The art and science of remembering everything
I just finished this book called Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. It was recommended by Bill Gates so should be a good one. But for me, the most important reason was I wanted to read about a new topic and memory seems to be good topic to explore.
In this book and of course in reality, Foer trained himself from a forgetful man to a champion of USA Memory contest. He can remember the sequence of a shuffled deck in 1 minute 40 something seconds. What an amazing feat. His example shows that the ability to remember things is not inborn, but can be trained. Unfortunately our current lifestyle and the advance of technology are not good simulators for us to remember more. We probably need to write down 3 things we have to do today because as funny as it sounds, we can’t remember such short list. We don’t need to remember our loved ones’ birthdays because the calendar took care of it and notified when it’s nearer the date.
Anyway, going back to the book. There are few quotes I highlighted and worth sharing
The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued.
I think ability to store information in internal memory helps us human make decision fast since we have a lot of reference to evaluate against. Foer shared an example that in chess, the best players spend a lot of time playing old games of other players. This helps create a library of examples in the players’ memory. Thus, when they are faced with similar challenge, they can retrieve the potential move from their memory.
Without time, there would be no need for a memory. But without a memory, would there be such a thing as time?
Life seems to speed up we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.
This statement is so true. If we don’t remember anything internally, there’s no point of time. Foer argued that when our life is mundane and boring (i.e. no significant events), there is nothing to remember about, we feel time collapses, one day blurring into another. And vice versa, when life is full of events, we can recall what happened and feel accomplished. The book cited an example of a scientist who went to live in a cave and cut his connection with real life. He gradually lost the concept of time. He thought the day went slower than actual day outside. So it’s important to change routines and immerse in new experience. When it comes to how to remember anything, the technique is to transform what we need to remember to 2 dimensional form: spatial and sensual memory. These 2 types are easily remembered by human. Hence, for any mnemonic, it’s a must to have 1 or more memory palaces (space) that hold information they want to remember. And each point will be illustrated by some sensual way, be it some bizarre action or colour or feeling that impresses the brain. For example, to remember a Pi number, a mnemonic might encode each number to a image / feeling / colour, so that when they see a set of numbers, such image and feeling will be triggered, that eventually telling a weird story that helps them recite the number sequence. They have a technique called PAO system (Person-Action-Object).
In the PAO system, every two-digit number from 00 to 99 is represented by a single image of a person performing an action on an object.
And one last point about memory and how by remembering more, we will gain more knowledge.
Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.