Moonwalking With Einstein (30 page)

That was the paradox: For all of the memory stunts I could now perform, I was still stuck with the same old shoddy memory that misplaced car keys and cars. Even while I had greatly expanded my powers of recall for the kinds of structured information that could be crammed into a memory palace, most of the things I wanted to remember in my everyday life were not facts or figures or poems or playing cards or binary digits. Yes, I could memorize the names of dozens of people at a cocktail party, and that was surely useful. And you could give me a family tree of English monarchs, or the terms of the American secretaries of the interior, or the dates of every major battle in World War II, and I could learn that information relatively fast, and even hold on to it for a while. These skills would have been a godsend in high school. But life, for better or worse, only occasionally resembles high school.

While my digit span may have doubled, could it really be said that my working memory was twice as good as it had been when I started my training? I wish I could say it was. But the truth is, it wasn’t. When asked to recall the order of, say, a series of random inkblots or a series of color swatches or the clearance of the doorway to my parents’ cellar, I was no better than average. My working memory was still limited by the same magical number seven that constrains everyone else. Any kind of information that couldn’t be neatly converted into an image and dropped into a memory palace was just as hard for me to retain as it had always been. I’d upgraded my memory’s software, but my hardware seemed to have remained fundamentally unchanged.

And yet clearly I had changed. Or at least how I thought about myself had changed. The most important lesson I took away from my year on the competitive memory circuit was not the secret to learning poetry by heart, but rather something far more global and, in a way, far more likely to be of service in my life. My experience had validated the old saw that practice makes perfect. But only if it’s the right kind of concentrated, self-conscious, deliberate practice. I’d learned firsthand that with focus, motivation, and, above all, time, the mind can be trained to do extraordinary things. This was a tremendously empowering discovery. It made me ask myself: What else was I capable of doing, if only I used the right approach?

Once our testing had wrapped up, I asked Ericsson whether he thought anyone who’d put in the same amount of time as I did could have improved his memory to the degree that I had.

“I think that with only one data point, we don’t know,” he told me. “But it’s rare for someone to make the kind of commitment you made, and I think your willingness to take on the challenge may make you different. You’re clearly not a random person, but on the other hand, I’m not sure there’s anything in how you improved that is completely outside the range of what a motivated college student could do.”

When I started on this journey, standing with my journalist’s notebook in the back of the Con Edison auditorium more than a year earlier, I didn’t know where it would lead,
how
thoroughly it would take over my life, or how it would eventually alter me. But after having learned how to memorize poetry and numbers, cards and biographies, I’m convinced that remembering more is only the most obvious benefit of the many months I spent training my memory. What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.

The problem that bedeviled the synesthete S and the fictional Funes was an inability to distinguish between those details that were worth paying attention to and those that weren’t. Their compulsive remembering was clearly pathological, but I can’t help but imagine that their experience of the world was also, perversely, richer. Nobody would want to have their attention captured by every triviality, but there is something to be said for the value of not merely passing through the world, but also making some effort to capture it—if only because in trying to capture it, one gets in the habit of noticing, and appreciating.

I confess that I never got good enough at filling memory palaces on the fly to feel comfortable throwing out my Dictaphone and notebook. And as someone whose job requires knowing a little bit about a lot, my reading habits are necessarily too extensive to be able to practice more than the occasional intensive reading and memorizing that Ed preaches. Though I committed quite a few poems to heart using memory techniques, I still haven’t tackled a work of literature longer than “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Even once I’d reached the point where I could squirrel away more than thirty digits a minute in memory palaces, I still only sporadically used the techniques to memorize the phone numbers of people I actually wanted to call. I found it was just too simple to punch them into my cell phone. Occasionally, I’d memorize shopping lists, directions, or to-do lists, but only in the rare circumstances when there wasn’t a pen available to jot them down. It’s not that the techniques didn’t work. I am walking proof that they do. It’s that it is so hard to find occasion to use them in the real world in which paper, computers, cell phones, and Post-its can handle the task of remembering for me.

So why bother investing in one’s memory in an age of externalized memories? The best answer I can give is the one that I received unwittingly from EP, whose memory had been so completely lost that he could not place himself in time or space, or relative to other people. That is: How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. 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, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. 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. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it’s about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have become estranged. That’s what Ed had been trying to impart to me from the beginning: that memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it’s about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.

Before the KL7
festivities degraded into a debauched free-for-all of blindfolded chess games and drunken recitations of the previous day’s poem, Gunther cornered me on a couch and asked if I would continue competing on the memory circuit. I told him that a not small part of me wanted to keep it up. It was, after all, not only strangely thrilling in a way I could have never predicted, but also addictive. That night, I could envision something I’d never before contemplated: the possibility of getting sucked in even deeper. After all, I had a U.S. title and a speed cards record to defend, and I was sure I could break the minute barrier in cards if I only put in a bit more time. Not to mention historic dates: I could do so much better in historic dates! And there was the grand master standard I’d just missed. “ ‘Grand Master of Memory’ would look awfully nice on a business card,” I joked to Gunther (it actually is on his business card). I could have filled a memory palace with the scenes I was imagining: the millennium system I’d develop, the horse blinders I’d buy, the hours of practice I’d invest, the jet-setting to national championships around the world. But even then, at the very moment I was being offered admission to the memory circuit’s sanctum sanctorum, I was sober enough to recognize that it was time for me to hang up my cleats. My experiment was over. The results were in. I told Gunther that I would miss it, but I didn’t see myself coming back next year.

“It’s too bad,” he said, “but I understand it. It would mean a lot more practice, and that’s time which you very likely can invest in a much better way.” He was right, I thought. I wondered why he’d never managed to have that realization about himself.

Ed got up off the couch and raised a toast to me, his star pupil. “Let’s go get a bagel,” he said, and we walked out the door. I have no memory of the rest of the night. I woke up the next afternoon with a large red circle on my cheek—the imprint of my names-and-faces bronze medal. I’d forgotten to take it off.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book took a while. I’m grateful to everyone who supported me in its creation as readers of drafts, sources of expertise, proofreaders, and friends. There are more of you than I could possibly name. I am especially grateful to all of the mental athletes who spent so much time with me, generously sharing their knowledge and their lives.

This book benefited from two editors. Vanessa Mobley guided it through its initial stages. Eamon Dolan expertly saw it through to completion. I am grateful to Ann Godoff for her faith in me and to everyone at Penguin Press for their work on this book’s behalf. My literary agent, Elyse Cheney, is the best partner anyone could ask for. Lindsay Crouse was an extraordinary checker of hard-to-pin-down facts. Brendan Vaughan helped make my writing much sharper.

In the interests of explanatory expediency, I have moved some details, conversations, and scenes around chronologically, but these changes don’t materially affect the truth of this book. To the extent that memory records and other time-sensitive facts are not always up-to-date, that is because I have tried to tell this story from the perspective I had when originally experiencing it. In the three years it took me to write this book, much changed in the world. My girlfriend became my wife. The thirty-second barrier in speed cards fell, and fell again. The poem event was finally nixed from international competition. And sadly, EP and Kim Peek passed away. I feel profoundly lucky for the time I was able to spend with them.

NOTES

1: THE SMARTEST MAN IS HARD TO FIND

12
$265 million industry in 2008:
Sharp Brains Report
(2009).

2: THE MAN WHO REMEMBERED TOO MUCH

27
80 percent of what they’d seen:
Lionel Standing (1973), “Learning 10,000 Pictures,”
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
25, 207-22.

27
2,500 images:
Timothy F. Brady, Talia Konkle, et al. (2008), “Visual Long-Term Memory Has a Massive Storage Capacity for Object Details,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
105, no. 38, 14325-29.

28
“details could eventually be recovered”:
Elizabeth Loftus and Geoffrey Loftus (1980), “On the Permanence of Stored Information in the Human Brain,”
American Psychologist
35, no. 5, 409-20.

28
Wagenaar came to believe the same thing:
Willem A. Wagenaar (1986), “My Memory: A Study of Autobiographical Memory over Six Years,”
Cognitive Psychology
18, 225-52.

30
only one case of photographic memory has ever been described in the scientific literature:
Photographic memory is often confused with another bizarre—but real—perceptual phenomenon called eidetic memory, which occurs in 2 to 15 percent of children, and very rarely in adults. An eidetic image is essentially a vivid afterimage that lingers in the mind’s eye for up to a few minutes before fading away. Children with eidetic memory never have anything close to perfect recall, and they typically aren’t able to visualize anything as detailed as a body of text. In these individuals, visual imagery simply fades more slowly.

30
a paper in
Nature
:
C. F. Stromeyer and J. Psotka (1970), “The Detailed Texture of Eidetic Images,”
Nature
225, 346-49.

30
none of them could pull off Elizabeth’s nifty trick:
J. O. Merritt (1979), “None in a Million: Results of Mass Screening for Eidetic Ability,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
2, 612.

31
“other people having photographic memory”:
If anyone alive today has a claim to photographic memory, it’s a British savant named Stephen Wiltshire, who has been called the “human camera” for his ability to create sketches of a scene after looking at it for just a few seconds. But even he doesn’t have a truly photographic memory, I learned. His mind doesn’t work like a Xerox machine. He takes liberties. And curiously, his cameralike abilities extend only to drawing certain kinds of objects and scenes, namely architecture and cars. He can’t, say, look at a page of the dictionary and then instantly recall what was on it. In every case except Elizabeth’s where someone has claimed to have a photographic memory, there has always been another explanation.

31
“none of them ever attained any prominence in the scholarly world”:
George M. Stratton (1917), “The Mnemonic Feat of the ‘Shass Pollak,’ ”
Psychological Review
24, 244-47.

33
a pattern of connections between those neurons:
Recently, a paper in the journal
Brain and Mind
attempted to estimate the capacity of the human brain using a model that treats a memory as something stored not in individual neurons but rather in the connections between neurons. The authors estimated that the human brain can store 10
⁸⁴³²
bits of information. By contrast, it’s said that there are somewhere on the order of 10
⁷⁸
atoms in the observable universe.

38
physically altered the gross structure of their brains:
E. A. Maguire et al. (2000), “Navigation-Related Structural Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers,”
PNAS
97, 84398-403.

39
not a single significant structural difference turned up:
E. A. Maguire, et al (2003), “Routes to Remembering: The Brains Behind Superior Memory,”
Nature Neuroscience
6 no.1, 90-95.

40
wouldn’t seem to make any sense:
If the mental athletes were also using navigational skills, why didn’t they have enlarged hippocampuses, like the taxi drivers? The likely answer is that mental athletes simply don’t use their navigational abilities nearly as much as taxi drivers.

44
“Baker/baker paradox”:
G. Cohen (1990), “Why Is It Difficult to Put Names to Faces?”
British Journal of Psychology
81, 287-97.

3: THE EXPERT EXPERT

49
all the hard work of putting food on our tables:
I’m speaking here about egglaying chickens, which are distinct from broiler chickens bred to produce meat.

52
“Exceptional Memorizers: Made, Not Born”:
K. Anders Ericsson (2003), “Exceptional Memorizers: Made, Not Born,”
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
7, no.6, 233-35.

53
volleyball defenders:
Much of this research is captured in
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance
, edited by K. Anders Ericsson, Neil Charness, Paul J. Feltovich, and Robert R. Hoffman.

65
several opponents at once, entirely in their heads:
During the first half of the twentieth century, playing simultaneous games of blindfolded chess against multiple opponents became a fetishized skill in the chess world. In 1947, an Argentinian grand master named Miguel Najdorf set a record by playing forty-five simultaneous games in his mind. It took him twenty-three and a half hours, and he finished with a record of thirty-nine wins, four losses, and two draws, and then was unable to fall asleep for three straight days and nights afterward. (According to chess lore, simultaneous blindfolded chess was once banned in Russia due to the mental health risks.)

4: THE MOST FORGETFUL MAN IN THE WORLD

69
lab technician called EP:
L. Steffanaci et al. (2000), “Profound Amnesia After Damage to the Medial Temporal Lobe: A Neuroanatomical and Neuropsychological Profile of Patient E. P.,”
Journal of Neuroscience
20, no. 18, 7024-36.

5: THE MEMORY PALACE

94
textbook called the
Rhetorica ad Herennium
:
So named after Gaius Herennius, the book’s patron.

94
“This book is our bible”:
The little red Loeb Classical Library English/ Latin edition of the book has the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero’s name printed on its spine—albeit inside a pair of brackets. Until at least the fifteenth century, people believed the short treatise had been written by the great Roman orator himself, but modern scholars have long been doubtful. It made sense that Cicero would have been the book’s author, since he was not only a famous master of memory techniques—he delivered his legendary speeches before the Roman senate from memory—but also (definitively) the author of another work called
De Oratore
, which is where the story of Simonides and the banquet hall first appeared. That the story of Simonides, a fifth-century-B.C. Greek, would have its first written record in a book written four centuries afterward by a Roman reflects the fact that no memory treatises have survived from ancient Greece—though some must certainly have been written. Since Cicero’s recounting of the incident was written so much later than Simonides supposedly remembered the locations of the mangled bodies, nobody can say just how much of the story is myth. I’m willing to wager that quite a lot of it is mythical, but a marble tablet dating to 264 B.C.—two centuries before Cicero, but still two centuries after the fact—and unearthed in the seventeenth century describes Simonides as “the inventor of the system of memory aids.” Still, it’s hard to believe that a technique like the art of memory was invented by one person at one moment in time, in so perfectly poetic a manner. For all we know, Simonides was merely the art of memory’s codifier, or maybe just a particularly adept practitioner who got tagged as its inventor. In any case, Simonides was a real person, and a real poet—the first apparently to charge for his poems and also the first to have called poetry “vocal painting” and painting “silent poetry.” This is a particularly noteworthy turn of phrase for Simonides to have coined because the art of memory that he is credited with inventing is all about turning words into paintings in the mind.

100
less a test of memory than of creativity:
The key thing is to compress as much information as possible into any single well-formed image. The
Ad Herennium
gives the example of a lawyer who needs to remember the basic facts of a case: “The prosecutor has said that the defendant killed a man by poison, has charged that the motive for the crime was an inheritance, and declared that there are many witnesses and accessories to this act.” To remember all this, “we shall picture the man in question as lying ill in bed, if we know his person. If we do not know him, we shall yet take some one to be our invalid, but not a man of the lowest class, so that he may come to mind at once. And we shall place the defendant at the bedside, holding in his right hand a cup, and in his left, tablets, and on the fourth finger a ram’s testicles.” The bizarre image would certainly be tough to forget, but it takes some decoding to figure out exactly what it is you’re supposed to be remembering. The cup is a mnemonic to remind us of the poison, the tablets are a reminder of the will, and the ram’s testicles are a double entendre, reminding us of the witnesses with a verbal pun on
testes
(testimony) and—since Roman purses were often made out of the scrotum of a ram—of the possibility of bribing them. Seriously.

100
“memory is marvelously excited by images of women”:
Rossi,
Logic and the Art of Memory
, p. 22.

6: HOW TO MEMORIZE A POEM

110
“ judgment, citizenship, and piety”:
Carruthers,
The Book of Memory
, p. 11.

110
“worth a thousand in the stacks”:
Draaisma,
Metaphors of Memory
, p. 38.

110
the principle language in which he wrote:
Carruthers,
The Book of Memory,
p. 88.

125
“core of his educational equipment”:
Havelock,
Preface to Plato
, p. 27.

125
Professional memorizers:
My favorite story about professional memorizers is told by Seneca the Younger about a wealthy Roman aristocrat named Calvisius Sabinus, who gave up on trying to learn the great works by heart and instead hired a coterie of slaves to do it for him.

I never saw a man whose good fortune was a greater offence against propriety. His memory was so faulty that he would sometimes forget the name of Ulysses, or Achilles, or Priam . . . But nonetheless did he desire to appear learned. So he devised this shortcut to learning: he paid fabulous prices for slaves—one to know Homer by heart and another to know Hesiod; he also delegated a special slave to each of the nine lyric poets. You need not wonder that he paid high prices for these slaves . . . After collecting this retinue, he began to make life miserable for his guests; he would keep these fellows at the foot of his couch, and ask them from time to time for verses which he might repeat, and then frequently break down in the middle of a word ... Sabinus held to the opinion that what any member of his household knew, he himself also knew.

125
memorizing the Vedas with perfect fidelity:
The Rigveda, the oldest of the Vedic texts, is over ten thousand verses long.

125
attached to poets as official memorizers:
After the introduction of Islam, Arabic mnemonists became known as
huffaz
, or “holders” of the Koran and Hadith.

125
memorized the oral law on behalf of the Jewish community:
For more on Jewish mnemonists, see Gandz, “The Robeh, or the Official Memorizer of the Palestinian Schools.”