The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

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The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

JOSHUA FOER, MEMORY CHAMPION


■ Most of us would like to have a better memory. We imagine our lives would be better—simpler, faster, easier—if we could recall the things that slip our minds on a daily basis and, increasingly, as we get older. But journalist Joshua Foer took the task more seriously than a passing whim. After witnessing the USA Memory Championship in 2005, where competitors memorize poems, decks of playing cards and strings of numbers in a certain period of time, Foer became seriously interested in this community of mental athletes. After reading that one competitor had said, “It’s all about technique and understanding how the memory works” and “Anyone can do it, really,” Foer decided to train for the next USA Memory Championship.

Using age-old techniques such as building a memory palace to store images in locations in his mind, turning numbers into letters and thus into words, and turning names into images [see sidebar], Foer began one year of training to become the 2006 USA Memory Champion, which he catalogs in the book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (Penguin, 2011). The book not only documents Foer’s training program but researches the science of memory and the history of memory-training literature from the fifth century BC up to the present, including modern case studies of a man who couldn’t remember anything beyond his childhood, not even that he just met you a day ago, and a man who remembered everything.
“What would it mean to have all that otherwise-lost knowledge at my fingertips?” he writes in the book’s opening. “I couldn’t help but think that it would make me more persuasive, more confident, and, in some fundamental sense, smarter. Certainly I’d be a better journalist, friend, and boyfriend. But more than that, I imagined that having a memory like (World Memory Champion) Ben Pridmore’s would make me an altogether more attentive, perhaps even wiser, person. 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. Surely some of the forgetting that seems to plague us is healthy and necessary. If I didn’t forget so many of the dumb things I’ve done, I’d probably be unbearably neurotic. But how many worthwhile ideas have gone unthought and connections unmade because of my memory’s shortcomings?”
Here, Foer discusses the importance of memory in an increasingly digitized society, what kind of memory it’s possible to increase, and where he might have left his car.

Brain World: You write that the only thing that differentiates us from our caveman ancestors is our memories. “Not the memories that reside in our own brains, for the child born today enters the world just as much a blank slate as the child born thirty thousand years ago, but rather the memories that are stored outside ourselves—in books, photographs, museums, and these days in digital media. Once upon a time, memory was at the root of all culture, but over the last thirty millennia since humans began painting their memories on cave walls, we’ve gradually supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of external memory aids—a process that has sped up exponentially in recent years. …Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.” Today’s society, you point out, has plenty of ways for us to remember things, such as daily planners for our schedules, a GPS for directions, Google for the rest of the information. You even talk about a man who records every moment of his life so he won’t have to remember anything. Why do we need to remember anything?
Joshua Foer: It’s really handy to outsource certain acts of remembering to technology. We all agree that we are better off not having to remember a bunch of phone numbers, but have our Blackberry or iPhone remember it. There are certain memories we don’t want to outsource, that we’re better off having in our minds. Like memories of our lives. I think this [movement] is just starting, that we’ll be using more technology to store things like phone numbers, and we’re happy to have computers, but it’s better for us to remember our own actual memories. So I think it’s a mixed bag. But in the end, I say, “How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember.”

BW: Like many of the competitors, for training you donned industrial earmuffs and goggles to block out noise and visual distractions. Has this training changed the way you think about multitasking?
JF: I do think that remembering requires attention. Multitasking is about spreading attention thin, and that’s a recipe for being forgetful.

BW: You cite neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire’s 2000 study with fMRIs of London cab drivers who had to memorize the location and traffic patterns of 25,000 streets, and also her study of mental athletes. She found that their anatomical brain structures were the same as regular people, but that they accessed different parts of the brain. Do you think that the brain is a muscle you can train, or is memory a skill you become an expert at?
JF: The brain as a muscle is a metaphor. It’s got some things going for it, it’s got some things that are problematic. It is not simply the case that doing these sort of memory tasks improves some sort of generalizable memory, in the way that lifting weights strengthens the muscles. There’s an old distinction that goes back to the earliest writing in classical Latin, the distinction between natural and artificial memory.

BW: You compare it a computer, to the hard drive you’re born with and the software you run on your hardware.
JF: You can improve your artificial memory, trying to make it more efficient, but it’s not fundamentally improving your natural memory. And that’s confusing sometimes.

BW: Yes. A few days after you won the USA Memory Championship you went out drinking and forgot that you drove there and took the subway home. You wrote, “I’d upgraded my memory’s software, but my hardware seemed fundamentally unchanged.” Do you have to consciously use the techniques you learned—say, to remember someone’s name, or that you drove your car to a bar, or that it’s your wife’s birthday—to remember something?
JF: Ultimately, what matters is how you function in the actual world, so if there are techniques to be used to function better, you should use them. The thing about memory techniques is that they work when you remember to use them—you have to remember to remember. The advantage is if you’re going to use the techniques. The general principles are sort of broadly applicable—I think I probably took away even more than remembering a credit card number, but they’re not something you actually need on an everyday basis.

BW: So if your working memory hasn’t really improved, were there any benefits to your year of training and all the memory techniques?
JF: It’s fun and nice, and knowing people’s names does come in handy. Sometimes the ability to remember a thousand numbers is like having a Lamborghini in the garage. I try and keep in shape, because if you’re not training you lose some of the speed. If I’m going shopping I’ll try to remember my shopping list. But the more important lesson is the general principles behind why they work—it’s about paying attention, and a kind of depth of process. You don’t have to be building memory palaces or memorizing cards to use those principles in your daily life.
If you throw down your keys and don’t remember, then you weren’t paying attention. You can be the person who treats everything like that, or the kind of person who is mindful and paying attention and is memorable, and not just be somebody who throws down the keys all the time.

BW: Before the contest, they talk about emptying your memory palace, an imaginary house with different rooms where you place outrageously visual images. How do you do that? How do you forget something you have been working so hard to remember?
JF: There’s two ways: You can metaphorically walk through and scrub the walls, as a conscious, willful act; or you just don’t think about that memory palace for a long time, and let [the images] fade. If you don’t go back and revisit it, they will fade. That’s another way of emptying them.

BW: At one of the poetry-memorizing contests, you found that many of the men used images to memorize the poems, but some of the women used emotions. The men didn’t really have to understand the poetry, but one woman had to understand it and know how it made her feel. Are there different senses for memory that work differently for different people and different genders? Like, will someone be able to remember an event based on music, or food or smells, or emotions or images? Can a person improve different sensory memories?
JF: I don’t think it’s an innate proclivity—the things that we do are the things we find interesting. Just as one of the things I write about is that chess grandmasters have incredible memories for details in their fields of expertise—that’s something they’re not born with, they develop. In our own little niche ways, we develop extraordinary memories for certain things. Some people are more visual and some are more auditory. You should go with what works.

BW: You talk about actively making something a multisensory image, something visually vivid, with smells and sounds that you can feel and touch.
JF: The idea is to increase the depth at which you’re processing something: The more associational hooks you can put on something, the more memorable it can be. It’s about doing it really fast and coming up with ways to see the images and smell them and feel them in your mind’s eye, because that makes them more memorable. It’s true that the more we are engaged by something and the more that we engage the other things we know in our senses, in terms of how to structure information, the more memorable stuff becomes.

BW: You write about the historical role memorizing has had in education, how compared to students today, a century ago students had to memorize a whole lot more—using the “drill and kill” rote memorization method. You write: “Of course the goal of education is not merely to cram a bunch of facts into students’ heads. It’s to lead them to understand those facts… But even if facts don’t by themselves lead to understanding, you can’t have understanding without facts. And crucially, the more you know the easier it is to know more. Memory is like a spider web that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.”
Are you hoping for education to return to the days of vast memorization—albeit using different methods, like memory palaces for memorization instead of rote drills?
JF: I think that overall we are better off than we were 100 years ago. The role of education is to create citizens and people that are thoughtful and curious and abstract thinkers. That’s what we want. I do think there’s probably been an over-de-emphasis on raw knowledge: You need to have stuff in your skull if you’re gong to have stuff to think about. I’m talking about something subtle in education, a slight reorientation.

BW: Do you think there’s a limit on brain space, how much people devote to memorizing where others may devote to, say, understanding relationships or improving the world?
JF: No I don’t think it works like that. The idea that you can only store so much up there is not the way it works; if anything, it’s opposite: The more you throw up there, the easier it is to add more stuff. One of the things that united the competitors is that there’s actually a degree of creative imagination, which I found surprising. The one thing that all of these events and this sport depends upon is being able to imagine stuff that’s really weird and really unforgettable.

BW: What do you think the connection between memory and happiness is? Does a better memory make a happier person?
JF: I think it has to do with how you use your memories. There are people who have great memories and dwell on failures and sad things and are depressed, and there are people who dwell on success and happy things, who are probably well adjusted. E.P. [the man whose hippocampus was destroyed and had couldn’t form new memories or remember anything beyond his childhood and his service in the merchant marines] was relatively content. Living completely in the present.

BW: Some people in your book believe that aging has no effect on memory? What do you think?
JF: I think that I quote that skeptically. Aging is a real phenomenon and it comes with real cognitive costs, and long-term memory loss is often, sadly, one of them.

BW: How do you think neuroscience will change this?
JF: I think it’s going to be an exciting next couple of decades. One thing I came to appreciate is that all the science is the last frontier—there is so much that is so poorly understood about how memory works, and the brain, and it’s waiting to be figured out.


Source: www.brainworldmagazine.com