Having a memory like Rain Man’s is easier than it looks, according to US memory champion Joshua Foer, who comes to Dublin this week
WHEN WAS the last time you forgot something? Can you remember? The other morning I was headed for a dental appointment when my car keys vanished off the face of the earth. Gone. You can imagine the scene: the fruitless zooming around the house; the merciless ticking of the kitchen clock. I finally accepted defeat, dug out a spare set and stepped out the door.
Then I happened to stick my hand into the pocket of the hoodie I was wearing under my rain jacket. And there were the real keys – right where I had put them 10 minutes earlier. I had no memory of doing so.
Why am I so confident that you are nodding your head in rueful recognition? I’d be willing to bet that if it’s not your car keys, it’s the number for the credit card; if not that, the password for one of the dozen or so online shopping sites you use. In a world where we can find out pretty much everything with the click of a mouse, we appear to be increasingly unable to remember anything at all.
Six years ago a young American science writer called Joshua Foer was assigned to write a piece about the US Memory Championship for Slate magazine. He became fascinated by the people involved, their feats of memory and their insistence that there was nothing special about the ability to memorise a list of 300 random words, or the digits of pi to 1,000 decimal places, or the whole of Paradise Lost. If anybody could do it, Foer wondered, could he? He decided to enter the event the following year.
Foer is a something of a wunderkind from a family of high achievers – one of his brothers was, until recently, the editor of New Republicmagazine; the other is the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer – but he insists his memory is no better than yours or mine. Yet after just 12 months of memory training he won the 2006 competition.
He recounts his adventures, and explores a vast range of memory-related topics, from neuroscience to pseudoscience, in a book called Moonwalking with Einstein. But the book's biggest strength is its extraordinary cast of characters, from the original Rain Man, Kim Peek, to the man known to neuroscience as EP who, following a virulent bout of herpes simplex, suffered one of the most extreme forms of amnesia ever recorded. Peek couldn't forget anything; EP couldn't remember anything.
“It’s a good thing that we’re all somewhere in between those two extremes,” Foer says. “But one of the things that surprised me was that EP was a content individual. He wasn’t aware that he was living an existential nightmare, and so he was a happy guy.
“One of the most moving experiences of researching this book was when I went for a walk round the block with EP. EP couldn’t tell you the name of the street that he was on. He couldn’t even tell me his age, within 25 years.” Yet EP, who has since died, was able to find his way around the block.
“The route had etched itself on to his brain through habit. We walked past these neighbours, and they waved and smiled. He had no idea who they were, but something inside of him told him that they were friendly.”
But the book’s star is the English memory champion Ed Clarke, Foer’s coach and mentor, whose singular approach to memory – and to life – lights up the book’s pages. Clarke has become one of Foer’s closest friends; a real-world result Foer says he never would have predicted. Clarke insisted Foer begin by reading a series of classical texts including Cicero, Thomas Aquinas and a Latin rhetoric textbook from 86 BC. It’s a measure of his dedication that Foer wasn’t put off at lesson one.
He proceeded to master memory techniques, including the Major system, a method of assigning letters to numbers, and the building of “memory palaces”, placing the objects to be remembered in a three-dimensional space that allows them to be retrieved later.
“The art is in creating images that are beautiful, ugly, weird, raunchy – so unforgettable that they will stick,” says Foer.
Hence the book’s memorable title: a mental image of Foer moonwalking with Einstein outside his parents’ bedroom door, invented to help him remember the card sequence four of spades, king of hearts, three of diamonds.
Has his memory improved since he became the US memory champion? “Well, I’m a little bit out of practice at this point,” he says. He is, however, convinced the faculty of memory is too important for us to simply relinquish it, wholesale, to hand-held digital devices.
“Once upon a time memory was everything,” he says. “People actually invested in their memories, and cultivated them, and laboriously furnished their minds. But memory is more than just a vault that we drop stuff into and retrieve stuff out of. To be curious about stuff we have to actually know enough to be curious about stuff. And, in that sense, having stuff knocking around in your skull is necessary for leading a rich life.”
Moonwalking with Einsteinis published by Allen Lane. Joshua Foer will talk at the Science Gallery, Dublin 2, on Thursday at 6pm as part of the Memory Lab exhibition; sciencegallery.com
Boost your memory
According to Joshua Foer there’s no magic formula that will instantly transform a sieve-head into a sponge-head. “It’s really about paying attention – figuring out how to make something meaningful, colourful and interesting to yourself,” he says.
So less of a magic formula and more a matter of being alert and open? “And mindful. Yeah. The reason we don’t remember where we put the car keys is because we don’t care. We’re not paying attention.
“You can be the kind of person who moves through life treating everything in that way, in which case you’ll have unmemorable experiences. Or you can [try] to figure out how to make things exciting and meaningful. That’s what I took away from the whole experience: the importance of being the kind of person who remembers to remember.”
