賵賲丿賳丿 趩賵賳 賲蹖卮賴 賱蹖爻鬲 禺乇蹖丿 乇賵 蹖 鬲蹖讴賴 讴丕睾匕 蹖丕 鬲賵 诏賵卮蹖 匕禺蹖乇賴 讴乇丿 鬲丕 丕蹖賳 賴賲賴 丿乇丿爻乇 賳讴卮蹖丿
June 27, 2013
Moonwalking with Einstein was a phenomenal book that made me feel differently about myself. An average student growing up, I still felt I was a step behind everyone when it came to "getting stuff". So I made a point to know things ahead of time, go over itinerary for conventions, review code and new techniques for a meeting before the meeting or seminar happened, memorize rules and lists for activities in which I belonged to in a group, etc. Because of this I was often seen as being in the "top of the class" or "In the know", but the truth was I was terrified of looking stupid, a particular insecurity of mine. As I got older I learned to live with my strengths and weaknesses, but some of those habits are still around. I'm convinced my obsession with reading comes from this insecurity as well. The problem is, like the old adage says, the more I read, the more I know, and the more I know, the more I realize I really don't know anything. And then there's the whole retention rate. How much of what we digest do we really retain? Then one of my book clubs suggested this book about world memory championships and I was fascinated.
Like most, my first thought was that these people that memorize numerous decks of cards or numbers that are twenty thousand digits long have innate abilities or are savants of sorts. But Foer shows us this isn't necessarily true. In fact, he's convinced many people that are labeled special or savants are just normal people that have utilized these age old memorization techniques. I was hooked. Is it possible that I could be retaining even more information? That I could make myself (at least feel) smarter? I was determined to find out.
Foer is a journalist that just happens to stumble on the memory championships and decides to train for a year and compete, to test his theories. This book is both eye-opening and thought provoking. Is it possible we've been teaching our children the wrong way to learn in schools? How do the experts in certain fields learn what they do? How is it that they show super human like abilities in analyzing and understanding their fields? In science? In chess? In cricket? Foer explores the many different memory techniques that have become standard for these memory sports. He also researches the whole idea of human memory at the same time. He gets tested himself before and after he starts training, he talks to scientists and psychologists who have studied this field for years and looks at various case studies that have been done over the years. He interviews people with various memory deficiencies/abilities, from world renown savants to a man who can't retain any information longer than it takes to concentrate on it.
Foer does an exceptional job with looking at both sides of the issues, but keeping an open mind all the way up until the end. His struggles and humorous imagery he uses for some of his techniques stay with you long after you've read the book. As I read the book and began to learn some of these techniques, I immediately began to employ them. The lady at the library that I asked three times what her name was, my grocery list, the names and interests of the twenty or so families that I've recently come to know in my church group. I employed techniques for all of these and was surprised to find how quickly the information came to me when trying to recall them. I've chosen a memory palace and have decided to memorize a small book I use for reference all the time called, "Know your Bible: All 66 books explained and applied". I use it constantly to look up the name of the book or the general idea of the book of the Bible I'm studying. I also wanted to memorize the names of the books of the Bible in order, as it makes for much easier referencing. So, I keep this book next to my bed, and have begun using my childhood home as my memory palace, forming imagery as I walk through my house to retain the information. This is a popular technique Foer explains in the book, especially when memorizing lists of concrete things, like a grocery list. It's working wonderfully. The more obnoxious or silly the image, the easier it is to retain the information. I won't go into each scene, but I will say some of my scenes include the Oompla Loompas, Professor Dumbledore, and talking French Peas. (Not all in the same scene though)
I found the history of some of these techniques fascinating as well, especially the sexual aspect of it. As you can imagine, lewd and obscene sexual acts might come in handy in forming imagery to remember things, and it was because of this, at some point in history it was sometimes banned as being immoral. In demonstrating to the reader the technique of using the memory palace to memorize a grocery list, he used an image of Claudia Shiffer covered in cottage cheese. He described the clumps of it falling off of her and asked the reader to imagine the smell of it. Many days later, I still can't get that image out of my mind, and will have no problem if I ever need to remember cottage cheese on my shopping list. But, with much humor, Foer also demonstrates the down side to sometimes using sexual acts to remember. For remembering playing cards he needed to remember a person, action, and item for each card, then (without going into too much description) as the cards are shown in a particular order, you have these people, items, and acts/verbs mixed up to form new images. He made the mistake of including some sexual acts as some of the verbs and his mother as one of the people. You can see how this got him into trouble. He ended up having to go back and change some of his image decisions or endure some mental scarring.
All in all though, are these techniques enough to really help us retain information or are they just fancy tricks that really have no real world use? Does memorizing your address book really matter when you can't remember where you put your car keys? Well, that's for you to decide. But Foer does an excellent job of exploring all sides of this entertaining phenomenon. And I highly recommend this book.
Like most, my first thought was that these people that memorize numerous decks of cards or numbers that are twenty thousand digits long have innate abilities or are savants of sorts. But Foer shows us this isn't necessarily true. In fact, he's convinced many people that are labeled special or savants are just normal people that have utilized these age old memorization techniques. I was hooked. Is it possible that I could be retaining even more information? That I could make myself (at least feel) smarter? I was determined to find out.
Foer is a journalist that just happens to stumble on the memory championships and decides to train for a year and compete, to test his theories. This book is both eye-opening and thought provoking. Is it possible we've been teaching our children the wrong way to learn in schools? How do the experts in certain fields learn what they do? How is it that they show super human like abilities in analyzing and understanding their fields? In science? In chess? In cricket? Foer explores the many different memory techniques that have become standard for these memory sports. He also researches the whole idea of human memory at the same time. He gets tested himself before and after he starts training, he talks to scientists and psychologists who have studied this field for years and looks at various case studies that have been done over the years. He interviews people with various memory deficiencies/abilities, from world renown savants to a man who can't retain any information longer than it takes to concentrate on it.
Foer does an exceptional job with looking at both sides of the issues, but keeping an open mind all the way up until the end. His struggles and humorous imagery he uses for some of his techniques stay with you long after you've read the book. As I read the book and began to learn some of these techniques, I immediately began to employ them. The lady at the library that I asked three times what her name was, my grocery list, the names and interests of the twenty or so families that I've recently come to know in my church group. I employed techniques for all of these and was surprised to find how quickly the information came to me when trying to recall them. I've chosen a memory palace and have decided to memorize a small book I use for reference all the time called, "Know your Bible: All 66 books explained and applied". I use it constantly to look up the name of the book or the general idea of the book of the Bible I'm studying. I also wanted to memorize the names of the books of the Bible in order, as it makes for much easier referencing. So, I keep this book next to my bed, and have begun using my childhood home as my memory palace, forming imagery as I walk through my house to retain the information. This is a popular technique Foer explains in the book, especially when memorizing lists of concrete things, like a grocery list. It's working wonderfully. The more obnoxious or silly the image, the easier it is to retain the information. I won't go into each scene, but I will say some of my scenes include the Oompla Loompas, Professor Dumbledore, and talking French Peas. (Not all in the same scene though)
I found the history of some of these techniques fascinating as well, especially the sexual aspect of it. As you can imagine, lewd and obscene sexual acts might come in handy in forming imagery to remember things, and it was because of this, at some point in history it was sometimes banned as being immoral. In demonstrating to the reader the technique of using the memory palace to memorize a grocery list, he used an image of Claudia Shiffer covered in cottage cheese. He described the clumps of it falling off of her and asked the reader to imagine the smell of it. Many days later, I still can't get that image out of my mind, and will have no problem if I ever need to remember cottage cheese on my shopping list. But, with much humor, Foer also demonstrates the down side to sometimes using sexual acts to remember. For remembering playing cards he needed to remember a person, action, and item for each card, then (without going into too much description) as the cards are shown in a particular order, you have these people, items, and acts/verbs mixed up to form new images. He made the mistake of including some sexual acts as some of the verbs and his mother as one of the people. You can see how this got him into trouble. He ended up having to go back and change some of his image decisions or endure some mental scarring.
All in all though, are these techniques enough to really help us retain information or are they just fancy tricks that really have no real world use? Does memorizing your address book really matter when you can't remember where you put your car keys? Well, that's for you to decide. But Foer does an excellent job of exploring all sides of this entertaining phenomenon. And I highly recommend this book.
December 6, 2022
A nonfiction book with all the modern hallmarks: glancing scientific research, niche topic, historical context, humorous asides, and a quirky narrator to light the way. Mr. Foer even competes in memory competitions himself, taking us along for the adventure. Woohoo! It's a tried-and-true formula.
Your enjoyment of this work will directly correlate to your interest in the aforementioned subtopics. Personally, I'm fascinated by how the mind works, where it stores memories, and how we recall those memories as human beings. The rest veered between mildly interesting and forgettable. I listened to this on audiobook while multitasking, which is the opposite of what you're supposed to do to increase the odds of remembering.
Your enjoyment of this work will directly correlate to your interest in the aforementioned subtopics. Personally, I'm fascinated by how the mind works, where it stores memories, and how we recall those memories as human beings. The rest veered between mildly interesting and forgettable. I listened to this on audiobook while multitasking, which is the opposite of what you're supposed to do to increase the odds of remembering.
September 22, 2015
I love his style of writing...fun and chatty. Nice introductory chapters and a technique I learned while listening on the train (for half an hour) that allowed me to come home and impress my kids by having them write down a 50-digit number and then me recalling it digit-by-digit in order for them.
I never thought about it before, but the book points out that before pen and paper, anything that needed to be preserved had to be memorized. That is why so many of the techniques mentioned in the book are from antiquity and continue to stand the test of time.
The mind likes sequential memories. Memories that are stored as part of a story that are made as multi-sensorial in the mind as possible are easily recalled. After finishing the book and applying some of the techniques, I can attest to the fact that my mind does operate in this fashion. Once a memory association is started vast amounts of information can be easily stored and retrieved. It is like knocking over the first domino in a series. They just lead into the next thought, which leads into the next. I was amazed how effortless it becomes once you get going.
The book also chronicles the author鈥檚 story of covering both the U.S. and world memory championships as a journalist that ultimately led to his own appearance in the tournament one year later. No spoilers here regarding how he did.
His story, the history of memory, and how to apply some of these memory methods make for an enjoyable book with practical applications in your daily life. I have been inspired to see how big of a memory athlete I too can become. Highly recommend.
I never thought about it before, but the book points out that before pen and paper, anything that needed to be preserved had to be memorized. That is why so many of the techniques mentioned in the book are from antiquity and continue to stand the test of time.
The mind likes sequential memories. Memories that are stored as part of a story that are made as multi-sensorial in the mind as possible are easily recalled. After finishing the book and applying some of the techniques, I can attest to the fact that my mind does operate in this fashion. Once a memory association is started vast amounts of information can be easily stored and retrieved. It is like knocking over the first domino in a series. They just lead into the next thought, which leads into the next. I was amazed how effortless it becomes once you get going.
The book also chronicles the author鈥檚 story of covering both the U.S. and world memory championships as a journalist that ultimately led to his own appearance in the tournament one year later. No spoilers here regarding how he did.
His story, the history of memory, and how to apply some of these memory methods make for an enjoyable book with practical applications in your daily life. I have been inspired to see how big of a memory athlete I too can become. Highly recommend.
June 13, 2015
I'm an expert mnemonicist now! Ha ha.
This book is a fast read..(funny, somewhat interesting, somewhat useful)
June: 2015... 4 years later: i've come back to change my rating from 2 stars to 4 stars
This book actually is brilliant I remember it quite well. It didn't deserve 2 stars. The ending is actually very touching. My reason for giving it 2 stars four years ago is I didn't think I personally was very good at the techniques in the book.
This book came to my attention today from another friend on the site. I hope she reads it.
I always value and left her reviews and I look forward to your comments.
Here's to you Monkey Girl!!!
This book is a fast read..(funny, somewhat interesting, somewhat useful)
June: 2015... 4 years later: i've come back to change my rating from 2 stars to 4 stars
This book actually is brilliant I remember it quite well. It didn't deserve 2 stars. The ending is actually very touching. My reason for giving it 2 stars four years ago is I didn't think I personally was very good at the techniques in the book.
This book came to my attention today from another friend on the site. I hope she reads it.
I always value and left her reviews and I look forward to your comments.
Here's to you Monkey Girl!!!
March 21, 2021
Aunque el t铆tulo pueda hacer suponer que estamos frente a una lectura que detallar谩 algunas t茅cnicas de memoria, la verdad es que el libro se centra en la historia personal del autor y su desaf铆o de convertirse en uno de sus admirados "atletas mentales". Las t茅cnicas se mencionan, obviamente, pero casi de forma anecd贸tica y bastante general. Foer es innegablemente simp谩tico y flu铆do para expresarse y esto convierte la lectura en algo parecido a chusmear el art铆culo de una revista. Y poco m谩s. Interesante para los que deseen iniciarse de forma general en este tema y para los que quieren saber "c贸mo lo hacen" para finalmente comprender, asombrados, que no han ido m谩s que al rescate de t茅cnicas ya usadas por los antiguos griegos, por Cicer贸n para memorizar discursos y por los acad茅micos medievales para memorizar libros enteros.
August 17, 2020
袨泄 褌芯谐褌芯芯谢褌褘薪 褌邪谢邪邪褉 褋邪泄褏邪薪 写褝谢谐褝褉褝薪谐爷泄 褟褉褜卸 萤谐褔 斜邪泄薪邪.
袧萤谐萤萤 斜懈写薪懈泄 谐邪泄褏邪薪 斜懈褕懈褉写褝谐 屑褍薪写邪谐 褑褝褝卸谢褝谐褔 薪萤褏写爷爷写 屑邪邪薪褜 芯谢芯薪 褌萤褉谢懈泄薪 写邪褋谐邪谢 邪褕懈谐谢邪卸 褑褝褝卸懈谢写褝谐 褞屑 斜邪泄薪邪. 啸褝写懈泄 芯泄 褌芯谐褌芯芯谢褌芯芯 褟薪蟹 斜爷褉懈泄薪 邪褉谐邪邪褉 写褝褝褕谢爷爷谢卸 斜芯谢芯褏 褔 褏爷薪懈泄 斜懈械 芯褞褍薪 谐褝写褝谐 褏褝屑卸褝褝褌褝泄 斜芯谢芯谢褌芯泄. 校泄谐邪谐爷泄 写邪褋谐邪谢 褋褍褉谐褍褍谢懈谢褌, 爷薪褝褌褝泄 褑邪谐邪邪 蟹邪褉褑褍褍谢卸 斜邪泄卸 褌懈泄屑 褔邪写胁邪褉褘谐 芯谢卸 邪胁写邪谐 斜邪泄褏 薪褜. 孝懈泄屑 谐邪泄褏邪谢褌邪泄 褑褝褝卸谢褝薪 褌芯谐褌芯芯褏 褔邪写胁邪褉褌邪泄 斜芯谢谢芯芯 谐褝褏褝写 芯褉褔懈薪 褑邪谐懈泄薪 谐邪褉 褍褌邪褋 谐褝褏 屑褝褌 褌械褏薪芯谢芯谐懈泄薪 写褝胁褕谢爷爷写 斜懈写薪懈泄谐 斜邪泄薪谐邪 屑褝写褝褝谢谢懈泄薪 懈谢爷爷写谢懈泄薪 褟写褉邪谢写 芯褉褍褍谢卸 斜邪泄写邪谐 褌褍谢, 褏爷褋褋褝薪 斜爷褏 屑褝写褝褝谢谢褝褝 褝薪褝 邪褉谐邪邪褉邪邪 褏邪写谐邪谢邪褏 斜芯谢芯屑卸谐爷泄 褞屑.
啸邪屑谐懈泄薪 褔褍褏邪谢 谐芯谢 邪褉谐邪 薪褜 Mind Palace. 孝芯写芯芯褉 写爷褉褋谢褝薪 褌萤褋萤萤谢卸 褔邪写邪褏 斜爷褏懈泄 谢 蟹爷泄谢褋 Mind Palace 斜邪泄卸 斜芯谢薪芯. 孝萤谐褋褋萤薪 褋褍褉谐褍褍谢褜, 褌萤褉褋萤薪 斜邪泄褕懈薪谐邪邪褋 褝褏谢褝褝写 谢 薪芯屑 蟹芯褏懈芯谢, 褕爷谢褝谐 写褍褍, 褏爷薪懈泄 斜懈械 谐褝褝写 谢 斜爷谐写 斜芯谢薪芯. 孝褝谐褝褝写 谢 褝薪褝 mind palace-褍褍写写邪邪 褑褝褝卸谢褝褏懈泄谐 褏爷褋褋褝薪 屑褝写褝褝谢谢褝褝 邪谢褜 斜芯谢芯褏 褏褝褌褉爷爷谢褝谐褌褝泄谐褝褝褉 蟹芯芯谐芯芯写 谢 褟胁邪褏 蟹邪褉褔懈屑褌邪泄. 啸爷薪懈泄 褌邪褉褏懈 爷褉谐褝谢卸懈谢褋褝薪 爷谢谐褝褉 褕懈谐 蟹芯褏懈芯谢 斜邪泄写谢褘薪 屑褝写褝褝谢谢懈泄谐 褑褝褝卸谢褝褏写褝褝 褏邪屑谐懈泄薪 谐邪褉邪屑谐邪泄 斜邪泄写邪谐褌邪泄 褏芯谢斜芯芯褌芯泄 褞屑 斜邪泄薪邪.
袟邪 褌褝谐褝褝写 械褉 薪褜 褌邪褉褏懈邪 斜邪泄薪谐邪 写邪褋谐邪谢卸褍褍谢卸 斜邪泄褏 薪褜 萤萤褉懈泄谐萤萤 褌邪薪懈薪 屑褝写褝褏, 芯褞褍薪褘 褔邪写邪屑卸邪邪 屑褝写褝褏褝写 褏褝褉褝谐褌褝泄 褌褍谢 斜芯谢芯屑卸 谐邪褉胁邪谢 写邪褋谐邪谢卸褍褍谢卸 斜邪泄褏 薪褜 蟹爷谐褝褝褉 褞屑 邪邪. 啸爷薪 褍褍谢邪邪褋邪邪 写爷褉褋褝褝褉 褋褝褌谐褝写褝谐 斜邪泄褋薪邪邪 褟褉懈褏 褔邪写胁邪褉褌邪泄 斜芯谢褋芯薪芯芯褉 褋褝褌谐褝褏爷泄薪 褑邪褉 褏爷褉褝褝 薪褜 褌褍褏邪泄薪 褏褝谢薪懈泄褏褝褝 爷谐懈泄薪 斜邪褟谢邪谐邪邪褉 褏褟蟹谐邪邪褉谢邪谐写邪褏 斜芯谢褋芯薪 谐褝写褝谐. 孝懈泄屑褝褝褋 斜芯谢芯屑卸 谐邪褉胁邪谢 谢 写爷褉褋谢褝薪 褌萤褋萤萤谢萤褏 褔邪写胁邪褉邪邪 写邪褋谐邪谢卸褍褍谢卸 斜邪泄胁邪谢 芯褞褍薪褘 褔邪写邪屑卸邪邪 褍谢邪屑 谢 褌褝谢卸 斜邪泄薪邪 谐褝褋褝薪 爷谐. 袗谢懈胁邪邪 薪芯屑褘谐 褍薪褕懈褏 褟胁褑写邪邪 斜邪泄薪谐邪 褌芯谢谐芯泄 写芯褌褉芯芯 褌萤褋萤萤谢萤薪 斜芯写写芯谐 斜芯谢褋芯薪. 校薪褕褋邪薪 屑褝写褝褝谢谢褝褝 邪谢褜 斜芯谢芯褏 褍写邪邪薪 褏邪写谐邪谢邪褏邪写 写萤褏萤屑褌褝泄 斜芯谢卸 斜邪泄薪邪.
小芯薪懈褉褏芯谢褌芯泄 谐芯褢 薪芯屑 斜邪泄薪邪 邪邪. 协褉谐褝谢蟹褝褏 蟹爷泄谢谐爷泄 褌邪薪写 褋邪薪邪谢 斜芯谢谐芯卸 斜邪泄薪邪.
袧萤谐萤萤 斜懈写薪懈泄 谐邪泄褏邪薪 斜懈褕懈褉写褝谐 屑褍薪写邪谐 褑褝褝卸谢褝谐褔 薪萤褏写爷爷写 屑邪邪薪褜 芯谢芯薪 褌萤褉谢懈泄薪 写邪褋谐邪谢 邪褕懈谐谢邪卸 褑褝褝卸懈谢写褝谐 褞屑 斜邪泄薪邪. 啸褝写懈泄 芯泄 褌芯谐褌芯芯谢褌芯芯 褟薪蟹 斜爷褉懈泄薪 邪褉谐邪邪褉 写褝褝褕谢爷爷谢卸 斜芯谢芯褏 褔 褏爷薪懈泄 斜懈械 芯褞褍薪 谐褝写褝谐 褏褝屑卸褝褝褌褝泄 斜芯谢芯谢褌芯泄. 校泄谐邪谐爷泄 写邪褋谐邪谢 褋褍褉谐褍褍谢懈谢褌, 爷薪褝褌褝泄 褑邪谐邪邪 蟹邪褉褑褍褍谢卸 斜邪泄卸 褌懈泄屑 褔邪写胁邪褉褘谐 芯谢卸 邪胁写邪谐 斜邪泄褏 薪褜. 孝懈泄屑 谐邪泄褏邪谢褌邪泄 褑褝褝卸谢褝薪 褌芯谐褌芯芯褏 褔邪写胁邪褉褌邪泄 斜芯谢谢芯芯 谐褝褏褝写 芯褉褔懈薪 褑邪谐懈泄薪 谐邪褉 褍褌邪褋 谐褝褏 屑褝褌 褌械褏薪芯谢芯谐懈泄薪 写褝胁褕谢爷爷写 斜懈写薪懈泄谐 斜邪泄薪谐邪 屑褝写褝褝谢谢懈泄薪 懈谢爷爷写谢懈泄薪 褟写褉邪谢写 芯褉褍褍谢卸 斜邪泄写邪谐 褌褍谢, 褏爷褋褋褝薪 斜爷褏 屑褝写褝褝谢谢褝褝 褝薪褝 邪褉谐邪邪褉邪邪 褏邪写谐邪谢邪褏 斜芯谢芯屑卸谐爷泄 褞屑.
啸邪屑谐懈泄薪 褔褍褏邪谢 谐芯谢 邪褉谐邪 薪褜 Mind Palace. 孝芯写芯芯褉 写爷褉褋谢褝薪 褌萤褋萤萤谢卸 褔邪写邪褏 斜爷褏懈泄 谢 蟹爷泄谢褋 Mind Palace 斜邪泄卸 斜芯谢薪芯. 孝萤谐褋褋萤薪 褋褍褉谐褍褍谢褜, 褌萤褉褋萤薪 斜邪泄褕懈薪谐邪邪褋 褝褏谢褝褝写 谢 薪芯屑 蟹芯褏懈芯谢, 褕爷谢褝谐 写褍褍, 褏爷薪懈泄 斜懈械 谐褝褝写 谢 斜爷谐写 斜芯谢薪芯. 孝褝谐褝褝写 谢 褝薪褝 mind palace-褍褍写写邪邪 褑褝褝卸谢褝褏懈泄谐 褏爷褋褋褝薪 屑褝写褝褝谢谢褝褝 邪谢褜 斜芯谢芯褏 褏褝褌褉爷爷谢褝谐褌褝泄谐褝褝褉 蟹芯芯谐芯芯写 谢 褟胁邪褏 蟹邪褉褔懈屑褌邪泄. 啸爷薪懈泄 褌邪褉褏懈 爷褉谐褝谢卸懈谢褋褝薪 爷谢谐褝褉 褕懈谐 蟹芯褏懈芯谢 斜邪泄写谢褘薪 屑褝写褝褝谢谢懈泄谐 褑褝褝卸谢褝褏写褝褝 褏邪屑谐懈泄薪 谐邪褉邪屑谐邪泄 斜邪泄写邪谐褌邪泄 褏芯谢斜芯芯褌芯泄 褞屑 斜邪泄薪邪.
袟邪 褌褝谐褝褝写 械褉 薪褜 褌邪褉褏懈邪 斜邪泄薪谐邪 写邪褋谐邪谢卸褍褍谢卸 斜邪泄褏 薪褜 萤萤褉懈泄谐萤萤 褌邪薪懈薪 屑褝写褝褏, 芯褞褍薪褘 褔邪写邪屑卸邪邪 屑褝写褝褏褝写 褏褝褉褝谐褌褝泄 褌褍谢 斜芯谢芯屑卸 谐邪褉胁邪谢 写邪褋谐邪谢卸褍褍谢卸 斜邪泄褏 薪褜 蟹爷谐褝褝褉 褞屑 邪邪. 啸爷薪 褍褍谢邪邪褋邪邪 写爷褉褋褝褝褉 褋褝褌谐褝写褝谐 斜邪泄褋薪邪邪 褟褉懈褏 褔邪写胁邪褉褌邪泄 斜芯谢褋芯薪芯芯褉 褋褝褌谐褝褏爷泄薪 褑邪褉 褏爷褉褝褝 薪褜 褌褍褏邪泄薪 褏褝谢薪懈泄褏褝褝 爷谐懈泄薪 斜邪褟谢邪谐邪邪褉 褏褟蟹谐邪邪褉谢邪谐写邪褏 斜芯谢褋芯薪 谐褝写褝谐. 孝懈泄屑褝褝褋 斜芯谢芯屑卸 谐邪褉胁邪谢 谢 写爷褉褋谢褝薪 褌萤褋萤萤谢萤褏 褔邪写胁邪褉邪邪 写邪褋谐邪谢卸褍褍谢卸 斜邪泄胁邪谢 芯褞褍薪褘 褔邪写邪屑卸邪邪 褍谢邪屑 谢 褌褝谢卸 斜邪泄薪邪 谐褝褋褝薪 爷谐. 袗谢懈胁邪邪 薪芯屑褘谐 褍薪褕懈褏 褟胁褑写邪邪 斜邪泄薪谐邪 褌芯谢谐芯泄 写芯褌褉芯芯 褌萤褋萤萤谢萤薪 斜芯写写芯谐 斜芯谢褋芯薪. 校薪褕褋邪薪 屑褝写褝褝谢谢褝褝 邪谢褜 斜芯谢芯褏 褍写邪邪薪 褏邪写谐邪谢邪褏邪写 写萤褏萤屑褌褝泄 斜芯谢卸 斜邪泄薪邪.
小芯薪懈褉褏芯谢褌芯泄 谐芯褢 薪芯屑 斜邪泄薪邪 邪邪. 协褉谐褝谢蟹褝褏 蟹爷泄谢谐爷泄 褌邪薪写 褋邪薪邪谢 斜芯谢谐芯卸 斜邪泄薪邪.
June 16, 2020
I've been meaning to read this book since I first read Foer describe the concept of the memory castle in a magazine article with the book's release. Honestly, there isn't much more in here than that. I did love the emphasis on memorizing as learning--that's how I was taught in grade school in another country and I still get a lot of satisfaction for memorizing things. Although these days, I can't even remember a phone number for 3 seconds.
July 4, 2020
What do chicken sexers, chess masters, and SWAT officers have in common? They all become good at what they do by memorizing a vast amount of highly specialized information that allows them to make instant judgments. Moonwalking with Einstein is about memory, and is the most interesting non-fiction book I've read in the past year. It's full of interesting facts, a history of the art of memory and how it relates to the history of reading, and a lot of surprising information I did not know about how memory works.
The author, Joshua Foer, was initially just writing a magazine article on the U.S. Memory Championship. This is a highly geeky competition for a handful of obsessive "mental athletes" who compete in events like memorizing long strings of random numbers, decks of cards, and lines of poetry. The tricks they can do are impressive, and for the true champions, may seem to border on superhuman. What Foer learns, though, is that they are just tricks - learned techniques. In fact, with few exceptions, all those fantastic feats of extraordinary memory you have heard about are not tricks performed by savants with superhuman recall, but people with perfectly ordinary brains who have learned special memory techniques. Anyone can do it!
The key to becoming really great at memorizing, and the reason why everyone doesn't learn these (fairly simple, when you get down to it) techniques and impress their friends at parties, is that memory techniques are like playing chess or the piano 鈥� anyone can do it, and anyone who puts in serious effort can become pretty good at it (at least good enough to impress people who aren't very good at it), but to become great at it requires lots and lots of practice and years of study, like any other skill.
Still, it was quite a revelation to me that this is a skill that anyone can learn. There is really no such thing as "photographic memory" and those guys who memorize the entire Bible cover to cover or can recite pi out to thousands of digits do not actually have memories, or brains, that are any better than yours or mine.
To prove it, Foer decides to enter the U.S. Memory Championship himself. I won't spoil the ending, but after just one year of training, he does very well indeed. Part of the book is his own odyssey of memory competition and reporting on the U.S. and international memory competition scene (American competitors he likens to the Jamaican bobsledding team - very enthusiastic, but not considered serious competitors internationally; what breaks records in the U.S. is barely qualifying in European championships.)
So what are these "tricks"? Foer describes the techniques in the book, but basically, you learn to build "memory palaces" constructed from places very familiar to you, and stock them with vivid, memorable, often outrageous images (a 14th century author of a treatise on memory techniques offended churchmen by admitting that he used images of, ahem, comely maidens in his memory palaces) that you associate with whatever it is you want to memorize. So if you are memorizing numbers, you might come up with a system in which 137 is Britney Spears performing a karate kick while standing on the back of a giant turtle, and you place her in your living room, and then the next chunk of numbers is another image which is in the hallway to your bedroom. If this sounds unlikely or bizarre, read the book (or go read one of the books that actually teaches the techniques). To prove it works, I am typing this right now off the top of my head without having spent any time with brute force, rote memorization:
A jar of pickled garlic
Cottage cheese
Peat-smoked salmon
Six bottles of white wine
Three pairs of socks
That's a partial grocery list Foer gives you in one chapter 鈥� as much of it as I bothered to memorize when he gave a quickie tutorial to demonstrate how the technique works. This is several days after reading it, and according to the brain scientists Foer interviews, it's possible that that list will stick in my head for months or years. Seriously, the "palace of memory" works!
The only problem is, as Foer points out, there actually aren't that many situations in the modern world where this kind of memorization is actually useful. We now have externalized memories in the form of books, computers, sticky notes, etc. Memorizing huge volumes of information that you could just as easily grab with a Google search doesn't seem worth it.
But these "memory palaces" go back to ancient Greece, and at one time, every educated person used these techniques. That is why lawyers, orators, poets, kings, generals, doctors, monks, and so on, were famous for being able to give long speeches or recite back a long body of work from memory - everyone learned to do it. Before the printing press, when books were rare and expensive, people wouldn't just read as many books as they could get their hands on, they'd make a serious study of a handful of books in their lifetime and pretty much commit each volume to memory.
Really, really interesting book. Will change the way you think about memory and intelligence, expertise, and maybe even reading. My highest non-fiction recommendation!
The author, Joshua Foer, was initially just writing a magazine article on the U.S. Memory Championship. This is a highly geeky competition for a handful of obsessive "mental athletes" who compete in events like memorizing long strings of random numbers, decks of cards, and lines of poetry. The tricks they can do are impressive, and for the true champions, may seem to border on superhuman. What Foer learns, though, is that they are just tricks - learned techniques. In fact, with few exceptions, all those fantastic feats of extraordinary memory you have heard about are not tricks performed by savants with superhuman recall, but people with perfectly ordinary brains who have learned special memory techniques. Anyone can do it!
The key to becoming really great at memorizing, and the reason why everyone doesn't learn these (fairly simple, when you get down to it) techniques and impress their friends at parties, is that memory techniques are like playing chess or the piano 鈥� anyone can do it, and anyone who puts in serious effort can become pretty good at it (at least good enough to impress people who aren't very good at it), but to become great at it requires lots and lots of practice and years of study, like any other skill.
Still, it was quite a revelation to me that this is a skill that anyone can learn. There is really no such thing as "photographic memory" and those guys who memorize the entire Bible cover to cover or can recite pi out to thousands of digits do not actually have memories, or brains, that are any better than yours or mine.
To prove it, Foer decides to enter the U.S. Memory Championship himself. I won't spoil the ending, but after just one year of training, he does very well indeed. Part of the book is his own odyssey of memory competition and reporting on the U.S. and international memory competition scene (American competitors he likens to the Jamaican bobsledding team - very enthusiastic, but not considered serious competitors internationally; what breaks records in the U.S. is barely qualifying in European championships.)
So what are these "tricks"? Foer describes the techniques in the book, but basically, you learn to build "memory palaces" constructed from places very familiar to you, and stock them with vivid, memorable, often outrageous images (a 14th century author of a treatise on memory techniques offended churchmen by admitting that he used images of, ahem, comely maidens in his memory palaces) that you associate with whatever it is you want to memorize. So if you are memorizing numbers, you might come up with a system in which 137 is Britney Spears performing a karate kick while standing on the back of a giant turtle, and you place her in your living room, and then the next chunk of numbers is another image which is in the hallway to your bedroom. If this sounds unlikely or bizarre, read the book (or go read one of the books that actually teaches the techniques). To prove it works, I am typing this right now off the top of my head without having spent any time with brute force, rote memorization:
A jar of pickled garlic
Cottage cheese
Peat-smoked salmon
Six bottles of white wine
Three pairs of socks
That's a partial grocery list Foer gives you in one chapter 鈥� as much of it as I bothered to memorize when he gave a quickie tutorial to demonstrate how the technique works. This is several days after reading it, and according to the brain scientists Foer interviews, it's possible that that list will stick in my head for months or years. Seriously, the "palace of memory" works!
The only problem is, as Foer points out, there actually aren't that many situations in the modern world where this kind of memorization is actually useful. We now have externalized memories in the form of books, computers, sticky notes, etc. Memorizing huge volumes of information that you could just as easily grab with a Google search doesn't seem worth it.
But these "memory palaces" go back to ancient Greece, and at one time, every educated person used these techniques. That is why lawyers, orators, poets, kings, generals, doctors, monks, and so on, were famous for being able to give long speeches or recite back a long body of work from memory - everyone learned to do it. Before the printing press, when books were rare and expensive, people wouldn't just read as many books as they could get their hands on, they'd make a serious study of a handful of books in their lifetime and pretty much commit each volume to memory.
Really, really interesting book. Will change the way you think about memory and intelligence, expertise, and maybe even reading. My highest non-fiction recommendation!
June 21, 2018
賲乇丕噩毓丞 賵鬲賯賷賷賲 賰鬲丕亘 馃摃
鈥�
丕爻賲 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 : #乇賯氐丞_丕賱賯賲乇_賲毓_丌賷賳卮鬲丕賷賳
丕爻賲 丕賱賲丐賱賮 : #噩賵卮賵丕_賮賵賷乇
鬲乇噩賲丞: #賲丨賲丿_丕賱囟亘毓
丿丕乇 丕賱賳卮乇: #丿丕乇_賰賱賲丕鬲
賳賵毓 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 : #鬲賳賲賷丞_匕丕鬲賷丞 #爻賷乇丞_匕丕鬲賷丞
毓丿丿 氐賮丨丕鬲 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 : 321 氐賮丨丞
鬲賯賷賷賲 丕賱 欧宝娱乐 :
3.86
賳賵毓 丕賱賯乇丕亍丞 : 賵乇賯賷 馃摉
鈥�
馃搶 賲賱禺氐 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 :-..
鈥�
賷鬲賳丕賵賱 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 丨賰丕賷丞 鬲噩乇亘丞 氐丨賮賷 賵賴賵 丕賱賲丐賱賮 匕丕鬲賴 [ 噩賵卮賵丕 賮賵賷乇 ] 丕賱匕賷 賰賱賾賮 亘賰鬲丕亘丞 鬲賯乇賷乇 氐丨賮賷 毓賳 賲爻丕亘賯丞 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 丕賱爻賳賵賷丞 賵丕賱鬲賷 賲賳 禺賱丕賱賴丕 毓賾氐賮 亘賴 丕賱賮囟賵賱 賱賱鬲毓乇賮 毓賱賶 丕賱卮禺氐賷丕鬲 丕賱賲卮丕乇賰丞 賵賰賷賮 賷賲鬲賱賰賵賳 賴匕賴 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 丕賱噩亘丕乇丞 賵賷鬲丨賰賲賵賳 亘賴丕 亘卮賰賱 賲賲鬲丕夭 賵亘丿賵賳 賲卮賯丞!!
鈥�
賵噩丿 噩賵卮賵丕 禺賱丕賱 丕禺鬲賱丕胤賴 亘賴匕丕 丕賱賲噩鬲賲毓 賵丕賱鬲丨丕賵乇 賲毓賴賲 丕賳賴 賷鬲賲賳賶 丕丨賷丕賳丕 丕賳 賷賰賵賳 賲孬賱 賴丐賱丕亍 丕賱賲鬲爻丕亘賯賷賳 賵賷胤賵乇 賲賳 賲賯丿丕乇 丕賱鬲匕賰乇 賱丿賷賴 賵賱賰賳 匕賱賰 賱賲 賷亘毓丿賴 毓賳 丕賱亘丨孬 賵丕賱鬲賯氐賷 賵噩賲毓 丕賱賲毓賱賵賲丕鬲 賵廿噩乇丕亍 丕賱毓丿賷丿 賵丕賱毓丿賷丿 賲賳 丕賱賲賯丕亘賱丕鬲 賲賳賴丕 ( 鬲賵賳賷 亘賵夭丕賳 ) 賵丕賱鬲賷 丕毓噩亘鬲賳賷 賱賱兀賲丕賳丞.
鈥�
賵賰賲丕 賷賯賵賱賵賳 賮賷 丕賱兀賲孬丕賱 [ 胤亘丕禺 丕賱爻賲 賷匕賵賯賴 ] 賮賯丿 噩乇亘 噩賵卮賵丕 亘賲爻丕毓丿丞 [ 廿丿 賰賵賰 ] 賵賴賵 兀丨丿 丕亘胤丕賱 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 賵賱賲丿丞 毓丕賲 賲賴丕乇丕鬲 賲毓賷賳丞 賱鬲賯賵賷丞 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 賵丕賱鬲賷 毓賱賶 乇兀爻賴丕 丕爻賱賵亘 ( 賯氐乇 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞) 賵丨賯賯 亘匕賱賰 賳噩丕丨丕賸 賱賲 賷賰賳 賷鬲賵賯毓賴!!
鈥�
馃枈 丕賱鬲賯賷賷賲 :-.
鈥�
亘丿丕賷丞 鬲乇丿丿鬲 賮賷 鬲爻賲賷丞 鬲氐賳賷賮 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 毓賱賶 丕賳賴 賰鬲丕亘 鬲賳賲賷丞 匕丕鬲賷丞 丨賷孬 丕賳 丕賱毓賳賵丕賳 賱賳 賷賰賵賳 丿賯賷賯丕賸 亘丕賱賲毓賳賶 丕賱丨賯賷賯賷貙 兀毓鬲賯丿 亘兀賳 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 賷賲賷賱 兀賰孬乇 丕賱賶 賰賵賳賴 爻賷乇丞 匕丕鬲賷丞 賲毓 賲噩賲賵毓丞 賲賳 丕賱賲賯丕賱丕鬲 賵丕賱鬲賷 鬲兀鬲賷賰 賮賷 賴賷卅丞 鬲爻賱爻賱 噩賷丿 賱賱兀賲丕賳丞 賵賱賰賳賴丕 丕賷囟丕賸 賰賭 賲毓賱賵賲丕鬲 賱賷爻 賲賳 丕賱氐毓亘 廿賷噩丕丿賴丕 亘爻賴賵賱丞 賲賳 禺賱丕賱 亘丨孬 毓賱賶 丕賱卮亘賰丞 丕賱毓賳賰賵亘賳賷丞.
鈥�
賱丕 丕賳賰乇 兀賳賰 賷丕 毓夭賷夭賷 / 毓夭賷夭鬲賷 丕賱賯丕乇卅丞 亘丕賳賰 爻鬲乇賶 亘毓囟 丕賱丨賲丕爻 賵丕賱乇賵丨 丕賱賲毓賳賵賷丞 丕賱噩賷丿丞 禺賱丕賱 鬲氐賮丨賰 賱賱賰鬲丕亘 賵賱賰賳 !!! 賵亘丿賵賳 兀賳 兀丨乇賯 毓賱賷賰 丕賱噩夭亍 丕賱兀賴賲 爻鬲噩丿 亘兀賳 丕賱賲丐賱賮 爻毓賶 丕賷囟丕賸 賱胤乇丨 賳馗乇賷丞 賲毓賷賳丞 鬲鬲毓賱賯 亘賭 丕賱賮乇賯 亘賷賳 丕賱匕賰丕亍 賵丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 賵賲賳 孬賲 賯氐賮 亘毓囟丕賸 賲賳賴丕!! 丌賲丕 鬲賯賷賲賷 賱賱賰鬲丕亘 2.75 / 5 .
鈥�
馃搳 爻丐丕賱 賱賱賯乇丕亍 :
鈥�
賴賱 賯乇兀鬲 賴匕丕 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 賲賳 賯亘賱責! 廿賳 賰賳鬲 賯丿 賯乇丕鬲賴 賮賴賱 丕毓噩亘賰 丕賲 賱丕 賵賱賲丕匕丕責! 賴賱 賯乇兀鬲 賰鬲丕亘 丌禺乇 賲卮丕亘賴 賱賴責! 卮丕乇賰賳丕 亘乇兀賷賰 馃槉.
鈥�
鈿狅笍 賲賱丕丨馗丞: 鬲賯賷賷賲賷 賱賱賰鬲丕亘 賴賵 乇兀卅賷 丕賱卮禺氐賷 賵賱賷爻 匕賲 丕賵 廿爻丕亍丞 鬲噩丕賴 [ 丕賱賰丕鬲亘 / 丿丕乇 丕賱賳卮乇 ] 馃槉. [ 兀賯亘賱 丕賱丕禺鬲賱丕賮 毓賳賰 貙 賵賱賰賳 丕禺鬲賱丕賮賷 毓賳賰 賱丕 賷毓賳賷 丕禺鬲賱丕賮賷 賲毓賰 ].
鈥�
馃攨丕賱賰鬲丕亘 睾賷乇 賲鬲賵賮乇 丕賱賰鬲乇賵賳賷丕 馃摬.
鈥�
#賲乇丕噩毓丞_賵鬲賯賷賷賲 #鬲丨丿賷_丕賱賯乇丕亍丞_賱賱毓丕賲_2018 #丕賱賰鬲丕亘_乇賯賲_62 #賯賳丕丞_賲毓_賰鬲丕亘 .
.
鈥�
丕爻賲 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 : #乇賯氐丞_丕賱賯賲乇_賲毓_丌賷賳卮鬲丕賷賳
丕爻賲 丕賱賲丐賱賮 : #噩賵卮賵丕_賮賵賷乇
鬲乇噩賲丞: #賲丨賲丿_丕賱囟亘毓
丿丕乇 丕賱賳卮乇: #丿丕乇_賰賱賲丕鬲
賳賵毓 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 : #鬲賳賲賷丞_匕丕鬲賷丞 #爻賷乇丞_匕丕鬲賷丞
毓丿丿 氐賮丨丕鬲 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 : 321 氐賮丨丞
鬲賯賷賷賲 丕賱 欧宝娱乐 :
3.86
賳賵毓 丕賱賯乇丕亍丞 : 賵乇賯賷 馃摉
鈥�
馃搶 賲賱禺氐 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 :-..
鈥�
賷鬲賳丕賵賱 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 丨賰丕賷丞 鬲噩乇亘丞 氐丨賮賷 賵賴賵 丕賱賲丐賱賮 匕丕鬲賴 [ 噩賵卮賵丕 賮賵賷乇 ] 丕賱匕賷 賰賱賾賮 亘賰鬲丕亘丞 鬲賯乇賷乇 氐丨賮賷 毓賳 賲爻丕亘賯丞 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 丕賱爻賳賵賷丞 賵丕賱鬲賷 賲賳 禺賱丕賱賴丕 毓賾氐賮 亘賴 丕賱賮囟賵賱 賱賱鬲毓乇賮 毓賱賶 丕賱卮禺氐賷丕鬲 丕賱賲卮丕乇賰丞 賵賰賷賮 賷賲鬲賱賰賵賳 賴匕賴 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 丕賱噩亘丕乇丞 賵賷鬲丨賰賲賵賳 亘賴丕 亘卮賰賱 賲賲鬲丕夭 賵亘丿賵賳 賲卮賯丞!!
鈥�
賵噩丿 噩賵卮賵丕 禺賱丕賱 丕禺鬲賱丕胤賴 亘賴匕丕 丕賱賲噩鬲賲毓 賵丕賱鬲丨丕賵乇 賲毓賴賲 丕賳賴 賷鬲賲賳賶 丕丨賷丕賳丕 丕賳 賷賰賵賳 賲孬賱 賴丐賱丕亍 丕賱賲鬲爻丕亘賯賷賳 賵賷胤賵乇 賲賳 賲賯丿丕乇 丕賱鬲匕賰乇 賱丿賷賴 賵賱賰賳 匕賱賰 賱賲 賷亘毓丿賴 毓賳 丕賱亘丨孬 賵丕賱鬲賯氐賷 賵噩賲毓 丕賱賲毓賱賵賲丕鬲 賵廿噩乇丕亍 丕賱毓丿賷丿 賵丕賱毓丿賷丿 賲賳 丕賱賲賯丕亘賱丕鬲 賲賳賴丕 ( 鬲賵賳賷 亘賵夭丕賳 ) 賵丕賱鬲賷 丕毓噩亘鬲賳賷 賱賱兀賲丕賳丞.
鈥�
賵賰賲丕 賷賯賵賱賵賳 賮賷 丕賱兀賲孬丕賱 [ 胤亘丕禺 丕賱爻賲 賷匕賵賯賴 ] 賮賯丿 噩乇亘 噩賵卮賵丕 亘賲爻丕毓丿丞 [ 廿丿 賰賵賰 ] 賵賴賵 兀丨丿 丕亘胤丕賱 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 賵賱賲丿丞 毓丕賲 賲賴丕乇丕鬲 賲毓賷賳丞 賱鬲賯賵賷丞 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 賵丕賱鬲賷 毓賱賶 乇兀爻賴丕 丕爻賱賵亘 ( 賯氐乇 丕賱匕丕賰乇丞) 賵丨賯賯 亘匕賱賰 賳噩丕丨丕賸 賱賲 賷賰賳 賷鬲賵賯毓賴!!
鈥�
馃枈 丕賱鬲賯賷賷賲 :-.
鈥�
亘丿丕賷丞 鬲乇丿丿鬲 賮賷 鬲爻賲賷丞 鬲氐賳賷賮 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 毓賱賶 丕賳賴 賰鬲丕亘 鬲賳賲賷丞 匕丕鬲賷丞 丨賷孬 丕賳 丕賱毓賳賵丕賳 賱賳 賷賰賵賳 丿賯賷賯丕賸 亘丕賱賲毓賳賶 丕賱丨賯賷賯賷貙 兀毓鬲賯丿 亘兀賳 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 賷賲賷賱 兀賰孬乇 丕賱賶 賰賵賳賴 爻賷乇丞 匕丕鬲賷丞 賲毓 賲噩賲賵毓丞 賲賳 丕賱賲賯丕賱丕鬲 賵丕賱鬲賷 鬲兀鬲賷賰 賮賷 賴賷卅丞 鬲爻賱爻賱 噩賷丿 賱賱兀賲丕賳丞 賵賱賰賳賴丕 丕賷囟丕賸 賰賭 賲毓賱賵賲丕鬲 賱賷爻 賲賳 丕賱氐毓亘 廿賷噩丕丿賴丕 亘爻賴賵賱丞 賲賳 禺賱丕賱 亘丨孬 毓賱賶 丕賱卮亘賰丞 丕賱毓賳賰賵亘賳賷丞.
鈥�
賱丕 丕賳賰乇 兀賳賰 賷丕 毓夭賷夭賷 / 毓夭賷夭鬲賷 丕賱賯丕乇卅丞 亘丕賳賰 爻鬲乇賶 亘毓囟 丕賱丨賲丕爻 賵丕賱乇賵丨 丕賱賲毓賳賵賷丞 丕賱噩賷丿丞 禺賱丕賱 鬲氐賮丨賰 賱賱賰鬲丕亘 賵賱賰賳 !!! 賵亘丿賵賳 兀賳 兀丨乇賯 毓賱賷賰 丕賱噩夭亍 丕賱兀賴賲 爻鬲噩丿 亘兀賳 丕賱賲丐賱賮 爻毓賶 丕賷囟丕賸 賱胤乇丨 賳馗乇賷丞 賲毓賷賳丞 鬲鬲毓賱賯 亘賭 丕賱賮乇賯 亘賷賳 丕賱匕賰丕亍 賵丕賱匕丕賰乇丞 賵賲賳 孬賲 賯氐賮 亘毓囟丕賸 賲賳賴丕!! 丌賲丕 鬲賯賷賲賷 賱賱賰鬲丕亘 2.75 / 5 .
鈥�
馃搳 爻丐丕賱 賱賱賯乇丕亍 :
鈥�
賴賱 賯乇兀鬲 賴匕丕 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 賲賳 賯亘賱責! 廿賳 賰賳鬲 賯丿 賯乇丕鬲賴 賮賴賱 丕毓噩亘賰 丕賲 賱丕 賵賱賲丕匕丕責! 賴賱 賯乇兀鬲 賰鬲丕亘 丌禺乇 賲卮丕亘賴 賱賴責! 卮丕乇賰賳丕 亘乇兀賷賰 馃槉.
鈥�
鈿狅笍 賲賱丕丨馗丞: 鬲賯賷賷賲賷 賱賱賰鬲丕亘 賴賵 乇兀卅賷 丕賱卮禺氐賷 賵賱賷爻 匕賲 丕賵 廿爻丕亍丞 鬲噩丕賴 [ 丕賱賰丕鬲亘 / 丿丕乇 丕賱賳卮乇 ] 馃槉. [ 兀賯亘賱 丕賱丕禺鬲賱丕賮 毓賳賰 貙 賵賱賰賳 丕禺鬲賱丕賮賷 毓賳賰 賱丕 賷毓賳賷 丕禺鬲賱丕賮賷 賲毓賰 ].
鈥�
馃攨丕賱賰鬲丕亘 睾賷乇 賲鬲賵賮乇 丕賱賰鬲乇賵賳賷丕 馃摬.
鈥�
#賲乇丕噩毓丞_賵鬲賯賷賷賲 #鬲丨丿賷_丕賱賯乇丕亍丞_賱賱毓丕賲_2018 #丕賱賰鬲丕亘_乇賯賲_62 #賯賳丕丞_賲毓_賰鬲丕亘 .
.
March 6, 2017
脫timo livro sobre mem贸ria. O autor come莽a a investigar como funcionava o sistema de memoriza莽茫o usado at茅 a populariza莽茫o dos livros e acaba se inscrevendo no campeonato americano de mem贸ria (e concorrendo).
O principal do livro, como funciona o pal谩cio mental e os sistemas de memoriza莽茫o, 茅 algo que poderia ser resumido em bem poucas p谩ginas. Mas o embrulho dessa mensagem 茅 muito bom, com hist贸rias e feitos de memoriza莽茫o, o caminho do autor se preparando para o campeonato e uma s茅rie de coment谩rios sobre a cultura da memoriza莽茫o que gostei bastante. Aquele livro que al茅m de informar ainda 茅 divertido e entret茅m.
Legal para quem quiser entender mais sobre mem贸ria, sobre talento e treino, e quem sabe at茅 aprender t茅cnicas para memoriza莽茫o. Com o b么nus surpresa de destruir muito do que eu acreditava do : o Joshua Foer d谩 uma boa explica莽茫o porque o parece ser muito mais um memorizador do que um savant.
O principal do livro, como funciona o pal谩cio mental e os sistemas de memoriza莽茫o, 茅 algo que poderia ser resumido em bem poucas p谩ginas. Mas o embrulho dessa mensagem 茅 muito bom, com hist贸rias e feitos de memoriza莽茫o, o caminho do autor se preparando para o campeonato e uma s茅rie de coment谩rios sobre a cultura da memoriza莽茫o que gostei bastante. Aquele livro que al茅m de informar ainda 茅 divertido e entret茅m.
Legal para quem quiser entender mais sobre mem贸ria, sobre talento e treino, e quem sabe at茅 aprender t茅cnicas para memoriza莽茫o. Com o b么nus surpresa de destruir muito do que eu acreditava do : o Joshua Foer d谩 uma boa explica莽茫o porque o parece ser muito mais um memorizador do que um savant.
September 20, 2023
... the irony is that i can鈥檛 tell you a single memorable part about this book.
February 10, 2017
This book explores technics that can be utilized to remember things. It's not a "how to" book, but rather it's an account of a year in the author's life dedicated to the training in the use of to change from being a person with "normal" memory to winner of the . The basic point seems to be that you don't need to have a good memory to remember things. What's needed is to use the human brain's natural abilities at remembering images as a means to remember the esoteric things of today such as telephone numbers, names of strangers, and in the case of memory championships, the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards.
Humans are descended from a long line of hunter gathers who needed to remember where to find food and how to find their way back home. Thus the ability to remember numbers or names of strangers did not play a role in natural selection. That is why today we have minds that can remember images better than we can remember numbers and names. is the technic of utilizing the human brain's natural strength as a means for helping those areas where the brain is naturally weak.
As the book's narrative follows the author's year of mnemonic training it addresses miscellaneous facts about the history of memorization technics, examples of unusual memory abilities, and miscellaneous neurological facts. So the reader of this book can learn some worthwhile facts of history and science which I found to be of more interest than the author's work at mnemonic training.
I feel sorry for any readers who pick up this book with the expectation that it is about Einstein. I went through the whole book and didn't recall any reference to Einstein. So I did a word search of the ebook text and found the word Einstein mentioned two places. One place in the author's training he mentions that he uses the imagined image of "Albert Einstein's thick white mane" as a way to remember the playing card, "three of diamonds." Then later in the book after the author has developed a system of images to remember all possible three card combinations, the word "Einstein" is used again. Under this enhanced system, "Myself moonwalking with Einstein," stands for, "four of spades, king of hearts, and three of diamonds."
The author admits that even though he is able to memorize the order of a deck of cards in less than two minutes, he still can't remember where he left his car keys.
Humans are descended from a long line of hunter gathers who needed to remember where to find food and how to find their way back home. Thus the ability to remember numbers or names of strangers did not play a role in natural selection. That is why today we have minds that can remember images better than we can remember numbers and names. is the technic of utilizing the human brain's natural strength as a means for helping those areas where the brain is naturally weak.
As the book's narrative follows the author's year of mnemonic training it addresses miscellaneous facts about the history of memorization technics, examples of unusual memory abilities, and miscellaneous neurological facts. So the reader of this book can learn some worthwhile facts of history and science which I found to be of more interest than the author's work at mnemonic training.
I feel sorry for any readers who pick up this book with the expectation that it is about Einstein. I went through the whole book and didn't recall any reference to Einstein. So I did a word search of the ebook text and found the word Einstein mentioned two places. One place in the author's training he mentions that he uses the imagined image of "Albert Einstein's thick white mane" as a way to remember the playing card, "three of diamonds." Then later in the book after the author has developed a system of images to remember all possible three card combinations, the word "Einstein" is used again. Under this enhanced system, "Myself moonwalking with Einstein," stands for, "four of spades, king of hearts, and three of diamonds."
The author admits that even though he is able to memorize the order of a deck of cards in less than two minutes, he still can't remember where he left his car keys.
June 22, 2020
I enjoyed by . I guess I just wanted it to be more...life-changing. And I resented its movement between a theoretical examination of memory, a history of memory and memory techniques, and the author's experience with a group of hard-core champions of memory contests.
The author happens upon the world of memory training in which people perform amazing feats of memory and claim that their memory is only average, that we could all (pretty much) do what they do if we trained ourselves. The book is a recounting of Foer's year training with the experts to compete in memory championships. Along the way, Foer recounts the history of memorization-its one-time primacy, its fall into disrespect and its current championship by some educators. He has some fascinating stories to tell and raises some interesting questions as well.
Before writing, memory was the only way to transmit information, culture, and history. Even after writing was invented and became common, even, in fact, after the printing press was invented, books were (Foer informs us) more of a memory aid than a source of information. As books became more sophisticated, it became easier to access the information they contained and gradually at first, then, with the advent of the Internet, extremely quickly, memory no longer seemed important. Foer raises an important question: Although memory does not constitute understanding, facts are an essential foundation to learning. As a teacher, I find myself defending the need to memorize a sets of basic facts so that the students can then proceed to think about them and analyze them.
Stories about individuals whose memories have been damaged along with stories of "savants" were of more interest to me for the questions they raised about the function of memory in forming our identity and as a necessary constituent of relationships than for their anecdotal pleasure.
Generally, my dissatisfaction with the book came from what is also its major attraction: a lot of information is covered in a relatively short space. In fact, not just a lot of information, but a lot of different areas-history, education, psychology-along with the current tale of Foer's training and the people he meets along the way. The book left me dissatisfied in that it didn't seem to offer a coherent starting point for further investigation because of the rapidity with which it covered so many important issues.
On the other hand, I was fascinated by much of the book and will spend time trying to sort out the questions it raised and decide where to go next with it. And that's a great thing for a book to do.
The author happens upon the world of memory training in which people perform amazing feats of memory and claim that their memory is only average, that we could all (pretty much) do what they do if we trained ourselves. The book is a recounting of Foer's year training with the experts to compete in memory championships. Along the way, Foer recounts the history of memorization-its one-time primacy, its fall into disrespect and its current championship by some educators. He has some fascinating stories to tell and raises some interesting questions as well.
Before writing, memory was the only way to transmit information, culture, and history. Even after writing was invented and became common, even, in fact, after the printing press was invented, books were (Foer informs us) more of a memory aid than a source of information. As books became more sophisticated, it became easier to access the information they contained and gradually at first, then, with the advent of the Internet, extremely quickly, memory no longer seemed important. Foer raises an important question: Although memory does not constitute understanding, facts are an essential foundation to learning. As a teacher, I find myself defending the need to memorize a sets of basic facts so that the students can then proceed to think about them and analyze them.
Stories about individuals whose memories have been damaged along with stories of "savants" were of more interest to me for the questions they raised about the function of memory in forming our identity and as a necessary constituent of relationships than for their anecdotal pleasure.
Generally, my dissatisfaction with the book came from what is also its major attraction: a lot of information is covered in a relatively short space. In fact, not just a lot of information, but a lot of different areas-history, education, psychology-along with the current tale of Foer's training and the people he meets along the way. The book left me dissatisfied in that it didn't seem to offer a coherent starting point for further investigation because of the rapidity with which it covered so many important issues.
On the other hand, I was fascinated by much of the book and will spend time trying to sort out the questions it raised and decide where to go next with it. And that's a great thing for a book to do.
March 29, 2016
This was a book about a man who learns to improve his memory in order to compete in the memory competition. The book talks a lot about creating 'memory palaces' in your mind in order to remember things. One thing that really annoyed me about this book was the sheer amount of time and effort these people put into memorizing useless stuff when I struggle so much with foreign language acquisition. This book also teaches that one should 'practice better, not harder.' Also, their methods of memorization involve imagining some pretty gross stuff that I don't think I want in my mind.
鈥淭here are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.鈥� - Bruce Lee, p.185.
It also seems that people with the best memories have no life (and no job). There is also a difference, I believe, between learning and memorizing, although the author makes the case that you can't do one without the other. Learning without understanding, really knowing the text you have memorized, etc. are all concerns of mine. He argues that it 'takes knowledge to gain knowledge' and that everything expands on your memory (which is called a database). I don't know if I necessarily agree.
He really tears down Daniel Tammet (author of ) for reasons I can't quite understand (he feels threatened by him?). I am sorry to say I laughed at his description of Kim and Kim's childhood. It also made me laugh to imagine (not suggested in the book) that one could self-injure their left brain in order to become a savant. I like that, at the end, he suggests all that work was really for nothing and he still forgets plenty in real life.
鈥淭here are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.鈥� - Bruce Lee, p.185.
It also seems that people with the best memories have no life (and no job). There is also a difference, I believe, between learning and memorizing, although the author makes the case that you can't do one without the other. Learning without understanding, really knowing the text you have memorized, etc. are all concerns of mine. He argues that it 'takes knowledge to gain knowledge' and that everything expands on your memory (which is called a database). I don't know if I necessarily agree.
He really tears down Daniel Tammet (author of ) for reasons I can't quite understand (he feels threatened by him?). I am sorry to say I laughed at his description of Kim and Kim's childhood. It also made me laugh to imagine (not suggested in the book) that one could self-injure their left brain in order to become a savant. I like that, at the end, he suggests all that work was really for nothing and he still forgets plenty in real life.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 7,245 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.