Junkyard Wisdom

Joshua Foer is a journalist who began investigating the men and women who compete in the US Memory Championships. As he researched the methods used to remember vast amounts of information, he found himself persuaded to enter the competition. He trained for a year with an expert in memory techniques. At the next competition, much to Foer’s surprise, he won!

The book title Moonwalking with Einstein refers to a mnemonic technique that Foer used to memorize a deck of cards — the goofier and more memorable an image the easier it is to recall. Foer explains some of the tricks that professionals use to train their minds to have incredible memories, and he also explores the people who call themselves savants (he mostly refutes their claim and says they just use memory techniques).

I enjoyed the story, but this book is primarily about how our minds work. Why can we remember the 16th President but not what we had for lunch yesterday? Why do we struggle to recall a name, but when asked, “Do you mean Joe?” we immediately remember that the name was indeed Joe? Or take Foer himself, who won the US Memory Championship, but still took the train home from dinner while forgetting he had driven there! These are the kinds of curiosities about our memory that the book explores, and I found them all very interesting.

Foer is a good writer, a good storyteller, and appears to be a good researcher. With all the new information coming out about how our brains work, this book is timely and interesting.