Skip to main content

Moonwalking with Einstein – Joshua Foer *****

There is a very particular style of popular science writing, often from America, that combines information on science with a personal voyage of discovery. On the whole they tend to be written either by quite young writers or by someone very well funded by a magazine or a TV company (book publishers rarely pay well enough) because they involve giving up maybe a year of your life to go on the road and follow up a high concept. The cream of these books are superbly enjoyable – and I think Joshua Foer’s is the best I’ve ever read, making it a classic of the genre.
In Moonwalking with Einstein he explores the world of competitive memory skills – a small, almost unknown cadre of (dare we say) rather weird individuals who spend the year practising to be able compete at tasks like memorizing the order of a pack of cards (allegedly very useful in casinos, though Foer doesn’t really explore this particular application), an unseen poem, a list of names and faces, and random binary digits.
Along the way – and here comes the science bit, as they say in all the best cosmetic adverts – he gives us a fair amount of information on the nature of memory and how the human brain processes it, though obviously this is not covered in as much detail as you would get in a ‘pure’ popular science book – it probably amounts to less than a quarter of the content. Even so, Foer gives us a good picture of current thinking on what is still an area of science requiring a lot more understanding.
The brain science is pretty well presented – though I’ve read a lot about the brain, I still learned a few things – but the captivating part of the book is Foer’s personal journey. Not only does he get to know the memory champions, and the larger-than-life ‘use your brain better’ guru Tony Buzan – he actually enters the US Memory Championships. It seems unlikely that an ‘amateur’ would do well, but apparently the US Championships are not in the same league as the Europeans, and Foer is guided by a UK master – so he has a fighting chance of getting placed (apart from an epilogue, the book peaks with his taking part – I won’t give the game away by saying how he does).
Perhaps the most fascinating chapter is when he is dealing with ‘savants’, people who have unusual and remarkable talents, often accompanied by mental disabilities. He talks to the man who was the inspiration of the movie Rain Man, but the best part of all is his interaction with the savant Daniel Tammet who Foer gives strong evidence for being not quite what he seems. It’s not that Tammet doesn’t have excellent memory and mental maths skills – but Foer clearly believes this originated from training rather than from any special mental capacity. And his argument is very persuasive.
Overall, then, a truly enjoyable book with a real surge of excitement as ‘our boy’ takes on the US Championships. You really do learn quite a lot about how memory works, and also plenty of excellent memory techniques. In the epilogue, Foer points out something I too have observed from dabbling in memory techniques. They really do work. It’s perfectly possible for pretty well anyone to remember names and lists and phone numbers. But the fact is it is actually harder work than just jotting down a note. These techniques work conceptually, but they rarely seem worth the effort in practice. Highly recommended.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more