MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN by Joshua Foer

• Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it.
• To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.
• “What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly,”
• Physiologically, we are virtually identical to our ancestors who painted images of bison on the walls of the Lascaux cave in France, among the earliest cultural artifacts to have survived to the present day. Our brains are no larger or more sophisticated than theirs. If one of their babies were to be dropped into the arms of an adoptive parent in twenty-first-century New York, the child would likely grow up indistinguishable from his or her peers.
• The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued.
• For normal humans, memories gradually decay with time along what’s known as the “curve of forgetting.” From the moment you grasp a new piece of information, your memory’s hold on it begins to slowly loosen, until finally it lets go altogether.
• The nonlinear associative nature of our brains makes it impossible for us to consciously search our memories in an orderly way. A memory only pops directly into consciousness if it is cued by some other thought or perception—some other node in the nearly limitless interconnected web.
• Because our memories don’t follow any kind of linear logic, we can neither sequentially search them nor browse them.
• The brain is a mutable organ, capable—within limits—of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity.
• There is something about mastering a specific field that breeds a better memory for the details of that field.
• Experts see the world differently. They notice things that nonexperts don’t see. They home in on the information that matters most, and have an almost automatic sense of what to do with it. And most important, experts process the enormous amounts of information flowing through their senses in more sophisticated ways.
• We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.
• When a new thought or perception enters our head, it doesn’t immediately get stashed away in long-term memory. Rather, it exists in a temporary limbo, in what’s known as working memory, a collection of brain systems that hold on to whatever is rattling around in our consciousness at the present moment.
• Our working memories serve a critical role as a filter between our perception of the world and our long-term memory of it. If every sensation or thought was immediately filed away in the enormous database that is our long-term memory, we’d be drowning, like S and Funes, in irrelevant information.
• Most of the things that pass through our brain don’t need to be remembered any longer than the moment or two we spend perceiving them and, if necessary, reacting to them.
• Like a computer, our ability to operate in the world, is limited by the amount of information we can juggle at one time.
• Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item.
• Notice that the process of chunking takes seemingly meaningless information and reinterprets it in light of information that is already stored away somewhere in our long-term memory.
• We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.
• According to Ericsson, what we call expertise is really just “vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain.” In other words, a great memory isn’t just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.
• Everything we see, hear, and smell is inflected by all the things we’ve seen, heard, and smelled in the past.
• A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.
• We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events. Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.
• Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it.
• Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.
• Though there is disagreement about just how many memory systems there are, scientists generally divide memories broadly into two types: declarative and nondeclarative (sometimes referred to as explicit and implicit). Declarative memories are things you know you remember, like the color of your car, or what happened yesterday afternoon. EP and HM had lost the ability to make new declarative memories. Nondeclarative memories are the things you know unconsciously, like how to ride a bike or how to draw a shape while looking at it in a mirror (or what a word flashed rapidly across a computer screen means).
• Motor skill learning takes place largely in the cerebellum, perceptual learning in the neocortex, habit learning in the basal ganglia.
• Indeed, most of who we are and how we think—the core material of our personalities—is bound up in implicit memories that are off-limits to the conscious brain.
• Over time, as they are revisited and reinforced, memories are consolidated in a way that makes them impervious to erasure. They become entrenched in a network of cortical connections that allows them to exist independently of the hippocampus.
• The principle underlying all memory techniques is that our brains don’t remember all types of information equally well. As exceptional as we are at remembering visual imagery (think of the two-picture recognition test), we’re terrible at remembering other kinds of information, like lists of words or numbers.
• “The general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it,”
• The more associative hooks a new piece of information has, the more securely it gets embedded into the network of things you already know, and the more likely it is to remain in memory.
• “Things that grab our attention are more memorable, and attention is not something you can simply will. It has to be pulled in by the details.
• The more vivid the image, the more likely it is to cleave to its locus.
• Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex—and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.
• Because of the way spatial cognition works, all you have to do is retrace your steps through your memory palace, and hopefully at each point the images you laid down will pop back into your mind as you pass by them.
• The better I knew the buildings, and the more each felt like home, the stickier my images would be, and the easier it would be to reconstruct them later.
• Perfect recall of words is something our brains simply aren’t very good at,
• The brain is a costly organ. Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body’s mass, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and it’s where a quarter of all our glucose gets burned. The brain is the most energetically expensive piece of equipment in our body, and has been ruthlessly honed by natural selection to be efficient at the tasks for which it evolved.
• Strip away the emotions, the philosophizing, the neuroses, and the dreams, and our brains, in the most reductive sense, are fundamentally prediction and planning machines.
• Much of the chaos that our brains filter out is words, because more often than not, the actual language that conveys an idea is just window dressing.
• The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized.
• Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language.
• Song is the ultimate structuring device for language.
• Gunther’s method of creating an image for the un-imageable is a very old one: to visualize a similarly sounding, or punning, word in its place.
• This process of transforming words into images involves a kind of remembering by forgetting: In order to memorize a word by its sound, its meaning has to be completely dismissed.
• Once upon a time, there was nothing to do with thoughts except remember them. There was no alphabet to transcribe them in, no paper to set them down upon. Anything that had to be preserved had to be preserved in memory.
• The brain is always making mistakes, forgetting, misremembering. Writing is how we overcome those essential biological constraints.
• Where one word ends and another begins is a relatively arbitrary linguistic convention.
• Indexes were a major advance because they allowed books to be accessed in the nonlinear way we access our internal memories.
• To our memory-bound predecessors, the goal of training one’s memory was not to become a “living book,” but rather a “living concordance,” a walking index of everything one had read, and all the information one had acquired.
• Because memories are associative, finding the odd misplaced fact is often an act of triangulation.
• So much of remembering happens at the moment of encoding, because we only tend to remember what we pay attention to.
• When it comes to memorizing long strings of numbers, like a hundred thousand digits of pi or the career batting averages of every New York Yankee Hall of Famer, most mental athletes use a more complex technique that is known on the Worldwide Brain Club (the online forum for memory junkies, Rubik’s cubers, and mathletes) as “person-action-object,” or, simply, PAO.
• The less you have to focus on the repetitive tasks of everyday life, the more you can concentrate on the stuff that really matters, the stuff that you haven’t seen before.
• As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the “OK plateau,” the point at which you decide you’re OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving.
• What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice.” Having studied the best of the best in many different fields, he has found that top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development. They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the “cognitive phase.”
• Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard.
• When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.
• Regular practice simply isn’t enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.
• The best way to get out of the autonomous stage and off the OK plateau, Ericsson has found, is to actually practice failing. One way to do that is to put yourself in the mind of someone far more competent at the task you’re trying to master, and try to figure out how that person works through problems.
• The secret to improving at a skill is to retain some degree of conscious control over it while practicing—to force oneself to stay out of autopilot.
• There is not a single sport in which records don’t regularly fall. If there are plateaus out there, collectively we have not reached them yet.
• Once a benchmark is deemed breakable, it usually doesn’t take long before someone breaks it.
• We usually think about our memory as a single, monolithic thing. It’s not. Memory is more like a collection of independent modules and systems, each relying on its own networks of neurons.
• Generally when we forget the name of a new acquaintance, it’s because we’re too busy thinking about what we’re going to say next, instead of paying attention.
• You can’t learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can’t memorize without learning.
• the simplest memory trick could dramatically increase the amount of information a person could remember, and nobody had bothered to teach him that trick until he was twenty years old, what else was there that he’d never learned?
• One creates a Mind Map by drawing lines off main points to subsidiary points, which branch out further to tertiary points, and so on. Ideas are distilled into as few words as possible and whenever possible are illustrated with images. It’s a kind of outline, exploded radially across the page in a rainbow of colors, a web of associations that looks like a prickly bush, or a neuron’s branching dendrites. And because it is full of colorful images arranged in order across the page, it functions as a kind of memory palace scrawled on paper.
• In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus,” says Buzan. “The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas.
• Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.”
• If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you’ll be at coming up with new ideas.
• In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on. Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory.
• When information goes “in one ear and out the other,” it’s often because it doesn’t have anything to stick to.
• Memory is how we transmit virtues and values, and partake of a shared culture.
• Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.
• The more tightly any new piece of information can be embedded into the web of information we already know, the more likely it is to be remembered.
• 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.
• Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can’t explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they’re happening.
• we all have remarkable capacities asleep inside of us. If only we bothered ourselves to awaken them.
• Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.
• We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits,
• Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory.
• Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character.