So I finished book 4 for 2012 The Big Con: Crackpot Economics and the Fleecing of America by one of the senior editors of the New Republic Jonathan Chait. Oh wait that’s Book 4 what about Book 3 I forgot to write about it! What was it oh yeah, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. Guess I learned a lot, huh! Anyway that book was really good and did have some great ideas for remembering things. Joshua Foer became intrigued by the National Memory Championship and interviewed some of the participants trying to find out what made these people so adept at remembering. What he found out is that they are just like everyone else but they know the tricks of how to remember. From there Foer enters the world of the memory experts and trains to compete. The book follows his journey as he uncovers the secrets that date back to early Greek and Roman times, discuss folks with great memories like S, and some that can’t remember at all and through his journey he discover that a big part of being human is remembering! It amazes me that the world record for memorizing a deck of cards is around 37 seconds! But the tricks of the trade are interesting and some of them are useful for remembering things other than PI to a gazillion digits!
One of the main methods that is used to remember is to convert what you want to remember and then store it in a location in a building, or on a street that you know well. The buildings are called Memory Palaces and the competitors have many that they use. The point is when you need to remember you take a walk back through the Memory Palace and pick up the items you dropped!!
Anyway I was a good read and hopefully some of the tricks will be remembered and can prove useful! Cause like Tom Rush laments as we get older we tend not to remember quite as well! More about Book 4 later!
