I have a terrible memory – I can’t remember names, can’t recall dates, can’t recollect what I’m supposed to pick up at the supermarket, can’t bring to mind where I parked the car, can’t remember that I can’t remember. It’s not a new thing – it’s been going on like this, well, as long as I can remember. And I’m not alone: my friends complain about their poor memories, too. Who hasn’t forgotten an anniversary or a birthday? Who hasn’t neglected to pick up their wife’s mother at the airport? Who hasn’t forgotten the car windows were down until after the onslaught of a thundershower? Or that there’s a pie in the oven? Or to undergo that vasectomy you had promised to get? Which is why I was fascinated by an entertaining new book on the best-seller list called “Moonwalking With Einstein,” which is about memory and how you can, and probably should, learn how to remember things – shopping lists, phone numbers, epic poems, the names of people you meet, and French verb forms – for longer than, say, 10 seconds.
Joshua Foer, the book’s author, says he once had the same memory troubles as the rest of us, but after doing a story on memory champions – people who can remember the order of a shuffled deck of cards after glancing at them once, – he learned the techniques, the tricks, the science and the art of evading the mists of the mind. After only a year of training, he competed in the U.S. Memory Championship and won.
One of the things he discovered is how visual our memory is. Once you’ve seen Lady Gaga in one of her over-the-top outfits you will never forget her, yet I doubt I could pick country music star Brad Paisley out of a lineup – and I’ve seen him honky-tonking on TV at least a dozen times. When you see disaster survivors on television picking through the rubble of a tornado or a flood, almost the first thing out of their mouths is: “We lost all our family photographs.” Photo albums are the first thing people grab when they have to evacuate their homes, because losing a photograph is like losing your memory, like losing your mind. Our brains seemed to be hardwired for pictures.
The memory champions become adept at making memorable mental pictures out of names and numbers. And like all magic, it is a trick. It must be learned and practiced, but you don’t have to be a genius to do it; any person of average ability could learn most of these tricks pretty quickly.
