Collections Manager Aly Wepplo recommends Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer.
In August, I performed in Laughingstock Theater’s production Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare. For that job, I memorized a script of about 100 pages – no small feat! And I remembered that memorization is an amazing thing. It is both a game and a challenge. And it is the topic of the book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.
In one year, author Joshua Foer went from covering the U.S. Memory Championship as a journalist to winning the event. His book details how he studied with the world’s most accomplished memorizers and learned their strategies to remember lists of phone numbers, digits of pi, and lines of verse.
In the process, Foer learned that memory is a muscle. It can be trained and improved. And it works best with information that can be visualized.
So, for example, it might seem impossible to remember the order of a deck of cards, but it gets a little easier when each card is attached to an outlandish image – like a moonwalking Einstein wearing four spades as shoes, the king of hearts on his face, and three diamonds on his driving gloves.
“Wait!” you object, “That still sounds incredibly complicated!” And maybe it is. But it’s an effective tool for connecting long lists of things we want to remember. And it’s a fun peek into how memory champions use their brains.
Know of any other great books about memorization? Share them with us! Recommend a title for our collection here.
