“Moonwalking with Einstein” is the story of Joshua Foer, an American journalist who covered the US Memory Championships and was so smitten with what he saw that he sought the expertise of K. Anders Ericsson, psychology professor at Florida State University and Ed Cooke, a regular competing “memory athlete” to teach him the techniques the contestants were using. Foer participated in the contest the following year, walking away with the title. This book is partly pop science, partly autobiographical adventure story and partly a pot-pourri of interesting snippets on memory, the written word, educational theory and the nature of skill and expertise.
It seems the title confused some readers. “This wasn’t a book on how to improve your memory,” moaned one Amazon reviewer. “I got the general concept of how the techniques work but no detail which left me confused and a little annoyed.”
The book was never intended to be a “how to” manual. Nevertheless, as someone who had already taken a memory training course, the author’s descriptions of the techniques he was using gave me plenty of useful snippets to take specific areas of that skill to whole new levels, particularly with regard to speed training and memorizing long numbers or other lengthy, abstract data if I so needed.
From time to time, a critic would join the pmemory forum and say that nobody used the pmemory system of numeric figurative codes for serious competition. This assertion was usually in vehement defence of the “Major System”. One of the first things that I found interesting is that Foer reveals that the memory champions don’t use the Major System to remember numbers either. They use a system called “Person – Action – Object”, or “PAO” for short. Each number is represented by an image of a person performing an action on an object, e.g. Frank Sinatra (person) singing (action) into a microphone (object). For six-digit numbers, the memory athlete would take the person representing the first two digits and combine it with the action representing the second two digits with the object from the third two digits, giving a ridiculous, but unique and readily memorable image. This would give him/her a picture for every number up to 999,999 while only having to learn figurative codes for numbers up to 99.
Contestants are apparently always working at developing new techniques that will enable them to memorize more information while having to visualize fewer pictures while doing so. Foer used the analogy of an arms race – someone will come up with some bigger and better system, and then everyone else starts using it and the contest is on to come up with something better still that will give the memory athlete an edge over the rest of the field. Ed Cooke developed the system “Millennium PAO”, in which every number from 0 to 999,999,999 is represented by its own unique image. Similar systems are used for memorizing playing cards and binary digits.
Foer devotes a chapter to “the OK plateau”; the level of skill at which progress tops out and the person makes little or no further improvement. It had long been believed that a person reaching the OK plateau had reached the level of their innate capacity. Upon reaching such a plateau while drilling memorizing cards at speed, Foer called Ericsson for advice. He was told to obtain a metronome and set it 10-20% faster than his current level of skill and keep trying at the faster pace until he stopped making mistakes. If there was a card that kept on giving trouble, Foer was to make a note of it and analyze why it was giving problems. This advice is doubly interesting, not only because it has applicability to areas of skill besides memory, but also because it demonstrates that the level at which many of us stop improving at various endeavours may have more to do with our own consideration that we are now good enough for purpose, rather than being a true index of our ultimate capability.
The pmemory course and forum are quite critical of other memory systems, and reading them both, one could be forgiven for having the idea that the author of the course and the forum members knew what techniques serious competitors were using. My conclusion now is that they probably don’t.
One thing both the pmemory course and many aspects of serious competition have in common is speed, but I feel that their respective approaches may be different. Ed Cooke describes to Foer about the speed aspect – competitors are moving so fast in events such as the speed cards that the only impression the competitor may get is a passing glance as the cards are turned over. The skill here is to learn just how little of the image one needs to see to make it memorable. He describes how it may not be necessary to see the whole image, and to focus on one salient element of it, because if you know your figurative code image system well enough, you should be able to translate that image back again. In fact, when the competitor is really going for broke, the only traces they may form are a series of emotions with no visual images at all. That is a complete departure from what we are taught in pmemory.
Possibly the biggest surprise for me in the book was the revelations about Daniel Tammet, and the questions raised about the nature of his extraordinary memory and freaky on-the-spot arithmetical calculations. Apparently, Daniel competed in the World Memory Championships a couple of times under the name Daniel Corney, achieving fourth place in the year 2000. Foer asks some penetrating questions about the nature of his alleged savantism, and points out how others, upon seeing the TV documentary about Daniel (“Brainman” or “The Boy with the Incredible Brain”), raise suspicions about his mental calculation techniques. Some say that these can be learned by anyone, and that what Daniel is doing is nothing out of the ordinary, and that the stuff he talks about synaesthesia and so on is just an obfuscation of what he is actually doing. There is, so they say, no way of “calculating without calculating”. Daniel may not be a savant after all, but a trained mnemonist who has learned mental calculation and calendar calculation, and there is no comparison between him and the real “Rain Man”, Kim Peek, who also appeared on the documentary.
Just before Foer wraps up with book with his account of how he won the US Memory Championships, he discusses “Mr. Memory” himself, Tony Buzan. Allegedly, opinion on the memory contest circuit is sharply divided about the man who founded the memory championships. Some worship the very ground he walks on, others think he is merely the purveyor of over-hyped self-help books. Foer’s bizarre interview with Buzan, conducted in the back of his chauffeur-driven classic car from Central London to Buzan’s abode a 45-minute drive away, is strongly suggestive of the self-styled guru: his unique mode of dress, his mannerisms and anecdotes, and his mysterious request that the location of his home not be revealed in print.
One thing this book certainly confirms for me is that probably every one of us could develop at least one skill to extraordinary levels, given the right training, sufficient time and bags of dedication.
