Moonwalking with Einstein
Joshua Foer · 2011
Moonwalking with Einstein (2011) is a book by Joshua Foer on Memory & Learning. A journalist covering the U.S. Memory Championship gets talked into competing himself. One year of training later, he shows that prodigious recall is an ancient, teachable craft, and asks what we lost when we outsourced remembering.
A skeptical journalist trains for a year, wins the U.S. Memory Championship, and proves that extraordinary memory is a learnable technique, not a gift you're born with.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Moonwalking with Einstein pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- Memory athletes score normally on standard intelligence and memory tests. Eleanor Maguire's brain scans of superior memorizers found no structural differences and no cognitive-ability differences, only heavier activation in regions tied to spatial navigation, including the right posterior hippocampus and retrosplenial cortex. They are not remembering harder; they are converting information into places.
- The **memory palace** (method of loci) works because human memory is exquisitely tuned to space and image but terrible at abstraction. You walk a familiar route in your mind and deposit vivid images along it, then retrieve them by strolling back through.
The other 5 — and the full 12-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 9 chapters
The whole summary runs about 12 minutes, read or listened to.
- The Smartest Man Is Hard to Find
- The Man Who Remembered Too Much
- The Most Forgetful Man in the World
- The Memory Palace
- The End of Remembering
- The Expert Expert
- The Talented Tenth
- The Little Rain Man in All of Us
- Training the Instrument, and the Championship
Finish Moonwalking with Einstein tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 12 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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