Later On

I’m reading with great fascination and enjoyment Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein: The art and science of remembering everything. As he takes care to point out, this is not a self-help book. Rather, it is a book about human memory: the forms it takes, how it works, and techniques once commonly used to allow humans to remember vast amounts of information—quite solid techniques that were unceremoniously discarded and forgotten once the invention of writing began the rush to maximize external memory—to the point where (as he writes) we now value the skill of being able to find information more than the skill of remembering information. And when I say “forgotten”, I don’t mean that we knew we once had those techniques but we don’t know what they are, but rather that we even forgot that such techniques existed, so that we are now amazed at relatively trivial feats of memory—say, at a person who goes into a room, meets a dozen new people just before he gives a presentation, and when asked a question during the presentation, always addresses the questioner by name. We’re floored, since most of us have trouble recalling the name when we are introduced to one new person (exception: if you find person is sexually attractive, the name is remembered without effort). And yet that sort of skill is trivial and, as demonstrated to Joshua in his investigations, can be taught in ten minutes.

I’m blogging right now not so much because the book is extremely interesting and highly entertaining, though it is, but because of what just happened.

I’m learning a lot of new Spanish vocabulary this afternoon—about 30 new words, some of which are naturally hard to recall. Then I thought, what the hey? why not try the technique Foer describes in the book?

I am stunned. I know every one of those words, more or less indelibly, after just one pass. And it’s permanent: I’ll know them tomorrow and next week, just as described.

Highly recommended, with this caveat: the explanation for why the technique works recognizes human evolution as a fact.