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We squander 40 days annually compensating for things we have forgotten. Joshua Foer, the author, used to be one of us. But after a year of memory training, he found himself in the finals of the U.S. Memory Championship. He says, we are the sum of our memories. His book draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of memory, and venerable tricks to transform our understanding of human remembering. An instant bestseller that is poised to become a classic, the book recounts Joshua Foer's yearlong quest to improve his memory under the guidance of top "mental athletes.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Moonwalking with Einstein - The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Author: Joshua Foer

Book Size: 320 pages

Summary Size: 12 pages

CHAPTER ONE: THE SMARTEST MAN IS HARD TO FIND

The techniques of the memory palace were refined and codified as set of rules and instruction manuals by Romans. It was a way for the pious to memorize everything from sermons to prayers. These were the same tricks that Roman senators had used to memorize their speeches. The Athenian statesman Themistocles had supposedly used to memorize the names of twenty thousand Athenians, the medieval scholars had used the tricks to memorize entire books.

Memorizing has got a bad rap as a mindless way of holding onto facts just long enough to pass the next exam. But it’s not memorization that’s evil, it’s the tradition of boring rote learning that he believes has corrupted Western education. “What we have been doing over the last century is defining memory incorrectly, understanding it incompletely, applying it inappropriately, and condemning it because it doesn’t work and isn’t enjoyable,”

“The reason for the monitored decline in human memory performance is because we actually do anti-Olympic training. What we do to the brain is the equivalent of sitting someone down to train for the Olympics and making sure he drinks ten cans of beer a day, smokes fifty cigarettes, drives to work, and maybe does some exercise once a month that’s violent and damaging, and spends the rest of the time watching television. And then we wonder why that person doesn’t do well in the Olympics. That’s what we’ve been doing with memory.”

Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that all the world’s ink had become invisible and all our bytes stored in smart phones and computers had disappeared. Our world would immediately crumble. Literature, music, law, politics, science, math: Our culture is a structure built of externalized memories. If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also painfully linked to our own death.

But as our culture has transformed from one that was fundamentally based on internal memories to one that is fundamentally based on memories stored outside the brain, what are the implications for ourselves and for our society? What we’ve gained is indisputable. But what have we traded away? What does it mean that we’ve lost our memory?

CHAPTER TWO: THE MAN WHO REMEMBERED TOO MUCH...

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