The Making of an Accidental Memory Champion

The most interesting book I read this summer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, is a refreshingly poetic take on what it requires to become a memory expert. What started out as a simple inquiry into the nature of mind, quickly evolves into a journey to mastering one of man-kinds most ancient crafts.

Why the Gutenberg changed everything Ever since memory was brought into the academic spotlight by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in late 1800s, researchers have been interested in improving the ways in which we learn. The author, Joshua Foer however, starts out by taking us back to an earlier time, when it wasn't rare for the average person to have what most people would consider an exceptional memory.

Once upon a time, memory was used a form of character building. It was thought that through practice and repetition, one could incorporate not just useless facts, but also the ethics and virtues of ones culture and society. It may strike you as odd when you consider that Socrates was the one who feared an emphasis on writing would lead society down a path of ethical and intellectual decay, but when you consider the emphasis he placed on memory and internalization, you begin to understand why. Socrates was born to a time when writing was on the come up, and citizens were relying less and less on memory. It was a time when scriptio continua were written on long tracts of papyrus reed, and because "paper" as we call it today, was rare and costly, scribes would save room by writing in long streams of capital letters, without the punctuation or spaces we have come to know and love today. In Foer's words, it was just about the "least user-friendly way of accessing information."

The early printing press | Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press]It wasn't until the sixteenth century, with the widespread adoption of the Gutenberg printing press, that readers could refer to something like the Bible without having previously memorized it. Before that, if you were a medieval scholar and you found a book you liked, there was a good chance that you would never stumble upon it again. Externalized memories, such as contact lists, GPS systems, and indeed the Gutenberg press freed us from our own heads, and from what researchers refer to as the 7 ± 2 rule of memory. Today, we no longer need to remember the phone numbers of our friends and family, or the route we take to get to work. While digital devices give us the ability to tackle more and more difficult problems, they also make our lives less memorable.

Mastering the ancient craft of memory Joshua Foer found himself in an unlikely scenario on March 11 2006. On his left was the defending US memory champion, Ram Kolli, a 25 year old business consultant from Richmond Virginia, who among many things, possessed the ability to memorize 124 consecutive numbers in less than five minutes. On the right were a plethora of cameras from a national cable network, and a crowd of spectators eager to witness the final competition of the day. In front of him on the desk, lay two decks of shuffled playing cards, face down. He took a deep breath, and shut his eyes. In a moment, the stopwatch would begin.

In an attempt at investigative journalism, Foer set out in the dead of winter, on a journey to stop forgetting where he left his keys. He had what you would call an average memory, and like us, felt that there was more to remember each passing day. More names, more faces, more passwords. With a better memory, he imagined, "life would be qualitatively different - and better." In the bone chilling cold, during a New York afternoon in the winter of 2005, Foer was taught his first lesson, in what would later commence his journey into becoming a memory expert. Under the mentorship of Memory Grandmaster, Ed Cooke, author of Remember: Learn the Stuff You Thought You Never Could, Foer was taught his most important lesson, that in order to remember, you had to see it in your minds eye. Really see it. Thereafter, he began mentally visualizing everything he did in his daily life. And he began to realize, indeed, memorizing like many skills, does not depend on a way unique difference in skill or ability but a different way of seeing the world.

"when students are taught to draw, often the first two exercises they’re made to master are tracing negative space and contour lines. The aim of these exercises is to shut down the top-level conscious processing that can’t see a chair as anything but a chair, and activate the latent, lower-level perceptual processing that sees it only as a collection of abstract shapes and lines. It takes a great deal of training for an artist to learn to deactivate that top-level processing"

— Joshua Foer In under a year, Foer was able to place first in the American memory championship. By dedicating himself to the study of ancient mnemonic devices, and practicing those techniques daily, he was able to beat seasoned competitors at their own sport. He was even able to break the then-American record for memorizing a whole deck of cards, a little under two minutes.

What strikes me odd about this journey is that Foer started out as a complete amateur. Before his introduction to the sport of memory, the author had no experience prior challenging his memory the way he did. He was no different than you or I, you might say. We almost never see newcomers beat olympic athletes at their own sport, or chess players with little experience suddenly beating grandmasters in under a year. When we do see gems, the likes of Michael Phelps, or Bobby Fischer, we are quick to attribute their skill to something innate like talent, unaware of the major triumphs they have overcome.

It is often noted that to become a grandmaster at any skill, one must practice 10,000 hours. Popularized in his book, Outliers, by Malcom Gladwell, this number represents an incomprehensible amount of practice for anyone to overcome. However, what Foer teaches us is that we need not hit 10,000 hours to achieve success. Had he studied 30 hours a week, every week for that entire year, he would have studied a little under 1600 hours. And while 1600 hours is certainly a lot, it is not something entirely unachievable by a motivated college student.

Closing thoughts

When I look back at my own university education, the fondest memories that come to mind are the tireless nights at the library drilling cards into my head, and memorizing facts such as, what is the butterfly shaped bone in the skull? It's the sphenoid by the way. When my friends ask me why I spend so much time memorizing stuff I could just be looking up, it feels silly. The best answer I can give today however, is not a personal story, but one can found in the making of an accidental memory champion: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.

👋 Thanks for making it to the end!