In 2005, journalist Joshua Foer (Josh) reported on the US Memory Championships. Many of the competitors he interviewed told him that they weren’t geniuses. They simply used memory techniques, and the techniques were so accessible anyone could learn them—including Josh. Grand Master of Memory Ed Cooke offered to train Josh in the memory arts and Josh, considering it a good journalistic experiment, agreed.
Over the next year, Josh learned the memory arts from Ed but also studied memory more broadly, interviewing famous mnemonists, savants, scientists, and researchers. Moonwalking with Einstein is a compilation of everything he learned and the story of his year training to be a mnemonist, or mental athlete.
Science doesn’t fully understand how memory works yet, but it does know that our brains are a network of neurons, and an individual memory is a group of connections between neurons.
Additionally, memories aren’t stored in any linear way; they’re stored in a web of associations. For example, thinking of the word “baker” would probably also make you think about bread, the smell of yeast, your favorite bakery, and so on.
To remember something consciously, we need a cue. For example, if you’re trying to remember what your friend’s car looks like, you might have to think more generally about your friend or about cars in order to “search” the web of associations that will eventually lead you to the memory of your friend’s car.
There are several different types of memories:
Whenever you think or make a memory, you physically change your brain. You can form new neurons or rearrange the neurons you already have. Additionally, it’s possible to improve your memory. While there are some people with naturally incredible memories, such as savants, anyone can improve their memory using memory techniques.
The human memory evolved to be good at remembering images and places because these sorts of memories are important for survival. The brain is also naturally good at remembering things that it finds interesting, such as sex and humor, and things that form patterns, such as songs or rhyming poems.
Memory is related to many of the other things that go on in our brains, such as identity, expertise, intelligence, and our perception of time.
Because our memories are stored in a web of associations in our brains, whenever we encounter something new, our interpretation of it is filtered by what we already know. As a result, our memories of the past are constantly influencing our actions in the present. We behave the way we do because of our memories, and, therefore, our memories shape our identities.
Our memories also affect our expertise and intelligence. Interestingly, scientists have discovered that expertise isn’t a function of intuition or intelligence—it’s a matter of perceiving things and relating them to the patterns of associations we already have in our heads. Experts have seen so many versions of the same thing that when they came across a situation, they can instantly remember the most relevant previous experience and apply the correct response without even thinking.
Finally, memory has a large effect on how we perceive the passing of time. Contrary to the old adage about time flying when you’re having fun, time appears to pass more quickly when we’re bored and more slowly when we’re doing interesting new things and making new memories. For example, as you get older, do you feel like time passes more quickly? This is because you’re making fewer memories than you did as a child when you were encountering things for the very first time.
We remember events in relation to other events, so the more memories we can lay down, the denser our network of associations. The denser the web, the more time it feels like we have. Some people make new memories with the express purpose of making their lives feel longer.
Scientists used to think that people remembered everything that had ever happened to them, and memories only became inaccessible because the cues were lost over time. However, this is not the case—memories do fade over time at the cellular level.
Memories fade most quickly in the hours and days after forming. Anything that’s left after a month tends to stay with us long-term. Interestingly, our memories change over time. We tend to remember our oldest memories in third person, as if we were watching them, and our newer memories from our own points of view. Sometimes our memories change so much they no longer even accurately record what happened.
Why don’t we remember anything before we were three or four? This should have been a very memorable time our lives—everything we encountered was new. It could be due to a few reasons: our brains aren’t fully developed until we’re three or four, most of our early learning is unconscious, and we don’t have language or a large existing web of associations. Even when we encounter new things, if we don’t have anything already in our heads to associate them with, they don’t stick.
Amnesia can also be responsible for forgetting. The acts of creating and recalling memories take place in different parts of the brain, so it’s possible to be unable to form new memories but still capable of remembering old ones, or vice versa.
In early human history, the only place to store knowledge was in your memory. No external memory aids, such as writing or calendars, existed. Additionally, because writing didn’t exist yet, the only way to transmit and preserve information for future generations was to communicate it orally. As a result, memory techniques were widely known and memory was an important marker of character and intelligence. The more you had memorized, the more you knew, and the more ethically you could act.
Writing started to appear in the 5th century BC, but the memory arts were still important. Early texts were written on scrolls in continuous text, with no chapter divisions, paragraphs, or even spaces between words. These texts were so difficult to read that people used them primarily to remember things they already knew, rather than as a method for offloading their memories externally. For example, it would be difficult to sight-read the phrase HAPPYBIRTHDAYTOYOUHAPPYBIRTHDAYTOYOU unless you already knew what it said. It would also be impossible to pick out a particular section, such as the beginning of the second phrase, unless you already knew the order of information.
Writing and book-making improved over the centuries. The parchment codex (a bound book) replaced scrolls and punctuation evolved. A notable book on the memory arts was written sometime between 86-82 BC, the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Mnemonists still refer to this book today.
The game-changer for the utility of books as external memory aids was the index. In the 13th century AD, the first index-like structure appeared, the concordance of the Bible. A concordance is a list of words and phrases with a locator that tells you where in a work they appear. Using a concordance, for the first time, you could find a specific piece of information without already knowing the organization of the work.
Around 1440, the printing press appeared. Now, books were easier to make and reproduce, and they became affordable. Interestingly, memory techniques experienced a renaissance even though they were less necessary than ever. Giulio Camillo tried to build a “Theater of Memory,” a building that would house every piece of knowledge in the universe, and Giordano Bruno built a device that would let him turn a word into an image (it worked a bit like a cipher wheel).
From the nineteenth century on, however, memory became less important to the general public. Memory techniques are no longer taught in school, and a good memory is impressive, but more of a party trick than a virtue. These days, most of us rely on external memories such as calendars and phones to remember things for us.
In the 5th century BC, the memory arts were part of a classical education. Today, rote memorization is seen as unnecessary and even bad for the mind. What happened?
Initially, schools based the educational system on the military, which was all about rote memorization. Educators used to think memorization was good for the brain because regardless of what students were memorizing, they were training their minds.
Over the years, however, there were many critics of the rote memorization approach and progressional education reform changed the system. School became more about experiences and focused on teaching skills such as logic and creativity rather than straight facts.
There are critics of this new approach too. 66% of American 17-year-olds don’t know when the civil war took place and can’t even guess within 50 years. Tony Buzan, a well-known mnemonist, has tried to get memory techniques back into the classroom. (He’s been less successful at this than he has at selling self-help books.)
As we learned above, memory is related to intelligence and expertise—the more associations we already have in our brains, the more new information has to stick to. As a result, it is easier to educate ourselves when we have an initial network of facts to connect new information to. Some educators believe that rote memorization should still be part of the curriculum.
The goal of memory techniques is to transform information into a format the brain is naturally good at understanding—meaningful images and places. To do this, you’ll use the method of loci, which is the foundation for the memory techniques that follow.
The method of loci involves placing images of whatever you need to remember inside a “memory palace,” which is a memory of a real place you know very well, such as your childhood home. For example, if your shopping list contains blueberries, crackers, cereal, and beer and you wanted to memorize this shopping list, you might mentally place the blueberries in the mailbox at the end of your driveway, the crackers on the front lawn, the cereal in front of the front door, and the beer on the entranceway mat. When you need to remember the list, you simply mentally tour your memory palace and look for the objects you left in significant locations.
Some things you need to remember might not lend themselves well to imagery. There are some more structured techniques for remembering cards, numbers, and words below, but in general, you can transform abstract things to remember into images using creativity. You’ll remember images best if you can harness the brain’s natural strengths and interests. Try to make images:
In addition to the method of loci, there are five additional memory techniques. You can combine any of them with the method of loci—once you’ve used the technique to transform information into an image or more memorable form, you can store it in your memory palace.
To use punning, change an abstract word into a concrete word by using rhymes or puns. You can also employ alliteration or repetition. For example, if you need to remember the title of the book The Joy of Cooking, you might picture a boy who’s good-looking.
Punning can also be used to memorize word-for-word. For example, mental athletes assign images to words like “and” and “the” and then picture a string of images to remember the exact words. One German mnemonist remembers the word “and” by picturing a circle because the German word for round, “rund,” rhymes with “and.”
The Baker/baker paradox is a phenomenon you can manipulate to help yourself remember names. If you’re shown a picture of a person and told her last name is Baker, you won’t remember “baker” as well as if you’re told she is a baker. This is because “Baker,” as a name, is an abstract concept without much to associate with it. As a profession, however, “baker” is associated with things like flour, the smell of cookies, the heat of an oven, and so on.
To remember people’s names, create an image that combines what they look like with a visual of something that will cue a memory of their name. For example, the name Joshua Foer could be remembered by imaging Joshua (he looks like this) joshing you so hard you break into four pieces.
This is a method of memorizing word-for-word that’s similar to method acting. To use this method, break sections of a text into small chunks and assign them emotions rather than images.
Your working memory can only hold five to nine pieces of information at once, so if you need to remember something like a 16-digit credit card number, it’s a tall order. Chunking is a method of breaking and combining individual things into meaningful groups so that you have fewer things to remember.
For example, if you had to remember the letters ONCEUPONATIME, that’s 13 individual letters, more than your working memory can handle. However, if you group those letters into four words, ONCE UPON A TIME, then you only have to remember four things instead of 13.
The major system is a method of converting numbers into sounds, then into words, then into images. You can use it to memorize any string of numbers, such as your SSN or phone numbers. Here’s how it works:
The person-action-object system is a method for remembering the order of numbers or cards. This method is used primarily by mental athletes who have to memorize hundreds of digits—if you’re just memorizing everyday numbers such as phone numbers, the major system will likely serve your purposes.
Here’s how the PAO works for numbers:
Here’s how it works for cards:
Competitive mnemonists are always refining this method and some have even gone beyond creating images for two-digit numbers or single cards, instead coming up with images for every three-digit number or two-card combination.
After a year of working with Ed Cooke and learning about memory, Josh competed in the US Memory Championships. The qualifying events include memorizing:
Josh did very well in speed cards—he used an advanced version of the PAO system that allowed him to beat the US record and advance to the finals.
The finals were three elimination-style events that included memorizing a list of random words, facts about strangers, and the order of two decks of cards. Josh got lucky in the facts-about-strangers event—he didn’t get asked about anything he’d forgotten—and advanced to the final event, which was memorizing the order of two decks of cards. At this point, only he and the defending US champion were left. Josh’s strength was cards, which were his opponent’s weakness, and Josh won.
As the US champion, Josh went on to compete in the World Memory Championships, which are much more competitive than the US event, and he finished 13th. After reflecting on the past year, he decided not to continue with the sport and to keep using external memory aids like notes and a Dictaphone. The memory techniques absolutely work—Josh had personally used them to memorize a deck of cards in less than two minutes—but he found external memory aids more helpful. Ultimately, the most poignant thing Josh learned about memory is that it makes us who we are—every new thing we encounter is influenced by the web of associations already in our brains.
Moonwalking with Einstein is part memoir, part pop science. Author Joshua Foer became interested in memory when he tried to find out who the smartest person in the world was. There wasn’t a quantitive answer—some people measure intelligence by IQ, whereas others use scientific or artistic achievement as the benchmark. However, in his search, Josh did come across someone who was, if not the world’s smartest person, at least a strong candidate: Ben Pridmore, the reigning world memory champion.
At the time, Josh was working as a journalist, and as a result of his new interest in memory, he decided to write a piece for Slate magazine on the 2005 US Memory Championship. There, he met mnemonists Tony Buzan, Lukas Amsüss, and Ed Cooke. All of them told Josh he could learn the same memory techniques the competitors were using—none of them had innate memory talents. If Josh practiced an hour a day, they said, in a year, he’d be good enough to compete too. Ed offered to coach Josh, and Josh embarked on a year-long experiment to improve his memory.
Moonwalking with Einstein was written in 11 chronological chapters that cover Josh’s year of studying memory and learning memory techniques. This summary rearranges the content into thematic, rather than chronological, parts:
Part 1 (Chapters 1-5) covers Josh’s research on memory, including science, history, and culture. Chapter 1 explains what memory is from a scientific perspective.
Our brains are made up of a web of neurons, and physiologically, a memory is an arrangement of connections between neurons. Whenever you think or encounter a sensation, this alters the connections. For example, thinking of the word “chocolate” might also make you think about the taste of sweetness, the color brown, and Valentine’s Day.
However, science doesn’t know yet how cells actually “contain” a memory. No one has seen a memory. Scientists have a good idea of what happens between and inside brain cells, and they can look at which parts of the brain light up when people are thinking, but they don’t know that much about thought and memory themselves.
What science does know is that we only consciously remember things when cued. Because our brains are a web rather than a straight pathway, we can’t search our brains in any linear way. We remember something when we think about something else that’s connected to it in the web of associations. For example, if you met someone whose name you’ve forgotten, you might have to think about what the person did for a living or where you met them in order to cue the memory you’re actually looking for.
Additionally, “memory” isn’t a single entity—it’s many different systems and facets. Some people have good memories for names and faces, while others are better at numbers.
The study of memory necessitates the study of the brain. Memories are created in, stored in, and affected by different parts of the brain:
When we use our brains, they physically change—we can form new neurons and rearrange connections. This is known as neuroplasticity. For example, neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire studied the brains of London cabbies-in-training. She found that their right posterior hippocampi (responsible for spatial navigation) were 7% larger than the average person’s because they spent so much time memorizing the layout of the city.
There are several different classifications and types of memory, some related to specific parts of the brain.
There are two different types of individual memories:
The brain uses at least two different systems to store memories:
Scientists think that sleep is important for consolidating our memories. For example, in experiments with rats, scientists look at rats’ brains while they’re awake learning to run a maze and then while they’re asleep. Asleep, their neurons are firing in the same patterns they did while learning the maze. Dreams could be part of the process of creating long-term memories.
Memory exists outside of our brains, too. There are two different ways to store memories:
An external memory can’t yet completely replace an internal one. Gordon Bell can’t search for anything in his external memory without a cue—a search term—from his internal memory. For example, one day, Bell wanted to find a website he’d visited. The only thing he could remember was that at the time he’d been on the website, he was also talking to a realtor on the phone. In his external memory, he could look up the time of the phone call and then look up what else he was doing at the time.
In the future, it may be possible to seamlessly connect our internal and external memories. Neuroprosthetics that allow direct communication between the brain and a machine already exist. For example, there’s a type of cochlear implant that transforms sound waves into electrical impulses. These impulses are then sent to the brain stem. This allows deaf people to hear.
When it comes to memory, the brain has three particular strengths. The first is remembering visual and spatial information. When the human memory evolved, the most important things to remember were what vegetation was edible and the routes between food and home. We didn’t need to remember things like shopping lists of historical trivia because they didn’t help us stay alive. As a result, by nature, the human brain is good at remembering images and places (like those of food and home).
Example #1: The two-alternative picture recognition exam. In this test, a subject is shown several images, each for less than half a second. Then, after waiting half an hour to allow some forgetting, the subject is again shown each image, paired with another image that the subject hasn’t seen before. Almost everyone can remember which images they’ve seen. Even if the alternate images are very similar (for example, both are bells but with different sized handles), the brain is good at recognizing the one it’s seen before.
Example #2: The Baker/baker paradox. In this test, a researcher shows two different subjects the same person. The researcher tells one subject that the person is a baker and the other that the person’s surname is Baker. Two days later, the researcher asks both subjects for the word associated with the person. The subject who was told to remember “baker” is more likely to remember her word than the subject who was given the name “Baker.” This is because the profession of a baker has more associations with other information in the network of our brains. We know that bakers wear tall hats, make cookies, smell like dough, and so on. Even if you can’t remember the word “baker” specifically, you might get the impression of something baker-associated, like bread, when you look at the person. The surname Baker, however, has no existing associations except the image of the person.
Example #3: Synesthetes (people whose brains process information using more than one sense) tend to have good memories because their brains automatically attach an image or feeling to abstract concepts. For example, S, a subject in a study by neuropsychologist A.R. Luria, saw words as colors and numbers as people. Whenever S encountered the number 7, he saw a mustached man in his mind.
Secondly, the brain is also good at remembering things that have some sort of structure, such as rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and music. For example, you’re more likely to remember a crusty crab making a grab than a crustacean reaching out.
Thirdly, the brain is also good at remembering things it finds interesting, such as humor and sex.
If our brains are naturally good at remembering certain things and naturally bad at remembering others, is there anything we can do to improve our memories? Is memory like vision or height—you’re stuck with what you’ve got—or more like a skill you can improve? For a long time, scientists thought our memory abilities were fixed, but in a study that took place from 1981-1983, K. Anders Ericsson and Bill Chase found that people can train and improve their memories.
Ericsson and Chase tested the memory of SF. SF took digit span tests, which measure a person’s ability to hold numbers in their working memory, for 250 hours over two years. In the test, someone reads out a new number every second and the test subject must remember the sequence.
Initially, SF, like most people, could only remember about seven digits. He remembered them by chanting them over and over to himself, which is called a phonological loop.
Then, however, he came up with a new method. SF was a runner, so he started thinking of the random digits as running times. For example, 4, 1, 1, 9 became 4 minutes and 11.9 seconds, the time it might take him to run a mile. Using this method, by the end of the testing, SF could remember over 70 digits. (There’s more on this technique, called chunking, in part 2.)
(Shortform note: To learn more about how to use mental representations to improve your skills in a variety of fields, read our summary of K. Anders Ericsson’s Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.)
Most people have probably heard of a “photographic memory,” which is the ability to take a mental snapshot of something detailed, such as a page of a book, and recall it in perfect detail. How does that work, considering everything we’ve learned about the memory so far?
It probably doesn’t work—there’s no scientific evidence to back up the existence of a photographic memory. Only one case of a photographic memory was ever recorded in scientific literature, and the research has some holes in it. A Harvard student named Elizabeth could allegedly look at a pattern of random dots with her right eye, then a different pattern with her left eye, and then mentally layer the dots on top of each other, which formed an image where the dots overlapped (similar to a “Magic Eye” stereogram). However, the validity of these test results was called into question when the scientist who studied her, Charles Stromeyer III, married her and she was never tested again.
John Merritt, another researcher, tried to duplicate the study with others. He published the two-dot test in newspapers and magazines, hoping he’d find someone who could do the same thing Elizabeth had. People responded, but once in a lab, none of them could do it.
Eidetic memories, however, are real. People who have eidetic memories can remember images longer than the average person, but not in more detail than the average person.
Having covered memory as its own entity, we can now consider it in relation to many other intangibles such as expertise, identity, and our perception of time.
How are memory and expertise related? Let's say you're an expert cab driver—you have a great memory for directions and you never get lost. Which came first—your great memory for directions, which led you to a career driving a cab? Or your career driving a cab, which required you to develop a great memory for directions?
Before we can understand how memory impacts expertise, we need to understand the general process of becoming an expert. K. Anders Ericsson (who studied SF) has been researching memory and expertise for decades. He’s found that expertise comes from perception and memories, not intuition or reasoning. When an expert encounters a situation, they don’t have to think consciously or analyze; they simply recognize a pattern they’ve seen before. They know what information matters, what doesn’t, and they instinctively know how to apply it in the most appropriate way.
Experts do a form of chunking—they use memories that are already in their brains to make associations and connections. Therefore, you need to have a good memory to be an expert.
When Ericsson studied police officers, he put them in front of a big screen and showed them multiple scenarios, including one of a man walking towards a school with what might be a bomb strapped to his chest. The more experienced officers knew what to do without thinking—they yelled at the man to stop and pulled out their guns. When he didn’t, most of them shot him. The experienced officers didn’t just see a man going towards a school; they noticed everything about him, such as a nervous twitch. They then compared what they observed to what they’d seen before, and acted.
The less experienced officers let the man walk into the school because they didn’t have the context to interpret the man’s actions.
Historically, chess has been a test of intellect—you have to be smart to plan moves many turns in advance and predict your opponent’s behavior. However, when Russian scientists tested chess players’ perception and cognition in the 1920s, the chess players didn’t do any better than the average person.
Adriaan de Groot also looked at chess players in the 1940s. De Groot set up boards in a way that there was an objectively correct but not clearly visible move. He gave the boards to masters and asked them to think aloud. He learned, to his surprise, that chess masters don’t analyze the board or plan moves, they just instinctively see the ideal move right away, usually within five seconds.
Further studies of master chess players, such as where they focus their eyes on the board or what parts of the brain they use, revealed that they chunk the board. To make moves, masters recognized configurations that they’d seen before and knew the outcomes of. Researchers concluded that the best indicator of skill at chess is your ability to memorize board positions, not your intelligence.
However, while masters were good at memorizing boards, they weren’t better than anyone else at general memorization. In fact, when given chess boards that were just random arrangements of pieces in locations that could never happen in a real game, they weren’t even good at memorizing those. This is because a random arrangement of pieces on a board doesn’t have any context—a player never would have seen an impossible-to-arrive-at arrangement before.
Ericsson has studied experts in different fields and discovered some commonalities between them.
There are three stages of skill acquisition:
It takes conscious effort to improve, so once you reach the autopiloting stage, you’ll plateau. Psychologists used to think that plateaus were inherent human limitations, but they’re usually not. To improve at something, we have to practice attentively and bring ourselves back to the first stage of skill acquisition. There are four ways to stay out of the autopiloting stage:
The human race as a whole hasn’t hit any plateaus. Every Olympics, people beat existing records. Students in high school learn math that ancient philosophers spent thirty years studying. This might partly have to do with improvements in technology such as better equipment, but it probably has more to do with improvements to training methods.
Barriers tend to be psychological—for example, until Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, no one thought it was possible. Then, only six weeks later, John Landy beat it too. These days, the four-minute is simply an expectation if you want to be a professional middle-distance runner.
Studies have found that how long you’ve spent doing something isn’t a great indicator of how good you’ll be at it. (However, it usually takes at least 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert.) Your practice method is more important than how long you spend doing it.
Even if you’re already an expert, if you don’t practice deliberately, you can actually get worse. For example, mammographers don’t tend to get any better at their jobs as time goes on. This is because mammographers don’t get any feedback—if they miss a tumor, they won’t find out until much later, when they’ve probably forgotten the details of that particular mammogram. They can overcome this by evaluating old images that have a known outcome to test their skills.
What does memory have to do with our identities? Historically, memory was a measure of character and virtue. Memorizing things helped you absorb them. For example, memorizing an oral poem about ethics was a way of internalizing ethics, so that any time a situation came up, you knew how to respond appropriately and morally. Memorization was meant to be humanizing.
In modern times, we can learn about ethics and morals in ways other than memorizing. However, memory is still related to who we are. Your memory is a record of what’s happened to you over your life and influences how you make new memories in the future. To create a new memory, you link your current perceptions to what’s already in the web in your head—everything you encounter is influenced by everything you’ve already encountered.
Our perception of the passing of time is influenced by our memories because we remember events in relation to other events. For example, you might remember you broke your arm the summer after 2nd grade, or you got married a month after Obama got elected. The thicker your web of memories, the longer your life will feel. You can thicken the web by making new memories by doing exciting, memorable, novel things.
The opposite is also true—the more your life is caught up in routine, the faster it feels like it passes. Have you ever had the feeling that a year’s gone by and you don’t know how it happened? This is because you weren’t making very many memories. Boredom compresses time.
(Shortform note: To learn more about how to expand time by creating defining moments in your everyday life, read our summary of The Power of Moments.)
Chronobiologist Michel Siffre wanted to find out what happens to humans when they have no way to measure time. He lived in an underground cave alone for two months with no access to a clock, calendar, or the sun. There was little to do and no one to speak with, so nothing interesting happened and he made few memories. Siffre became amnesic and after the two months of the experiment, he thought only one month had passed.
Writer William James also commented on the connection between memory and time. Your life seems to go faster as you age because you aren’t doing as many memorable things. When you’re a child learning about the world, you’re constantly encountering things you’ve never seen before. As an adult, you have to work to find things you haven’t seen before.
Now that we’ve explored the facets of memory, it’s time to look at its opposite—forgetfulness. Do our brains ever actually forget things, or do memories simply become inaccessible after a certain amount of time? Have our brains permanently and perfectly recorded everything that’s ever happened to us, and we’ve only forgotten because we don’t have the right cue?
In the 1980s, most psychologists believed that we never forgot anything. There were a couple of studies that seemed to support this:
However, over the last 30 years, psychologists have changed their minds. Neuroscientists have discovered that at the cellular level, memories disappear over time. Most think that Penfield’s probing cued hallucinations rather than genuine memories.
Now that we’ve established that we do in fact forget, it’s time look in more detail at how that happens:
How quickly do memories fade over time? Psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus did an experiment in which he memorized three-letter syllables and then tested himself on how many he could recall. He forgot more than half of them in the first hour after learning them. He forgot another 10% after a day and another 14% after a month. After a month, there was little additional forgetting.
As adults, most of us can’t remember anything that happened before we were three or four, even though everything we encounter is novel at that age and we’re learning faster than we ever will again. There are likely a few reasons for this:
We change so much as we grow that sometimes it's as if we’re two different people, but the thing that links the different versions of ourselves is memory.
“Amnesia” refers to memory loss. Because memories are stored in a different part of the brain from where they’re created, there are two different types of amnesia:
Example #1: HM had epileptic seizures and neurosurgeon William Scoville performed experimental surgery on him to relieve it. Scoville took out HM’s hippocampus and most of the medial temporal lobes. The surgery did help with the seizures, but it also affected HM’s memory. Since his hippocampus was gone, he lost the ability to create long-term memories.
Example #2: EP’s medial temporal lobes, including his hippocampus, were damaged by the virus herpes simplex. He has both anteretrograde and retrograde amnesia—he can’t form new memories and can’t remember anything that’s happened more recently than 1950. However, his amnesia has been steady for the last 15 years, not worsening or improving.
Our identities have to do with our memories, but most of our daily actions don’t come from declarative memories, they come from our unconscious memories. As a result, EP still has emotions and a personality. He can walk his usual path through the neighborhood without getting lost and even though every time he meets a neighbor it’s for the first time, he knows he should feel comfortable around them.
However, even people who have amnesia can learn and “remember” some things, such as how to do a task.
Example #1: HM learned how to draw a star while looking at a mirror. Each time HM was asked to do this, he never remembered that he’d done it before, but over time, his drawing improved.
Example #2: Scientist Larry Squire gave EP 24 words to memorize, which he quickly forgot. Squire then showed EP each of the words paired with another word (similar to the two-alternative picture recognition exam). EP only recognized the word he’d seen before about half the time. However, in a test where words were flashed on a screen for 25 milliseconds and Squire asked EP to read them, EP was better at reading the words on his memorization list than the random words.
Ribot’s Law finds that in amnesiacs and Alzheimer’s patients, more recent memories fade faster than older ones (science doesn’t know why yet). This phenomenon suggests that as memories get older, they change. Whenever you think about something, you impress it more strongly on your memory web. This impressing also changes the memory.
Sometimes the memory changes so much that it no longer accurately records what actually happened. You usually remember older things in third person, as if you’re watching them from outside your body. You tend to remember newer things in first person.
This process isn’t well understood yet, but one well-supported hypothesis suggests that our memories move within our brains. They’re initially formed in the hippocampus, but they’re stored in the neocortex. As you revisit them, they become consolidated and permanent. In the case of amnesiacs such as EP who lose the parts of their brains responsible for making new memories but still have the parts responsible for storage, this brings up the question—are their memories actually gone, or just inaccessible? Scientists don’t know.
It took a long time for humans to learn how our memories work and how to supplement them with external memory aids. Chapter 4 describes the history of memory.
In early human history, there was no alphabet, no paper, no writing system—the only way to retain things was memory. Everything was communicated orally, often through poetry or song, because as we learned in Chapter 1, the brain is better at remembering things with structure. When reciting very structured poetry that includes constraints such as imagery, meter, and alliteration, if you forget a word, there are so few options for what it can be that it comes back to you quickly.
Oral communication, by nature, morphs over time. If an easier-to-remember turn of phrase comes up, that’s the version that’s passed on. Unimportant details or tangents fall away.
For example, critics think that the Odyssey and Iliad are collections of songs that were shared orally and only written down later. Both works contain mnemonic devices such as repetition, and almost every part of the two poems fits into some sort of pattern. For example, Aphrodite is always referred to as “laughing Aphrodite,” regardless of her emotional state, and the events of both works are predictable and formulaic—rivals, shields, and armies come up again and again.
Poetry didn’t become art until it was replaced as the primary method of transmitting information.
Over time, communication and its requirement for memory changed. Here’s a timeline:
In the 5th Century BC, the memory arts were widely known and memory was as integral to a classical education as grammar. Having a good memory was a desirable character trait because it meant you had absorbed and understood information, and if you had a good memory, you were seen as a genius. (Allegedly, the memory arts were invented by poet Simonides of Ceos when a banquet hall collapsed in Thessaly. Simonides had visualized the hall and remembered exactly who had been at the dinner and where they’d been sitting. He was able to lead family members to the exact places their loved ones were buried.)
Writing first started to appear in 5th Century BC, but reading and writing still required heavy use of memory. Greek texts were written on scrolls that could be up to sixty feet long. The text was written in scripto continua, which means that there were no spaces, punctuation, or lowercase letters. When text broke across a line, there was no hyphen—it just ran on. It looked something like this: THISISREALLYREALLYHARDTOREADREADINGWASADIFFERENTBEASTINFIFTHCENTURYBC
As a result, the easiest way to parse scripto continua was to read it aloud, and to do that fluently, you had to have some idea in advance of what it said—you had to have previously read it and remembered it. (In fact, Scripto continua is a lot like speech. Speech doesn’t use spaces—when we’re talking, we don’t differentiate between words. This is why it’s hard for computers to recognize speech.)
Additionally, if you didn’t already know a text, you had to read a scroll from beginning to end to learn from it. There were no navigational aids such as chapter divisions or indexes. You couldn’t find a particular piece of information in the middle without reading the whole thing unless you already knew where to look for it.
Literacy had its critics. Some people, such as Socrates, thought that all reading could do was remind you of what you already knew. It was nothing more than a cue and it could be dangerous—if you could keep information on a page instead of in your head, people would become ignorant and immoral shells.
The parchment codex (similar to a modern book, with bound pages) had almost fully replaced scrolls.
In 200 BC, basic punctuation appeared. However, this punctuation was simply dots at the top, middle, or bottom of a line that signified how long a reader should pause.
Most of the techniques of classical memory training (which are still the basis for memory training today) appear in a book called Rhetorica ad Herennium, or Ad Herennium, which was written sometime between 86 and 82 BC. The author is unknown. For a while, people thought it was written by Cicero, but in Cicero’s writing, he said that the arts of memory were so basic and well known that they didn’t need to be written down.
The Ad Herennium speaks of two elements of memory:
(More on training your memory in Part 2.)
Bound books started to appear in the 1st century AD, but they were expensive and labor-intensive to produce. You’d probably never encounter the same book more than once, so you studied and memorized it so you could retain what you’d learned.
Even if you did have consistent access to a book, it was hard to find the particular piece of information you were looking for without scanning the whole thing (indexes hadn’t been invented yet), so it was more practical to just learn the information. When you were learning a book, you weren’t just learning the contents; you were organizing the information in your brain in a way that allowed you to easily access it again.
For a little while, Latin scribes tried including “spaces” (dots) in scripto continuo, but in the second century AD, texts went back to running letters together. Spaces wouldn’t appear again for almost another full century. This tells us that people read to remember a text they already knew, not to learn new information.
In the 9th century AD, writing adopted spacing and more sophisticated punctuation, which allowed people to read silently to themselves rather than aloud.
The first concordance of the Bible was created in the 13th century AD. A concordance is a list of phrases and words in the Bible with a reference to where they appear. It’s a little bit like an index, in that you don’t have to read a whole book to find a particular piece of information. Around the same time, bookmaking had advanced enough that the text of the Bible could be collected in one volume, but this single volume was still over ten pounds.
Shortly after the biblical concordance, tables of contents, page numbers, and indexes came into use. Indexes were particularly important—you no longer had to read a book from the beginning until you found what you wanted. You could go directly to the part you needed.
After indexes, people didn’t need to remember the contents of books because they could quickly access particular bits of information. Being intelligent became less about what you held in your head and more about if you knew how to access information when you needed it.
An index can’t compete with the brain, however, and the brain is still the best random-access indexing system in existence. An index entry in a book will give you a page number on which the term appears, and then you have to turn to the page to access the information. Your brain doesn’t need a page number—it just supplies you with a memory, regardless of where that memory is stored.
In 1440, Gutenberg invented the printing press. Now, it was much easier to make new books and make copies of existing books. Books became more commonplace and affordable enough that the average person could own a book.
Interestingly, memory techniques underwent a resurgence even as the need for an internal memory decreased due to mass-produced books and indexes. In the Renaissance, people became re-interested in Plato’s idea that our world is just a shadowier version of an ideal reality. Guilio Camillo believed that there was a set of magical images that represented everything in the universe. If you could just memorize those images, you would learn the workings of the entire universe.
To this end, Giulio Camillo made plans to build the “Theater of Memory.” The Theater of Memory was architecturally similar to a Roman amphitheater, but where the spectators would have sat, there were paintings and boxes and drawers of cards. Everything that was known about the universe was written on the cards. However, you weren’t supposed to physically visit this building to learn the information; you were supposed to mentally visit it. The idea was that if you visualized the image of a painting, the information stored near that painting would pop into your head.
The Theater of Memory was never finished.
A second notable figure during this time was Giordano Bruno. Inspired by the mystic and philosopher Llull, Bruno came up with a device that would let him turn any word into an image, thus allowing him to better remember the word. The device was composed of a series of concentric circles, similar to a cipher wheel. Each circle had a letter pair that corresponded to an image, action, adjective, object, and circumstance. If you turned the wheels to spell out the word, you’d end up with a memorable image. For example, the Latin word cr/oc/it/us is Pilumnus (a Roman deity)/riding a donkey/with a bandaged arm/and a parrot sitting on his head.
The church was concerned about the potential occult implications of the device and Bruno was burned at the stake during the Inquisition.
In the 19th century, and to some extent today, memory became about learning things quickly. Many people wrote self-help books about memory, notably Professor Alphonse Loisette, who wrote about classical mnemonics but claimed the ideas were all his own.
Another notable figure during this time was Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, who first encountered the memory arts at a memory course Loisette was running. Twain went on to use mnemonic systems such as attaching each topic of a speech to each one of his fingernails. Additionally, he taught his children the order of the reigns of English monarchs by mapping them out with pegs in his backyard (the distance between the pages represented the length of reign). Twain tried to sell the peg game but it didn’t take off.
These days, the memory arts aren’t associated with intelligence, virtue, or spirituality, and most people don’t learn them. Until 1991, there wasn’t even a contest associated with memory—odd in a world that has competitions in everything from science fairs to hobbyhorsing.
Over the years, our relationship with reading has completely changed—how much we read is more important than what we read or what we retain from it. Our reading has become extensive rather than intensive.
Our relationship with writing has also changed—we trust writing more than our own memories. Writing is less fallible, more accurate, and free of the “editing” unconsciously involved with passing things on orally.
Additionally, in the digital age, there are far more ways to externalize our memory than just reading and writing—we have cameras, the internet, and lots of digital storage space.
As a result, most people aren’t good at memorizing. According to a 2007 survey:
As we learned in Chapter 4, memory training used to be part of a classical education. Today, the educational system looks down on rote memorization. What happened?
Early education was based on military training, and the military’s goal wasn’t to train people to think, it was to train people to follow orders. Therefore, at the beginning of the twentieth century, rote memorization was the norm. Students memorized all sorts of information including speeches, dates, poetry, and times tables.
Educators used to think that memorization was good for the brain. People weren’t just learning the facts that they were memorizing, they were training their memories. Educators believed in “faculty psychology,” the idea that the mind was made up of individual “faculties” that could be developed individually.
The rote memorization approach had its critics and reformers over time:
Memory techniques are sometimes criticized because they take information out of context. For example, one teacher helped his students remember the differences between Lenin and Stalin’s economic systems by telling them to picture a constipated Lenin on the toilet. (He was constipated because of his mixed economy.) Stalin shows up and asks what’s going on, and Lenin responds, “Bread, peace, and land.” The image is memorable, but it doesn’t result in an understanding of economics.
Eventually, progressive education reform changed the school system. Over the last century, educators:
There are critics of this approach, too:
Memory and learning are related. You can better process new information when you have existing information in your brain to associate it with. The bigger your web of associations, the more likely you are to remember new things, and each new thing you add allows you to connect even more new things.
We learned in Part 1 that the human brain is naturally good at remembering images and places but bad at remembering semantic memories like lists of numbers of words. In Part 2, we’ll learn how to use memory techniques to transform information into a form that our brain is naturally inclined to remember.
Additionally, we’ll learn to transform information into something meaningful that relates to memories we already have. We remember new things better when we can associate them with what we already remember.
Anyone can learn the arts of memory. Creativity helps because it allows you to quickly create images, but you don’t have to be a genius or a savant. You just need to pay attention to life and learn the techniques.
The method of loci is a way of organizing memory storage in your brain. Normally, our memories are stored in random, semantic networks, but if we can be intentional about storage, we can more easily recall information. The method of loci is the foundation for most memory techniques.
The method involves two stages: transforming information into an image and then placing the image into a memory of a physical place you know well, such as your childhood home. This place will be your “memory palace.” For example, if your shopping list consists of eggs, bread, milk, and butter, place the eggs at the foot of your driveway, the bread in front of the door, the milk on the dining room table, and the butter on your bed.
Transforming a piece of information into an image forces you to pay attention to it, which results in you remembering it better. Make the image as memorable as possible by giving it some or all of the following characteristics:
When neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire (of the cabby brain study) looked at the brains of master memorizers, she found that they were no different physically than the average person’s brain.
However, when she and her team looked at the master memorizers’ brains while they were in the process of memorizing, they found that the mental athletes were using the same part of the brain as the London cabbies, the right posterior hippocampus, which is involved in spatial navigation. This is because they were mentally touring their memory palaces as they memorized. (Their right posterior hippocampi aren’t enlarged like the cabbies’ because while they use it while remembering, it’s not to the same extent as a cab driver uses this part of the brain.)
Memory palaces don’t have to be buildings—they simply need to be something familiar that has a sequential progression. For example, you could use your walk to work or the signs of the zodiac.
You can put more than one image at each location of your memory palace, but if you’re going to need to remember many things, you’re going to need multiple memory palaces to hold them all. Competitive mental athletes can have upwards of a hundred memory palaces. If you’re not intimately familiar with this many places, you’ll have to study. You can look at houses in magazines, museums, and so on. You need to learn these new memory palaces in detail—wall color, arrangement of the furniture, what incidents happened in specific corners, and so on.
Chunking is another foundational memory technique. Chunking involves combining individual pieces of information into more meaningful groups.
For example, say you need to remember this string of numbers: 5, 4, 0, 5, 0, 6, 3, 3, 1, 2, 2, 4. That’s 12 things to remember. However, if you break the numbers into four groups of three, that’s only four things to remember: 540, 506, 331, 224. (This is why credit card numbers and phone numbers are broken up.)
You could additionally break the 12-digit string into only two chunks in a date format—54/05/06 and 33/12/24. Finally, you could even transform these 12 digits into a single chunk—your grandma’s and mother’s birthdays.
(You’ll find more on turning numbers into meaningful images in Chapter 7.)
Our brains are naturally good at remembering images. Transform information into visuals in order to remember it better.
Write down the first three items on your to-do lists. (If you don't currently have a to-do list, you can use this example: 1) buy milk, 2) make a dentist appointment, 3) bake a cake.)
How would you transform the first to-do on your list into an image? Remember that the image will be more memorable if it’s multisensory, funny, lewd, novel, concrete, and personal.
How would you transform the second item into an image?
How would you transform the third?
Now, picture all three images. What original piece of information does each correspond to?
Our brains are naturally good at remembering places. Mentally place images into a memory of a real place in order to remember those images better.
Think of a place you know very well, such as your childhood home. Picture it in your mind. What are some important locations in it? Consider the bottom of the driveway, front porch, shower, and so on.
Recall the three images you created in the last exercise. Mentally place each of them in a significant location of your memory palace.
From memory, without looking at the answers to the previous questions, write down the route through your memory palace, noting where and when you come across the images you placed in it.
In Chapter 6, we learned the fundamental memory technique of the method of loci, which involves creating images to later place in a memory palace. Chapter 7 covers how to transform words into such images.
Our brains aren’t very good at perfect recall because it’s evolutionarily ineffective. The brain uses 20% of the oxygen we breathe and 25% of our glucose even though it only comprises 2% of our body mass. Our brains tend to drop words because the actual words aren’t important—it’s the meaning behind them that matters.
For example, in the Watergate hearings, John Dean reported conversations word-for-word. When compared to a tape recording of the actual conversations (Dean didn’t know about the existence of the recorder), there were discrepancies. Dean didn’t get the quotes word-for-word and sometimes he didn’t even get the content right. Overall, though, he remembered the gist of things correctly.
There were two historical approaches to memorizing a speech or text:
While memorizing meaning is likely more relevant in your daily life than remembering exact wording, there are cases in which you might need to memorize word-for-word. There are two methods: the methodical method, and the emotional method.
The Ad Herennium recommends memorizing poetry word-for-word by repeating a line a couple of times and then trying to transform it into images. How do you transform a word like “and” into an image? There are a few options:
This method tends to be more popular with men.
The emotional method is similar to Method acting. First, you break the text into chunks (or “beats”) and then you assign an emotion to each section. This allows you to retain the meaning of the text (unlike the shot abbot above), which allows you to create additional anchors to already existing memories.
Studies have shown that if you do an action related to a phrase you’re memorizing, you’re more likely to remember it. For example, if you’re trying to remember “Stir the soup,” you'll remember it better if you actually stir soup while memorizing the line.
This method is more popular with women.
Words are easiest to memorize when you transform them into images.
Consider the sentence, “I like cake.” You could transform this sentence into an image by picturing an eye (“I”) riding a bike (“like” rhymes with “bike”) towards a giant piece of cake. How else could you picture it?
How could you change “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” (Shakespeare) into an image?
How could you change the phrase “O Thou bright jewel in my aim I strive” (Phillis Wheatley) into an image?
How could you change the phrase “Our home and native land” (Canadian national anthem) into an image?
Write all four of the lines you just memorized in the box below.
Chapter 7 covered how to transform words into images. Chapter 8 covers how to transform numbers and the order of decks of cards into images.
There are several, ever-evolving systems for memorizing numbers. (Techniques are always evolving because mental athletes push the sport to new levels at every competition.) This summary will discuss two methods: the Major System and PAO. The Major System is useful for things like phone numbers and credit cards, but to do the kind of heavy lifting required for international memory competitions, you’ll need to use PAO.
The “Major System” was invented by Johann Winkelmann and is a code for translating numbers into words, and then into images. Here are the steps:
In the PAO system, instead of assigning letters to single-digit numbers, you assign an image of a person acting on an object to every two-digit number. This system generates some bizarre (and therefore memorable) images. Here are the steps:
While you have to come up with a person, action, and object for a lot of numbers, once you have the images memorized, you have a built-in system for creating an image for any number between 0 and 999,999.
The more advanced version of PAO is to come up with a person, action, and object for every three-digit number between 000 and 999, which allows you to generate unique images for every number between 0 and 999,999,999.
Another advanced version of PAO applies specifically to binary digits. When memorizing binary digits, give each chunk of digits their own image. For example, mental athlete Ben Pridmore assigned the image of a card game to 1101001001. He’s come up with 1,024 images, one for every ten-digit combination. Using this technique, Ben was able to set a world record for learning 3,705 binary digits in 30 minutes.
Memorizing decks of cards works similarly to the PAO system for numbers. You assign each card an image of a person, place, and object, and then create an image that represents three cards. Here are the steps:
If you find you’re mixing up cards, you can change your images, but the original will live in your memory somewhere. This old image could potentially reappear in a competition and confuse you, so think carefully before changing images.
Some mnemonists, including the author, use an advanced version of this system in which they create a person-action-object image for every possible combination of two cards. This allows them to compress 52 cards into nine unique images.
If you’re competing in speed card events, there are a couple additional things to keep in mind:
The major system is a method for remembering numbers. Here’s a review of the system:
What letters does the number 33 correspond to? How can you add vowels to turn these letters into a word?
How can you transform this word into an image?
What letters does the number 1548 correspond to? How can you add vowels to turn these letters into a word, or into multiple words?
How can you transform the word or words into an image?
Recall the two images you came up with. What numbers do they correspond to?
The PAO system involves coming up with combinations of people, actions, and objects and assigning them to numbers or cards in order to create images.
Write down a sentence that involves a person acting on an object. (For example, an option might be Michael Phelps swimming in a pool.) Visualize this scene. It will represent the number 11.
Write down a sentence that involves a different person performing a different action on a different object. Visualize this scene. It will represent the number 22.
Write down a sentence that involves another person acting on an object. Visualize this scene. It will represent the number 33.
Consider the number 223311. Write down the person from your number 22 sentence, the action from your number 33 sentence, and the object from your number 11 sentence. What do you come up with? Picture the scene in your mind.
Recall your image. What number does it correspond to?
Part 3 covers some of the characters the author encountered at memory competitions and some of the important people in memory studies and history. Chapter 10 will cover savants and Chapter 11 will cover mnemonists/mental athletes.
A “savant” used to be a person who was very intelligent and knowledgeable in several fields. These days, a savant is a person with a mental disability who has exceptional abilities in a narrow area, often to do with memory.
Dr. Darold Treffert informally divides savants into three categories:
Note that none of these definitions consider whether or not someone has learned memory techniques.
Savantism expresses itself differently in different people, but the main thing savants have in common is damage to the left hemisphere of the brain. As a result, savants usually have difficulty with left-brain activities such as language but are exceptional at right-brain activities such as spatial and visual skills. Some scientists think that turning off the left brain allows right-brain skills to flourish.
Treffert thinks that savants might somehow be able to use their nondeclarative memory system (riding-a-bike type skills) to remember declarative things (facts, figures).
People who suffer injuries to the left brain later in life sometimes develop savant-like abilities. This suggests that everyone might have the potential for savantism; it’s just a matter of getting the left brain out of the way.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) allows some experimentation in this area. TMS uses magnetic fields to temporarily shut off parts of the brain. Neuroscientist Allan Snyder has used TMS to temporarily shut off people’s left brains, and while partly shut down, people exhibit some savant-like behavior such as estimating the number of dots on a screen or drawing pictures from memory with more accuracy than they normally can.
The inspiration for Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film Rain Man, Kim is a prodigious savant with an amazing memory. He claims to have read 9,000 books, spending only ten seconds per page, and can regurgitate all the information. (The author suspects this is hyperbole.) His caregiver says he never forgets anything.
When Kim was born, his head was a third larger than normal and had a blister. Kim didn’t learn to walk until he was four and until he was fourteen, he was on sedatives. Once he got off the sedatives, he became interested in books. Though he’s very well-read, he doesn’t seem to be able to use the information he reads about, only recall it. His IQ is 87 and his social skills are underdeveloped.
Kim’s not autistic and science doesn’t know much about his savantism. Kim doesn’t have a corpus callosum, which is the part of the brain that connects the right and left hemispheres.
When the author interviewed Kim, they spent some of the time in the library memorizing phone books. Kim would finish a page in the time it took the author to learn five names. When the author asked Kim how he did it, he said he just remembers.
Daniel Tammet is either a prodigious savant or a good mnemonist. The author, along with some other mental athletes, suspects he’s a mnemonist, but Tammet claims to be a savant who’s never practiced memory techniques.
When Daniel was four, he suffered a life-threatening epileptic seizure that affected his brain. After the seizure, he was able to quickly learn languages and perform lightning-fast calculations. For Daniel, numbers allegedly have color, emotional tone, and shape. When he does mental math, he sees the images of two numbers he needs to multiply or divide, and the answer’s image forms between them.
Brain scientist Simon Baron-Cohen thinks that Daniel has two rare conditions that are responsible for his savantism, Asperger’s and synesthesia (his brain processes information using more than one sense). As a child, Daniel struggled with empathy and often got in trouble for taking things literally. As an adult, he’s gotten past most of his social problems, but he still can’t drive or shave.
The author isn’t convinced Daniel is a genuine savant because:
When the author asked Daniel about all of this, he said that several scientists had tested him and that he doesn’t use memory techniques.
The author doesn’t think Daniel’s just a normal person—he’s been very successful at memory techniques—but he thinks that Daniel’s memory isn’t unconscious and automatic like Kim’s. Other people should be able to do what Daniel does.
Throughout the author’s year-long exploration of memory, mental athletes were constantly telling him that anyone can learn memory techniques. Unlike savants, there’s nothing unusual about the brains of mnemonists.
However, mnemonists do tend to belong to a particular subculture. They dress unusually, enjoy juggling, often don’t have impressive day jobs, and many of them are male, young, and white.
The best mnemonists compete internationally. Here are some notables:
Tony Buzan is one of the most notable figures in the memory world, and other mnemonists have mixed feelings about him. Half of them think Buzan is a genius whose methods will transform the educational system, and the other half think he’s an unscientific moneymaker.
When Buzan was a child, his best friend Barry was put in the “dunces’ class” while Buzan was in the most advanced classes. However, Barry was very good with nature and animals—he could identify everything. Buzan realized that there was something wrong with the system—if the school thought Barry wasn’t smart when he clearly was, the system must be misdefining intelligence.
Buzan’s second ah-ha moment was in his first university class. Whenever his instructor took attendance and someone was missing, the instructor would call out their address, phone number, birthday, and parents’ names. Buzan asked the instructor how he’d done this. The instructor refused to tell him for a long time, but one day he explained the Major System to the entire class.
Buzan again realized the failings of the educational system—the Major System was a game-changer, and no one had ever taught it to him until now. He was sure there were other important things he’d missed. He couldn’t find a book about how to best operate your brain—and there still isn’t one—but he did find the Ad Herennium.
Buzan learned memory techniques and then worked as a substitute teacher and taught them to students. He came up with a particular method of note-taking called a Mind Map, which is a bit of an on-paper memory palace. A Mind Map involves drawing lines between main and subsidiary points and using lines, color, and images to connect things. Scientists at the University of London studied Mind Maps and found that they resulted in about a 10% increase in retention than mainstream note-taking techniques.
Buzan now makes his living selling books about memory. He’s been more successful selling books than he has getting his techniques into the curriculum.
Buzan started the World Memory Championship in 1991.
Ed Cooke is a British mental athlete and a grand master of memory. (To be a grand master, you have to be able to memorize 1,000 random digits in less than an hour, the order of ten shuffled decks of cards in less than an hour, and the order of one deck in less than two minutes.)
Ed was the author’s memory technique coach. He finished in eleventh at the 2005 World Memory Championship after flubbing the speed card event.
Ben Pridmore competes internationally in the memory competitions. Interestingly, he didn’t learn about the existence of memory techniques until he went to his first World Memory Championship. Up until then, he’d been using rote memorization. After learning techniques, he won the World Memory Championship in 2004.
In 2005, Pridmore planned to beat a world record by memorizing the first 50,000 digits of pi. However, an obscure Japanese mnemonist beat him to it by memorizing 83,431. It took Ben six months to clear pi out of his memory palaces.
Lukas is an Austrian mnemonist and has achieved the rank of grand master of memory. He and Ed co-founded a society of memorizers called the KL7. KL stands for “Knights of Learning” and the 7 represents the original seven members. Lukas and Ed also have plans to start the Oxford Mind Academy, which is like a gym for brains, with Ed and Lukas acting as personal trainers.
Gunther Karsten is another international mental athlete. He’s won all of Germany’s national contests since 1998. He wears earmuffs and sunglasses with tape covering most of the lenses to ward off distractions.
Corinna Draschl is an Austrian mnemonist. She competed in the World Memory Championship at 15 and won the poetry memorizing event. She uses the emotional method.
Clemens Mayer is an eighteen-year-old law student from Bavaria and one of Gunther’s students. He won the World Memory Championship in 2005.
After a year of training, the author competed in the 2006 US Memory Championship. These are some of the people he encountered:
In Parts 1-3, we learned about the science, art, and community of memory. In Part 4, we’ll look at the author’s (Josh’s) personal experience learning the arts of memory. Josh started his journey shortly after attending the 2005 US Memory Championship, where he met his memory coach, Ed Cooke.
(Josh mentions in his acknowledgments that he’s slightly rearranged the order of events to better fit the narrative.)
Before Josh started training, he spoke to Anders Ericsson, the expert on experts. Ericsson worked at the Human Performance Lab at Florida State University and he was interested in studying Josh’s journey from beginner to expert. Josh went to Florida to have his memory tested. In exchange, Ericsson would help him with his training.
(Shortform note: To learn about Ericsson’s research on how to become an expert, read our summary of his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.)
The Human Performance Lab tested Josh’s ability to remember numbers, words, and faces. They also tested him on seemingly random things, such as definitions of obscure words and if he could visualize rotating cubes. He took a Multidimensional Aptitude Battery Information Test, which involved multiple-choice trivia questions such as how a carburetor works. Finally, they tested him on the events that would appear in an international memory competition such as spoken numbers, historical dates, and binary digits.
No one would tell Josh what any of the testing meant, but he was able to self-assess a little. Josh could remember nine digits—better than average—but he was abysmal at remembering poetry, and he was hit or miss on the trivia.
Josh convinced Discover magazine to send him to the World Memory Championship in Oxford, England. Josh stayed with Ed and his family, who would have preferred if Ed had become a lawyer instead of a mnemonist. Ed took a leave of absence from grad school, and his plans to start the Oxford Mind Academy with Lukas had temporarily fallen through, as Lukas had injured himself in a fire-breathing accident.
The World Memory Championship takes place over three days, and there are ten events, including memorizing lists of words, numbers, decks of cards, dates, faces, and names. Some of the events have a time component—how much can competitors memorize in five minutes or an hour?
Everyone dreads the poem-memorizing event, in which you have to memorize—down to the punctuation and capitalization—as many lines of an unpublished poem as possible in fifteen minutes. Then, you have half an hour to write down what you’ve memorized. People had lobbied to get rid of this event, but historically, poetry was viewed as humanizing and creative, and the art of memorization started with poetry. Ted Hughes wrote the poem for the competition for many years, but Buzan took over after Hughes’s death.
The international competitors were much more serious than those at the US championship. The US competitors talked to each other before events, while the Europeans ignored each other or juggled to warm up their minds. The World Championship records were also far more impressive than the US ones. Americans are like the Jamaican bobsled team of the memory community—friendly and cheerful, but lagging behind in terms of practice and technique.
Josh started his memory training by memorizing Ed’s to-do list using the method of loci. Then, he memorized some of the to-do list post-it notes stuck on his walls, such as to get his car inspected or to find books on specific subjects. He tried to use his memory in his daily life rather than simply practicing for the specific challenges he’d be facing in the national championship. He memorized phone numbers and his credit card numbers.
Josh tried poetry. He first tried “Jabberwocky,” which is made up almost completely of nonsense words. He didn’t know how to make images out of not only abstract but unreal words such as “brillig” and ended up just memorizing by rote.
Cards were Josh’s strongest event because he used an advanced PAO system. At a certain point, however, he hit a plateau and couldn’t get his speed any faster. He consulted Ericsson, who advised him to practice deliberately. Josh did this by timing himself with a metronome and forcing himself to go faster than his usual pace. Whenever he came to a card that gave him trouble, he took the time to analyze why.
Josh logged his progress on a spreadsheet and consulted regularly with Ed. When Josh found himself getting bored by his training and easily distracted by more interesting things going on nearby, Ed suggested he try earmuffs and pinhole glasses to minimize distractions.
Josh returned to Oxford to work with Ed in person. He timed the trip so he could attend Ed’s twenty-fifth birthday. Ed’s party had some mnemonist-specific elements—it was held in a barn that Ed set up like a memory palace (fabric dividers between sections, a room full of balloons, and so on) so the party would be memorable. He also wanted to mix social circles, so everyone came in a costume that hid their face. Finally, there was a card memorizing contest between Ben Pridmore and Lukas, and after Lukas was deemed too drunk, Ben and Ed.
After the party, Josh got some more tips from Ed. Josh kept mixing up the seven of spades and diamonds, whose images were both of people riding. The spades were a jockey on a racehorse, and the diamonds were Lance Armstrong on a bike. Ed gave him two options: focus on a detail or change the image. Josh decided to focus on Lance Armstrong’s sunglasses and changed the seven of spades to a midget riding a pony while wearing a sombrero.
Josh also found that he’d forget his card images, for which the solution was practice. He had to spend time with each character, considering everything from their taste to their clothes to how they felt about violence. Then, he imagined them doing everyday things to get used to their presence in any situation. He also had some trouble because he’d put family members into his PAO, so Ed recommended he choose other people instead.
In February 2006, Josh’s practice scores started to get competitive—he was getting close to the numbers previous champions had achieved and once even managed to do a deck of cards one second faster than the record in the US. However, Ed warned Josh that he’d likely do at least 20% worse at the actual championship when the pressure was on.
The 2006 championship included a new event that neither Ed nor the competitors had seen before. It was called “Three Strikes and You’re Out of the Tea Party” and involved remembering details about five strangers—an event with real-world applications.
For this event, Josh and Ed came up with a system that involved creating five memory palaces, and assigning one to each of the strangers. Each person’s assigned palace would contain the same piece of information: for example, the image corresponding to the address of each stranger would go in the kitchen of that stranger’s palace.
Three weeks before the championship, Ed told Josh to stop practicing the other events and focus on the tea party. Josh got his friends and family to test him.
A week before the championship, Josh stopped practicing. He mentally cleared his memory palaces so that no leftover images would get in his way during the competition. (Some of the most intense mental athletes won’t even talk to anyone in the three days before a contest, lest someone create a distracting association.)
Ed was supposed to have been at the competition with Josh, but Ed got an opportunity to do research in Australia, so he was no longer able to attend.
Josh had been telling everyone the contest was just a whim, or just a journalistic experiment, but he really wanted to win. He worried competitors would come up with new mnemonic techniques, and he was particularly worried about Maurice Stoll. The night before the competition, Josh couldn’t sleep and had strange dreams about his images.
When Josh arrived at the competition, the first people he ran into were Ben, who would be spectating, not competing, and Maurice. Both of them told Josh how important it was to get a good sleep before a competition. Josh was rattled.
The approximately 35 competitors included:
In most memory competitions, everyone’s scores in standardized events are added up at the end of the competition and the highest score wins. In the US championships, there are four qualifying events in the morning, and the top six scorers move to the finals in the afternoon. The finals are TV-friendly, elimination events.
The morning events are:
Names and faces. Competitors try to memorize the first and last names of people in headshots. They have 15 minutes to memorize and then 15 minutes to write out names next to pictures.
Speed numbers. Competitors have 5 minutes to memorize as many digits as they can.
Speed cards. Competitors memorize the order of a deck of cards as fast as they can. When finished, they tell the scorekeeper they’re done and then have five minutes to rearrange a new deck into the correct order.
Poem. Competitors memorize as many lines of an unpublished poem as possible in 15 minutes.
The afternoon’s events are:
Random words. In most memory competitions, the random word event involves competitors memorizing as many words as possible in fifteen minutes. They then have half an hour to write as many as they remember. At the US Memory Championship, however, the event was adjusted to be more TV-friendly. After 15 minutes of memorizing, the six finalists take turns calling out the words. Therefore, the strategy was different—Josh chose to spend more of his time making sure he knew the words, rather than remembering as many as he possibly could.
Facts about strangers. In this event, five strangers walk on stage and give ten pieces of information about themselves, such as their phone numbers or pets’ names. The competitors are quizzed on the information, and the first two people to make three mistakes are out.
Memorizing two decks of cards. Competitors must do this in five minutes.
Winning the championship turned Josh into a minor celebrity. He talked to Ellen DeGeneres, and talk shows asked him to come on air and memorize a deck of cards.
Because Josh had won the national championship, he would act as the US representative at the World Memory Championship. At worlds, he’d be competing against Ed, Ben, and Gunther.
Josh knew he was out of his league. He had hoped to finish in the top ten and become a grand master of memory, but he finished 13th and missed the grandmaster standard in a few events. His top event was names and faces, in which he came third. He expected he did so well because the names were ethnically diverse, and coming from the US, he was used to non-European names.
Clemens Mayer won the championship. Ed won silver in the hour cards and spoken digits events.
After the championship, Ed invited Josh to join the KL7. The initiation includes:
The first time Josh tried, he forgot the 48th digit. The second time, he got through the initiation and was inducted.
After the world championship, Josh returned to Ericsson’s lab to be retested. He retook the same tests and some new ones. He’d improved his digit span test to 18 and he could remember more poetry, names, and trivia.
The digit span test is the standard for working memory, but Josh didn’t find that his working memory had doubled. He still didn’t remember things he couldn’t put into a memory palace, and he didn’t remember things he hadn’t been paying attention to in the first place. Only a few days after the world championship, he forgot he’d driven to a restaurant and took the subway home, leaving his car behind.
Ericsson thought Josh was unusual in that he committed to the practice required to improve his memory, but any motivated college student could have achieved the same results.
Josh thought he could further improve at the memory arts if he put more time into them, but he ultimately decided to stop competing. A fellow competitor acknowledged that Josh could probably find better ways to spend his time than training intensely for another year.
Josh never got rid of his notebook or Dictaphone, and he only memorizes things if he doesn’t have a phone or pen handy. The memory techniques worked for him, but he found they weren’t very necessary in his day-to-day life in the modern world.
Josh found that the most valuable thing he learned about memory is that it shapes our characters—we see the world and interact with it based on what and how we remember. Memory is about finding connections between things, creating new ideas, and being mindful—you can only remember things you were paying attention to in the first place. External memories can keep track of schedules or groceries, but they don’t make creative connections the way people’s memories do. An external memory doesn’t create art or jokes. Our internal memories are at the core of what makes us human.