Moonwalking With Einstein

Moonwalking With Einstein not only educates you about the history of memory, and how its standing has declined over centuries, but also gives you actionable techniques to extend and improve your own.

We didn’t always have the attention span of a goldfish, but today it sure seems that way.

Imagine our memory had been so bad, once we finally became old enough to pass on knowledge from generation to generation.

We wouldn’t be here today, had the elders not remembered a few important things.

Before the invention of scripture, memory artists were today’s equivalent of quarterbacks. King Cyrus of Persia was known for knowing all the names of his soldiers, and Socrates mocked writing for making people forgetful.

No wonder: Anything that was written before 200 BC had no punctuation, all texts were basically just word strings. If you didn’t already know what you were reading, reading was useless.

If there’s one guy to blame then, for the decline of memory, we’d have to point the finger at Johannes Gutenberg. In 1440 he invented the printing press, and it was all downhill from there.

Once we could store information externally, physically store it anywhere in our house and access it at any time, the need to remember things significantly declined.

This tendency has continued ever since, and taken a major turn for the worse with the invention of smartphones and globally available internet.

However, just because our memory sucks now doesn’t mean we can’t improve it. You might know that the average number of list items we can store in our short-term memory is 7.

This capacity can be extended though, as shown in a study by K. Anders Ericsson and William Chase from 1980.

Test subject S.F. expanded his ability to memorize digits from 7 to 79 through over 230 hours of repeating number sequences to himself, a technique also called the phonological loop.

Similarly, it was found that chess players have a so-called chess memory. Because they are an expert in their field, they perceive the board differently and focus on the most important parts of it, based on their experience.

It’s called chess memory because it is limited to chess and won’t help them do better on general memory tests.

The lesson? Through repetition, practice and becoming an expert in certain fields you can increase your capacity to remember things.

Remembering more is one thing, and you’re bound to hit an eventual ceiling there, but recalling better and faster is where it really gets interesting. 2 quick examples from the summary are chunking and the memory palace. Chunking simply means dividing one string of information into several. Can you remember 1117200112241999 just by looking at it once?…