Moonwalking with Einstein

Description

Journalist Joshua Foer enters the world of competitive memorization expecting to observe people with extraordinary natural gifts. Instead, memory champions tell him that their performances depend on learnable techniques. Under expert guidance, Foer spends a year training his own ordinary memory and eventually tests it at the U.S. Memory Championship. His experiment anchors an investigation of how the brain encodes experience, how deliberate practice pushes past performance plateaus, and how mnemonic systems such as the method of loci turn abstract information into vivid spatial images. Moving among neuroscience, cultural history, education, and competition, the book asks what societies lose when they outsource remembering and what disciplined attention can reveal about the mind’s capacity for change.

Themes