Form a strong image of this post--maybe you'll remember it

Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: The Penguin Press, 2011.

Who knew this would be a "challenge" book? When I picked it up, I thought it would be a pop-science discussion of memory and how to remember more. It's that, but it also shifts swiftly into participatory journalism and the challenge as Foer (brother of author Jonathan) decides to build himself some "memory palaces" of his own to really understand the concept.

It's a very entertaining read, full of interesting facts. We can remember images way better than we think (test subjects flashed 2500 pictures can tell later whether they'd seen those photos before (versus a very similar photo) with about 90 percent accuracy). That's how the image-focused memory-palace tool becomes so powerful--don't remember these two cards, remember Pamela Anderson serving you a martini. When Foer first tries it, he describes it slowly enough that the reader can play along--and it seems to work, though I'm not too inspired to master it. I was also intrigued by the thought that leading a very full life makes time seem to go slower (in a good way), with a counter-example from a guy in self-imposed solitary confinement and darkness who lost track of time and thought only a month had gone by when two had.

There's an interesting connection with How We Decide, which I read earlier this year. That book's author described how the emotional side of the brain can process an overwhelming amount of facts quickly and make the right decision (e.g., a pilot who needs to get through a storm or a quarterback who throws a pass through a tempest of blockers). Foer approaches a similar concept from a memory angle, describing chicken sexers who have memorized enough bird-hindquarter patterns (that's as much detail as you need) to just "know" somehow whether a chick is male or female and SWAT team professionals who can tell in a flash whether a person walking up to a building is a threat. The brain has internalized all of the relevant images, and then the emotional side of the brain can snap to the right choice. (This also relates to the magical 10,000 hours of practice that makes an expert, as described in Outliers.)

Foer also spends some time discussing externalized memories: all of the smartphones and notepads and webpages and other crutches we have for remembering things these days. This blog is one of those tools--I don't have to remember details about which books I liked recently (including the two from the previous paragraph), as long as Blogger doesn't go down. It means that we don't bother to store a lot in our heads. Is that a problem? Not really, when it makes things easier, but by the end Foer suggests that the mindfulness that attention to memory brings is definitely a good thing, even if you don't become the U.S. memory champion.

Rating: ***