M17 – Moonwalking with Einstein – Members
A summary and review.
(Audio: link)
[audio:http://www.RunRunLive.com/PodcastEpisodes/Membership/M17-Moonwalking.mp3]Link M17-Moonwalking.mp3
I heard this book being talked about by the new media intelligencia in more than one forum over the last few months. When that happens, when I get multiple people I follow referencing the same text, it usually moves to the top pf my reading queue.
I have a project going right now that is a combination of writing a book and using that book’s content as a springboard to a more active speaking role. One of the things that I have always been challenged with is being able to port the very powerful prose I write to a speech format. When I speak it is not a memorized reading of prose but a rendition of an outline of that article. By doing that I sometimes feel I lose much of the power and pacing of the prose.
I gathered from what I had heard that this book was about unlocking the secrets of how professional memorizers work. I thought it might be a way to solve my prose-to-word conversion problem. I could just memorize the whole speech, instead of working from an outline, right?
That’s how Moonwalking with Einstein made it to the top of the stack.
I love Kindle books. Really I do. It allows me to bring several books along with me at the same time and all I need is my iPhone. One of the things I miss about physical books is it’s hard to gauge the physical size of a work when you buy it on Kindle. If I knew how long this book was or what the actual content was I might not have pushed it to the top of my queue.
It’s a long book. It’s only tangentially about memorization techniques. It uses the style of storytelling that is common to many professional writers today that endeavors to tell a specific narrative about people engaged in a specific journey but at the same time paint a broad arc of everything having to do with that topic.
The narrative element of the book is how this journalist gets involved with the professional memory competition and the whacky denizens of that ‘sport’. The book follows his journey through training himself and eventually winning the US memory championship. In the process it goes down every back alley and side path in the history of memory skills.
So while the book is about memory skills it is not a ‘how to’ book on any particular memory technique. Interesting book. Interesting story. But if you want just the meat of how to use memory skills it’s about 200 pages too long and in Kindle terms I don’t know how many electrons, LED’s or pixels too long that is.
There is a genre of these types of books that does a deep dive into some lesser topic and crafts a popular story around it. I read one in the past called “The secret life of lobsters.” which was a similar arc. Just like you wouldn’t buy that book to learn how to trap lobster you wouldn’t read moonwalking to learn memory techniques.
A quick summary is that there is an ancient and mostly neglected methodology around memorization. Anyone can acquire these seemingly ‘mind-blowing’ memory skills through understanding the approaches and doing the practice. This practice and these techniques go all the way back to the ancient Greeks and before, because they didn’t really have writing. The world has forgotten these techniques because we now rely on external memory (Writing, computers, internet, etc.) Except for a bunch of memory nerds who compete in these memory competitions and are colorful characters.
If you wonder, like I did, how do I learn to memorize stuff there really is only one way. It comes from the ancient Greeks and is the ‘loci method’. Loci simply means location or place. In our modern world you will probably recognize a version of the loci method known as “the memory palace”.
Yes, that’s right 317 pages of story, character portraits and obscure history to get to ‘professional memorizers use a memory palace’.
How does that work?
Our brains have short term and long term memory. We can’t remember everything. This forces our brains filter out what appears to be important. Some things we evolved to remember really well like situations, feelings and relationships – things that helped our hunter gatherer predecessors to find food sources and avoid becoming a food source. Other things, like numbers, and long lists of facts, not so much.
Most of you will be familiar with the memory ‘rule of seven’ which is the average number of things we can hold in short term memory. That’s why phone numbers were seven digits. The other thing we all know is that things we do remember tend to degrade exponentially over time – we forget the majority of what we learn right away and the rest of it fades over time as well.
Because of this short term memory problem there is an upper limit to how much you can rote memorize. Yes you can read a poem or an essay or a list of numbers over and over and eventually force it into long term memory but that is very inefficient. That’s not what the pros do.
The way you get around these built in limits is to use the things you can remember really well to remember the other things you can’t. The things we remember well are places, and emotions and colors and sounds and the relationships between them.
Our brains are not set up like a filing cabinet where once you know the label on the file you can find the appropriate drawer. Our brains are very distributed with each memory having millions of possible neural connections. It’s more like a web than a file structure. How do you remember a thing and then find it when you need it in this infinitely connected web of neurons?
To memorize something like a random string of words or numbers you use the loci method. With the loci method you create through practice a number of locations, (think houses) in your memory that you remember so well you will never forget them. Think about your childhood home. Most of us can close our eyes and very easily walk through our childhood homes.
You then use these fixed memory locations to file away the things you want to remember. In this case let’s say you had a list of things, like a shopping list, you would walk through your house and put each of those things in a location. When you put those things in that location you do so using sounds, colors, imagery, smells and emotion to tag them to make them more vivid.
When you want to remember them you simply close your eyes and walk through your house and pick those memories up. All of the professional memorizers use a variation of this technique. They use other technique to clump data together, like being able to store three digits in each location instead of one by using the POA method.
The POA method is where you create an inventory of People, Objects and Actions to be able to remember a 3 digit fact in one storage spot. Hence moonwalking with Einstein tags three digits to a person; Einstein, an object; the moon and an action; walking.
Anyone can develop the methods used by the memory pros. Like anything else it takes practice. These pros train an hour or so a day on this. By having the locations and methods already burned into their memory they look like freakish geniuses when out among the general public. They can memorize multiple decks of cards or very long binary numbers and read them back to you. You could do this too if you spent the time.
Going back to my original idea of memorizing my speeches, it turns out this isn’t really a solution for that. You could remember every word or string of words using these techniques but that is not what professional speaker or actors do.
What they actually do is to chunk the speech or the script up into bite sized pieces and then associate an emotion or link to that segment. It turns out the way I have always approached a speech, by essentially memorizing the outline, and maybe the opening and the closing is the way most people do it. The rest is simply practice.
Before closing let me add that I did like the historical asides about the genesis of writing and language. It seems initially the marks on the tablets and the dabbings on the scrolls weren’t really what we think of written language today.
Originally they weren’t words or concepts they were vocal sounds. Like a player piano roll. There was no punctuation. There was not sentence or paragraph structure. It was a long string of noises. (A bit like FaceBook.) They weren’t meant to be read per se but spoken out loud and interpreted.
If you are interested in knowing everything there is about the history of and the current state of memory in the world then you’ll enjoy this book. I thought it was a good and informative read and it did point me in a direction to do some things better with memory in my own practices.