I’ve always been fascinated by the brain. I wanted to be a neurosurgeon as a teenager but was talked out of it by my rather traditional dad who didn’t think medicine was a suitable career for a nice Jewish girl who should be settling down with a family.
I was recommended to read Joshua Foer’s insightful book Moonwalking with Einstein by a colleague on Linkedin. I had posted a link to a TEDx event I had spoken at, lamenting about how difficult it had been to remember my talk, and asking for tips. Albert Einstein is one of my heroes so I figured it deserved a look.
Foer’s 2011 blockbuster is all about memory. The sub-title is The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. But it’s also a perceptive discourse on human memory and brain function in our modern world of technology when every fact is just a click or two away.
The Brain’s Great Mysteries
As a teenager, the afflictions that most intrigued me were autism and savant syndrome.
These days autism needs little introduction but when I was a teenager (40 years ago) it was rare. I first encountered it in the TV show St Elsewhere where the son of one of the main characters was autistic. My interest was reignited 15 years ago when my older son was diagnosed with Aspergers (and ADHD) at age 5. It ended up changing my career trajectory as you can read about in my book.
Savant syndrome has everything to do with memory. It is a still rare condition where exceptional memory creates genius-like traits that usually coexist with profound disability. Some are musical prodigies like Leslie Lemke who can play complicated musical pieces on the piano after hearing them just once. Leslie is blind, brain-damaged, and couldn’t walk until he was fifteen.
Others are artistic marvels such as Alonzo Clemons who suffered a traumatic brain injury as a child and can’t read or write, but who can sculpt amazingly lifelike animals after just a glance.
One of the most famous savants is the late Kim Peek who inspired the fictional character Raymond Babbit in the movie Rain Man.
Kim was born with an unusually large head and was found to have brain damage in his cerebellum and an absence of nerves that would usually connect the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Unable to walk until age 4 he had difficulties with basic tasks such as dressing himself. But his memory was legendary knowing thousands of books by heart as well as zip codes, maps, sports trivia and so much more. In his later years he was known as the human google.
What is Memory?
Foer winds these characters and a few more into his narrative but it was the discussion of the role memory plays in our culture and how we have devalued internal memory in favor of external memory aids, that I found most interesting.
“Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that all the world’s ink had become invisible and all our bytes had disappeared. Our world would immediately crumble. Literature, music, law, politics, science, math: Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories”.
Foer goes on to explain how our external memory aids have changed how people think and even shifted our notion of what it means to be intelligent.
In the days of Socrates (fifth century, B.C.) there was push-back on the developing written word after centuries of passing down information through the oral tradition. There was a concern that our minds would get lazy, and as the years have gone by this has played out, with the imperative to have the information within our memory less relevant than knowing where to find it.
From the rote learning in educational settings 100 years ago, the pendulum has likely swung too far in the other direction with schools de-emphasizing raw knowledge in favor of reasoning and creativity.
But you can’t have higher-learning without retrieving existing information.
Foer makes the argument that memory (the art of remembering) and creativity are two sides of the same coin. Curiously the Latin root inventio is the basis of two of our modern English words: inventory and invention. In order to invent, we need a bank of existing ideas to draw on.
The way the human brain stores and indexes information can never be replicated by a computer even with the most advanced artificial intelligence software.
Training for Improved Memory
The core of Moonwalking with Einstein lies at the heart of Foer’s personal journey to compete at the US Memory Championships. A journalist, initially writing an article about “mental athletes” competing at the event the year before, he embarks on a rigorous training schedule to prove whether an “ordinary” person can improve their memory. He winds up in the finals just one year later.
Beyond the capabilities and afflictions of other people, my own fascination stems from a curiosity with my particular brain. Considered a disability by some of those close to me, I have an inability to remember personal experiences and events in my life. While many people can’t remember their childhood, I find myself drawing a complete blank when someone refers to the restaurant we ate at a few months ago or the family event that occurred last year.
If I’m really lucky I’ll get a single fixed image of a moment in time, especially if I have an external photo of the “memory”. But even with my many photobooks carefully kept over the years, I can look through one of even a couple of years ago and I cannot recall actually being there. It’s like it was someone else’s life.
Conversely, I have an incredible memory of facts, figures and concepts that I have picked up particularly in my professional life. Every new fact I learn sparks a hundred linkages to other information and people I know who might find the information useful. I’m an avid reader and retain most of the information at a certain level enabling me to make the linkages, using an external filing system that enables me to get back to the detail very easily.
Yet the TEDx talk, on a topic I was intimately familiar with, proved difficult.
The fundamental basics of memory known since ancient days, are at the heart of how to improve it.
Foer explains this throughout his journey but the key features are: that we remember things in context, ie. as they relate to information already in our brains, and that we are far better at remembering visual imagery than words or numbers.
While Foer describes various systems that can be used to learn certain party tricks like memorizing strings of numbers, cards in a deck, or random words, the fundamentals can be employed by anyone looking to improve their memory for everyday tasks.
The concept of mindfulness is a helpful start for me and something I’m working on. A chronic multi-tasker I am trying to be more present in the moment and aware of what is going on around me instead of living in my head juggling a hundred different ideas.
Some people are simply better at remembering numbers than words, or better with faces and names than other people. But the conclusion of Moonwalking with Einstein is that we all have the capacity to improve our memories with a little bit of effort.
