BOOK SUMMARY

How many phone numbers do you know off by heart?

How much do you remember from your high school history classes?

What were the five main points in the last book you read?

What did you eat for lunch last Tuesday?

f you are sitting there

with a blank look on

your face, you are not

alone. As we become

m o r e a n d m o r e

d e p e n d e n t o n

technology, we become

less and less dependent

on the most powerful

technology ever invented

SAY WOT

I

In his fascinating book, Joshua Foer takes us in for a close look

inside an annual event, the geekery of which is unparalleled in this

world: the World Memory Championship However, in the process he

discovers a long lost art that might just be the one thing you could be doing

to transform your entire life. Let’s get started.

Once upon a time, Foer reminds us,

memory was the root of all culture.

It was the way that customs, traditions,

and knowledge got passed from

generation to generation. If you

wanted to ‘know’ something, you

had to commit it to memory. So,

that’s what they did. For thousands

of years, all of history’s great

stories and customs were passed

on by word of mouth – which

is to say that they were

committed to memory.

The History

of Memory

When we (in the 21st century) think of committing something to memory, our first thought is to find a place that we can record it so we can access it at a later date. In the last few hundred years, we would put pen (or printing press) to paper and read it when the time was appropriate.

Then, in the last 5 years or so, we transitioned from bytes on a computer to

In the last 25 years or so, we transitioned from paper to... bytes

on a computer

And if we didn’t record what we are looking for...

bytes on a phone.

Ironically,

with all of this

technology at

our disposal, we

have forgotten

how to

remember. If

you’ve ever tried

to remember a

phone number

that you’ve just

heard for the first

time without the

aid of some

recording device,

you’ll probably

find yourself

repeating it over

and over again

until you think

you’ve

committed to

memory. Then,

when you go to

dial the number,

you realize that

you didn’t

commit it to

memory at all.

Things used to be different. Our predecessors trained their minds on a daily basis. As Foer points out, they trained them not to just remember a bunch of random facts and figures, but to create a system so that they could access them at any time. It would be the difference between a book and a table of contents. They would instantaneously be able to find the information they were looking for in their brains. Consider Peter of Ravenna, a fifteenth-century Italian jurist who authored one ofthat era’s most popular books on memory. Not only did he commit thousands of texts to memory, he was able to “re-read” them from memory while he was on vacation.

When was the last time you did that?

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Memory today has been reduced to

parlour tricks and movies about savants

(Rainman, anybody?). What we don’t

realize is that this has an enormous

impact on our daily lives. The gap

between having something committed to

memory and being able to look it up

(in a book or on the Internet) can’t be

understated.

The Impact of Not Using Your Memory

(12x19)/7a

6x }{ =

Take, for example, the case of Charlie Munger. He is the right hand man to Warren Buffett, and Warren himself admits that Charlie has the best “30 second mind” on the planet. He is able to work through a problem (particularly in finance) in less than 30 seconds that the average financier would probably struggle with for a lifetime. Why? Because he has committed between 80-90 “mental models” to memory that allow him to work through any challenge presented to him.

Munger Memory Powered!

(Warren’s right hand man)

However, most of us are tempted to delightfully forget

almost everything in our lives because we are able to

write it down somewhere where we will access it

later. In place of elaborate systems to remember

things with our minds, we have devised elaborate

systems in order to organize information externally.

There are systems like David Allen’s “Getting Things

Done”, Merlin Mann’s ‘43 Folders’ and thousands of

other books and courses devoted clearing your mind

of things you need to remember.

This is taken to the extreme by a scientist at Microsoft

by the name of Gordon Bell, who has devised a

system that records the entirety of his life, so that he

doesn’t need to remember anything that he’s ever

experienced. He has a little black box that hangs

around his neck that is essentially a camera that never

turns itself off. He also scans all of the paper that

comes into his life so that everything is stored

digitally, where he can access it at a later point

in his life. Why bother to remember anything

when you could just as easily access it later

through your computer?

The strategy of externalizing memories may be a useful tool for the minutia of

daily life. Writing a todo list so you don’t forget the milk on the way

home from work isn’t going to do much damage. However,

when we take it to the extreme like Gordon Bell proposes, we

lose something very important – the

ability to think critically. How many

critically important business situations do

you find yourself in where it’s acceptable to say “hold on

a second while I Google that”?

And what if you find yourself

in a negotiation with somebody like Charlie

Munger? Here is the simple fact: people who have

elaborate systems for externalizing knowledge have

to relearn it every single time they want to have

access to it. The people like Charlie Munger who

don’t relearn the knowledge – they reuse it.

In a world where most people would rather be like

Gordon Bell than Charlie Munger,

you have an incredible opportunity to swim

upstream and reap the rewards.

have committed it to memory

Amazingly, Foer went from journalist at the World Memory Championship to winner of the United States memory championship in 2 years time. If you somehow found yourself competing in one of these memory championships you would be required to remember a poem you’ve never seen before, the exact order of random decks of cards, and other feats that right now you would think are impossible for anybody but the most intelligent people in the world. You’d be wrong. As it turns out, most of the competitors in these competitions are no more remarkable than you and I – they just understand how to use their brains.

How the brain makes

memories

The one technique that is universally accepted in the memory circuit is the technique called

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The

The Memory Palace was first used by the fifth

century BC poet Simonides when he was at a

dinner that ended in disaster – the building

collapsed killing many of the people inside.

Simonides escaped, only to find himself standing

outside the rubble watching a number of people

search the rubble for their loved ones. As he was

standing there, Simonides realized that he

remembered exactly where each of the people at

the dinner party had been sitting, without any

attempt to memorize them beforehand. The layout

of the room and the location of each person within

it was embedded in his memory. He was then able

to help the grieving families find

their loved ones.

MEMORY PALACE

Fast forward 2,500 years or so to present day England and we realize that something interesting was going on in Simonides head. To become a cabbie in London, you need to spend between 2 – 4 years memorizing the more than 25,000 twisting and curving streets of the London area. Incredibly, only 3 out of every 10 people pass the final exam (called “The Knowledge”). A study was done in 2000 by a British neuroscientist to find out what effect all that driving around had on the the cabbies’ brains. The study concluded that the cabbies had a larger right posterior hippocampus than the average human being. The driving and memorizing had actually altered the structure of their brains.

LOLCATZ404

THE KNOWLEDGE

When the researchers moved their focus to the brains of the top

contestants in the World Memory Championships, they found an equally surprising result. When asked to

memorize random series of numbers, they differed from the control group. The parts of the brain that were lighting up

where the parts that are involved in spatial navigation and visual memory, including the same part of the brain that the London

cabbies used. These visual and navigational cues are the key to us remembering and ultimately using the knowledge we obtain

during our lifetimes. Now let’s move on to how you can start using this to your advantage.

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The first step is to choose your palace. The most logical place to start for most people is their current home. If you can close your eyes and take a tour of your current residence in your head right now, you’ve got your first palace. As you get addicted to this technique and want to remember many more things, you’ll have to find a number of places to use. Some memory champions even resort to designing new buildings in their mind in order to store information there. You might move next to your place of work, a street that you are intimately familiar with, or the place you went to school. Save the mental architecture for a later date.

Putting the Memory Palace Into Action

1

The Memory Palace technique essentially consists of placing memorable objects around a familiar place that you can visualize quickly and with great ease.

The second thing to note are the distinctive features in your palace and use those as your “loci” (the places you will put the things you want to remember). This is critical because as you take a tour of your palace at a later date, you’ll want to be able to have the associations you’ve made jump out at you. For instance, although I’m intimately familiar with my own house, the 4’ by 6’ canvas painting I’m staring at right now is much more memorable for me

2

than the drapes that are behind me.

The third thing you’ll want to do is plot a route through your memory palace so that your “tour” happens in the same sequence every time. This way you’ll be able to remember things in the correct order. If you chose your home for your first memory palace, the front door is a logical place to begin.

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4Next, it’s time to start associating

visual associations with the loci

around your palace. The key here is

to make your images a memorable

as possible. This should be obvious,

but most people have a hard time

with this. What things are

“memorable”? Things that would

make you stop dead in your tracks

if you saw them in real life. One of

the first things a memory champ

made Foer remember when

training him on this

method was Claudia Schiffer

swimming naked in a huge tub of

cottage cheese.

Now imagine that this happened on your front porch. I dare you to try and forget this image. So, if Foer needed to pick up some cottage cheese at the store, he was very unlikely to ever forget.

If you are having trouble

thinking of things that are

memorable, try crazy, offensive,

sexual and completely non-

sensical imagery. Most of the

memory champions know that the

best in the “game” rely more on their creativity to

create memorable images than they do a genetically

gifted brain. Lastly, once you’ve encoded your

imagery around your memory palace, take a few

trips through to make sure you’ve got everything in

its place. Shore up any deficiencies with a

different (and usually, crazier) image and

you will have stored that in your memory so

that you’ll be able to recall it at a moment’s

notice.

5go crazy

For more information, about this book and our other great book

summaries, please visit:

www.readitfor.me

This is a brave new world

you are wandering into,

and it just may change

your life forever. Not only

will you be able to amaze

your friends at a cocktail

party, you’ll be able to have

a wealth of knowledge at

your fingertips for when

you need it most. And that,

my friends, is a competitive

advantage that almost

nobody in your world will

be able to compete with.

Final logo2007 /10/16