A Summary and Analysis of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer for Practicing and Aspiring Managers

Executive Summary

   
    Joshua Foer, a freelance journalist, becomes intrigued with mental sport of memory after finding out Ben Pridmore, former U.S. Memory Champion, could remember the precise order of 1,528 random digits in a hour. He was then surprised to hear Ben Pridmore claim that anyone could do it. Ed Cooke, a grand master of memory, also claimed that anyone could perform the outstanding feat.
    Foer learned of a young journalist, whom the literature called S, that had an incredible memory as a result of a rare perceptual disorder called synesthesia. Russian neuro-psychologist, A. R. Luria’s research on S connects his disorder to an ancient memory technique called “memory palace”. Unfortunately for S, his mind automatically used this technique with an inability to stop, causing him to retain too much useless memory.
    Simply being an expert at certain task made you a more generally intellectual person in the eyes of others in the past. Obtaining a great memory was included in the many intellectual talents you were thought to obtain by being an expert in certain task such as chess. After research like that of K. Anders Ericson, this particular perception of intellect was proven to be inaccurate. Memory guru’s have been able to remember a vast amount of information without being experts at the particular subjects. Studies proved that memory cannot simply be a by-product of being an expert at a particular task such as chess.
    As Foer continued his research, he decided to concentrate on some of the worst memories in the world. He not only studied, but was able to actually meet them. Even though the two men that were being researched lost their hippocampus, the part of the brain that turns short term into long term memory, they still had the ability to remember.There was a catch. They could only remember unconsciously. Their implicit memory was still functional.

    Using this technique called the memory palace was invented to be a conscious way of retaining a large amount of information as well as an efficient way to retrieve it at will. It involves encoding what you want to remember into images and storing them in a space in your mind’s eye, particularly a place you are well accustomed to, in a creative and memorable way.
     This technique is said to have been used by people in ancient times to remember entire books, speeches, a vast amount of names, and other things they were required to remember. They lacked any external tools to store their memory on. This made it extremely important to be able to obtain a reliable memory. Even though we value memory a lot less these days, it still makes us what we are. As Alexandra Horowitz wrote ,”Still, memory is intricately tied to identity, we are a product of our own experiences.”
    Joshua Foer, with the help of Ed Cooke, eventually trains his memory to the point where he feels confident enough to enter the U.S. Memory Championship. Using the lost techniques for memory has helped Foer realize his minds full potential and win the U.S. Memory Championship.

The Ten Things Managers Need to Know from Moonwalking with Einstein

   
1.    It is important to first realize that we have hidden abilities such as having an outstanding memory in our mind. Memory is only one of the many hidden abilities we have lying dormant in our minds.

2.    You should try to sharpen your brain, by soaking in useful information, while disregarding useless information and habits. There is a such thing as remembering too much

3.    Take full advantage of the possibilities that are lying dormant in you mind. Your brain has the ability to improve in many ways within limits. Take full advantage of that ability to develop and maintain an edge over competitors.

4.    Try to use more creative ways to store your memory on a long term basis. The more creative the memory is the easier the retaining and retrieving of that memory. Perhaps you should give the ”memory palace” technique a try

5.    You can apply your knowledge better and more conveniently, if you put extra effort into letting the information soak into your mind. The more you let information soak into your memory, the better you can apply it, in comparison with depending on an external source.

6.    It is perfectly find and sometimes necessary to let your implicit memory go to work. Sometimes when you have to make an important management decision you have to let intuition take over.

7.    Use your brains strengths to enhance its weaknesses. Your brain is good at remembering concepts and images. Use those strengths to remember important information.

8.    When you run into a mental plateaus, concentrate on your technique and get out of your comfort zone. Plateaus are bad for business. This is the perfect time to take risks.

9.    The art of memory is not only for recalling information at will but letting the information shape your decision, character and other important traits. Our whole persona and the way we live are based on our memory.

10.    The more associations you make with something you are attempting to remember the easier it is to remember. Combined as many concepts and images to important information so you can recall it better.

Full Summary of Moonwalking With Einstein

Chapter 1: The Smartest Man Is Hard To Find

    Joshua Foer finds himself in a peculiar position in which he could not have imagined. He still has to take a moment realize that he is competing in the United States Memory Championship.
    This interesting event is a result of a convenient stop at the Weightlifting Hall of Fame and Museum in York, Pennsylvania. During his journey throughout the museum he discovers a picture of Joe “The Mighty Atom” Greenstein captioned “the strongest man in the world. This provoked the thought in Joshua’s mind of how interesting it would be to have the world’s strongest person and the world’s smartest person meet each other. He conducted a Google search and easily found the world strongest person, Mariusz Paudzianowski from Rawska, Poland. Afterwards, he typed in “highest IQ” to search for the world’s smartest person, which proved to be a much bigger challenge. Brains were harder to quantify than strength. Even though he could not complete his goal of unifying the world’s smartest person and the world’s strongest person together, he was able to find something that intrigued him.
    Joshua found a man named Ben Pridmore, the reigning U.S. memory champ. Ben can remember 1,528 random digits in an hour and any poem handed to him. Foer immediately starting thinking of how much better life would be for someone with that kind of memory. Surprisingly, Ben Pridmore claimed that his memory was only the result of technique that anyone can learn. Foer went to the Con Edison headquarters to observe the 2005 U.S. Memory Championship, where he eventually met Ed Cooke. Ed Cooke, a young grand master from England, eventually confirms Ben Pridmore’s earlier comment by claiming that his memory was average as well. Apparently they all have been using a 2,500-year-old mnemonic technique called the “memory palace” that Simonides of Ceos had supposedly invented in the rubble of the great banquet hall collapse. The “memory palace,” also know as the journey method, method of Loci, or memorativa, were refined and codified in an extensive set of rules and instruction manuals by Romans like Cicero and Quintilian. This technique has been used in the middle ages to remember sermons, prayers, punishments, speeches, and other important things. Joshua eventually met Tony Buzan,  a British educator and self styled guru, was the leader of the renaissance in memory training and the founder of the World Memory Championship. He claimed to have the highest “creativity quotient” in the world. Every since the World Memory Championship was founded, in 1991, it has established national championships in more than a dozen countries from China to South Africa to Mexico. Buzan has been on a mission since 1971 to implement memory techniques into schools around the world. He tells Foer that schools in the recent times are going about things all wrong. He claims that schools dump all kinds of information in the students head and fail to teach them how to retain it. Buzan also claims that it is not natural for the normal human mind declines. He believes it is the result of what he calls “anti-Olympic training.” Buzan eventually encourages Joshua to tryout for the U.S. Memory championship. Foer started to understand that compared to our ancestors, physiologically, we are identical and have no internal advantage over them. What made us more intellectually sound was actually external instead of internal knowledge and memory.

CHAPTER 2: The Man Who Remembered Too Much

    One young journalist, whom was called S, was sent by his boss to a neuro-psychologist, A. R. Luria, to have his memory tested. He had an amazing memory in which he thought was normal. A. R. Luria eventually wrote a book about him, The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory, which has become a classic in literature of abnormal psychology. For normal humans, memories gradually decay, as the studies of, German psychologist, Hermann Ebbinghaus has shown. S’s memory didn’t follow the curve. He could remember instances from as far as 16 year ago. Studies of S’s memory eventually became the source of proof that everyone had his ability lying dormant in them. Ed Cooke was definitely an advocate for that idea as he proves to Foer, along with some sixteen-year-old students of a public high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, that there minds were already extraordinary. He displayed Foer’s and the student’s excellent memory for images by performing a test on them known as the two alternative picture recognition exam, which they all passed astoundingly with 100% accuracy. They had less than a half second to see each of the thirty slides they viewed. Ed even claimed that if they would have perform almost just as well if they had viewed thousands of those images. Even though a normal human already has an outstanding memory, most scientist agree that it is unlikely for someone to have a photographic memory. There was only one case of scientific memory that has ever been described in the scientific literature. In 1970, a Harvard vision scientist named Charles Stromeyer III published a paper in nature, one of the world’s most respected scientific journals, about a young woman named Elizabeth, a Harvard student. She seemed to be the only conclusive proof that photographic memory was possible. Unfortunately, all testing on her stopped after she surprisingly marries Charles. This story evolved into weak evidence of photographic memory because of its unlikely circumstances. So this rules out the possibility that S has a photographic memory. S had a perceptual disorder called synesthesia, which caused his senses to be bizarrely intertwined. For example every word S hear had a color to it. As much as he could remember, he lacked the ability to understand metaphors and words such as nothing or something. Oddly, he could not function normal enough to even keep a job. He actually had to learn how to forget.

CHAPTER 3 : The Expert Expert

    While reading into an abundance of scientific literature, Foer noticed that he kept running into one particular name, K. Anders Ericson, a psychology professor at Florida State University and author of an article titled, “Exceptional Memorizers”. Ericson begin laying the foundation for the “Skill Memory Theory,” before Tony Buzan started mass marketing this theory. This theory proved through years of experimenting on Carnegie Mellon, also known in literature by his initials SF, that memory was improvable. Foer decides to get his memory tested by Ericson’s, Human Performance Lab. At the time, Ericson was already in the process of attempting to isolate what we call expertise, to dissect it and identify its cognitive basis. The result of many tests and research including Ericson’s test would point to the conclusion that the we learn by applying what we already know from our experience, such as a technique called chunking. This conclusion still left many answers to be learned about how memory guru’s are able to remember so much. In 1956 George Miller, a Harvard psychologist, published a paper that eventually became a classic paper in memory research. This paper endorsed the idea that we as humans can only think of seven ideas at one time. The paper’s title was “The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” And Ericson’s research claims that long term memories are stored by what is already known, or experience. Yet people like Ed Cooke and Tony Buzan can remember a vast amount of information without having any expertise.

Chapter 4: The Most Forgetful Man In The World

    After studying and meeting people with the best memories in the world, Foer decides his research would be incomplete if he failed to study the opposite end of the spectrum. He searched the Internet and ran across an article in The Journal of Neuroscience, about an eighty-four-year-old technician whom they called EP. He was claimed to have one of the worst case of amnesia as a result of herpes simplex that ate through a lot of his medial temporal lobes, such as his hippocampus. His memory extended only to his most recent thoughts. Foer was granted permission to meet EP at the allowance of Larry Squire, the neuro-scientist and memory researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and San Diego VA Medical Center. Larry was studying EP at the time. EP’s mind was stuck in the fifties with an inability to learn anything new or retain anything after that period. This is thought to be because of Ribot’s Law, claims that memory isn’t static. The more you think about a memory and the memory ages, the deeper it is embedded into your mind. According to Ed Cooke’s theory, psychological time is most likely advancing faster for EP. Ed claims, as a French chronobiologist, Michel Siffre’s self-experimentation confirmed, the more memories that anchors us throughout our lives, the slower time passes psychologically. Another case of extreme amnesia was a Henry Molaison, also known as HM. He obtained his case of amnesia from a brain surgery, performed by William Scoville in attempt to reduce his symptoms from epilepsy, which ultimately robbed him of his memory. Scoville had most of HM’s hippocampus sucked out, which did at least succeed to reduce HM’s seizures. HM was left with the inability to turn his conscious short term memory into long term memory, but outstandingly retained his unconscious memory, or implicit memories.

CHAPTER 5: The Memory Palace

    Ed Cooke, insisted in meeting Foer in central park, where he clambered up a big boulder and started by introducing his first lesson, “elaborative encoding,” explaining how human minds were not made for the modern world, but adapted to the demands of modern times. Ed mentions a book named, Rhetorica ad Herennium, written sometime between 86 and 82 B.C., the only truly complete discussion of the memory techniques invented by Simonides to have survived the middle ages. In the Rhetorica ad Herennium it speaks of the difference between natural memory and artificial memory. Artificial memory is achieved using the “method of loci,” when you translate what you are trying to remember into images and store them in a space, a place that you can easily visualize in your mind’s eye. To add a extra twist on this technique, you can distort the images that you use to represent what you are trying to remember. The more creative you are with the images and the more easily you can visualize the place you store them, the less forgettable they become. Ed also insist that it is in the best interest of storing memory on a long term basis, to include as other senses, such as touch, taste, or smell, into you imaging.

CHAPTER 6: How To Memorize A Poem

    Joshua prepared for memorizing a poem by stocking up on memory palaces because of how much more rigorous this task will be compared to remember Ed’s to do list. Even though Joshua may seek an improvement and easy access to his memory,  Early writers viewed memory as more of a tool to develop stronger personal ethics, as well as becoming a complete person. The secret to becoming a grand master of life was to learn old texts, as opposed to merely reading them. A Dutch poet Jan Luyken’s saying was, “One book, printed in the heart’s own wax/ Is worth a thousand in the stacks.” After convincing Discover magazine to send him to Europe to right on the World Memory Championship and Ed Cooke to let him stay at his place while there, he made his trip to the competition. Even the competitors of the World Memory Championship dreaded memorizing a poem. Two types of  recollections were indicated in the earliest memory treatises, memoria rerum, memory for things, and memoria verborum, memory for words. Quintilian and Cicero agreed that remembering an abundance of words such as speeches, memoria verborum, are learned by using memoria rerum,  remembering by every major topic.

Chapter 7: The End of Memory

    Foer describes how remembering use to be the only tool for passing information leaned by one to another. Today we remember very little because we don’t have too. We have planners, GPS devices, video cameras, and all sorts of other technology at our disposal. Even though we have all these tools today, the first external memory source was the written word. Back in ancient times the early form of the book were scrolls,  which were a hassle to read due to the absent of punctuation marks and spaces between the words. There was an inability to start in the middle of the scrolls because of the absence of an index, to add on to all the other problems. Books metamorphosed since then into what we know today and changed the way we rely on our memory.

Chapter 8: The OK Plateau

    While in training, which started to show some results, he hit a plateau. His memory had stop improving after a few months. Joshua noticed that he could not learn how to memorize a deck of cards fast. When Foer consulted in Anders Ericson, Ericson recommended him to check out the literature on typing. Foer learned that he has improved so well at memorizing things such as a deck of playing card to the point that he was unconsciously completing the task. In other words, when he was memorizing the deck of cards his memory was working on auto pilot. A psychologist Paul Fitts described three stages of learning, in which Foer may have experienced. The “cognitive stage,” intellectualizing the task and finding new ways to perform it, was the first followed by the “associative stage,” becoming more efficient, and the “OK plateau,” being OK with how good you are. Once Foer hit the OK plateau the best solution for the problem was failing. Once he pushed himself harder and started to fail, as others, you get out of the autonomous stage and enter back into your conscious learning.

Chapter: 9

    While training and researching on his competitors, mostly Ram Kolli, defending U.S. Memory champion, his attention was brought to a Tony Buzan, pupil, Raemon Matthews. Raemon was set out how important memory was and trains a few students which he dubbed the “Talented Tenth. Matthews teaches memory techniques in the intent for his students to use it in everyday life. He Believes it is a tool that will get them further than there current surroundings. Matthews has won two citywide Teacher of the Year awards for his work with the children. Matthew is one of a few, such as Tony Buzan, trying to implement more memory techniques into the schools.

Chapter 10: The Little Rain Man

In attempting to find someone as equal of a savant as Daniel Tammet, a twenty-six year old British Savant also known as brain-man, he found Kim Peck, also known as Rain Man. Daniel’s brain was said to be altered by an epileptic seizure he suffered as a child, that resulted in Daniel being a prodigious savant. Kim Peek,R ain Man, was also considered a savant. The interesting point of Kim’s knowledge was his IQ and how his take on what was appropriate was esoteric. He only had an IQ of 87. After some investigation on both savants, especially Daniel, Foer came to the conclusion that we all may have the abilities of people like Daniel and Kim lying dormant in Us.

Chapter 11: The U.S. Memory Championship

    Foer’s practice times were getting close to the records that other memory guru’s had set. He was now confident enough to go through with competing in the U.S. Memory Championship. It was a challenge for Foer, but as a surprising twist to many he was able to walk away with the championship. Throughout all his research, Foer found a new respect for memory.

The Video Lounge

    This video describes how memory has evolved from a very critical skill to a less critical and outsourced skill. He explains how the ancient people outstandingly knew so much in cognitive science even though they were not nearly as developed civilization. Even they knew how the human brain is better at remembering concepts and images as opposed to singled data.

Personal Insights

Why I think:

• The author is one of the most brilliant people around…or is full of $%&#, because:

The ideas communicated throughout the book can provide for a nifty edge in the business world. There is so much reliance on external memory banks that it has made the people from these modern times, including me, mentally lazier. I would have to image that anyone that takes advantage of the memory techniques will have more of a clear cut foundation in managing a business.

• If I were the author of the book, I would have done these three things differently:

1.    I would have organized it slightly differently. Subtitles would have been a great idea.

2.    Foer repeated a good amount of information. But I do understand he was accounting for the reader’s, most likely, average memory.

3.    I would have left out some of the side stories that drifted off the subject. It was not a huge problem. But it was something I would have did differently.

• Reading this book made me think differently about the topic in these ways:

1.    This book made me think differently on the effective way to learn information. In the past, I have been taught that learning through repetition was the most effective method

2.    I previously thought that being able to remember as much as S in chapter two could only do you well. Reading his story makes me realize that there is a such thing as remembering too much for your own good.

3.    I have a different outlook on my past. I have realized that the techniques taught in this book has already helped me remember important information. I learned the alphabet through song and the orders of operation through the same memory techniques covered in this book.

• I’ll apply what I’ve learned in this book in my career by:

1.    I plan on using the “memory palace” technique to remember important information. After reading this book, I realize that is important to make sure information sticks and sinks in to my mind.

2.    Moonwalking with Einstein has encouraged me to truly see my brain as an improvable muscle. I have obviously got some more potential to explore in my brain.

3.    I will use memoria rerum to learn new concepts. This should be a very useful tool for presenting.

• Here is a sampling of what others have said about the book and its author:

“What others (scholarly and magazine reviews – along with on-line reviews – not simply reviews off the back of the book) have said about the book and its author?” Insert: Write a synthesis and summary of these often varying perspectives – this is to be followed by a bibliography of physical and web sources consulted – in the next section. This section should be at least one to two full paragraphs – and perhaps more! The more extensive the research you do to find and compare reviews, the better your score will be in this area.

Bibliography

Alexandra Horowitz. 2011, Mar 11. How To Memorize Everything.
Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/books/review/book-review-Moonwalking-with-Einstein-by-Joshua-Foer.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Michiko Kakutani. 2011, Mar 7. Remember How Important It Is Not To Forget. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/books/08book.html?pagewanted=all

Elizabeth F. Loftus. 2011, Mar 5. In A Memory Palace. Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703409304576166881407595142.html

Josh Cohen. 2011,  Mar 15. Moonwalking With Einstein By Josh Foer. Retrieved from
http://mnemotechnics.org/moonwalking-with-einstein-joshua-foer-1745.html

Josua Foer (2011). Moonwalking With Eintein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York, New York: the Penguin Group

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Contact Info

To contact the author of this article, “A Summary and Analysis of Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer for Practicing and Aspiring Managers,” please email ivoray.dyson@selu.edu.  

About the Publisher  

David C. Wyld (dwyld.kwu@gmail.com) is the Robert Maurin Professor of Management at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. He is a management consultant, researcher/writer, and executive educator. His blog, Wyld About Management, can be viewed at http://wyldaboutmanagement.blogspot.com/. He also serves as the Director of the Reverse Auction Research Center (http://reverseauctionresearch.com/), a hub of research and news in the expanding world of competitive bidding. Dr. Wyld also maintains compilations of his student’s publications regarding:

• management concepts (http://toptenmanagement.blogspot.com/)
• book reviews (http://wyld-about-books.blogspot.com/) and
• international foods (http://wyld-about-food.blogspot.com/).                                             

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