“The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two”
March 8th 2011 21:01
An epidemic of amnesia, as potent as one of the surreal plagues in Gabriel García Márquez’s novels, seems to have hit our culture. It’s not just aging baby boomers who are complaining about their lousy memories. Their kids, too, have forgotten how to remember phone numbers, driving directions and the basic data of daily life. After all, why bother to memorize anything when there are cellphones and Google to do it for you?
In his captivating new book, “Moonwalking With Einstein,” the young journalist Joshua Foer tackles the subject of memory the way George Plimpton tackled pro football and boxing. After a year of memory training, this novice not only began competing against the country’s best mental athletes but also unexpectedly found himself in the finals of the U.S.A. Memory Championships. His story shows, he says, that “our memories are indeed improvable” and that there are established techniques — pioneered by the Greeks and Romans — to help train the brain.
“Moonwalking With Einstein,” which grew out of an article for Slate, and which in 2006 reportedly earned its author, then 23, a $1.2 million advance, has a lot in common with Malcolm Gladwell’s best sellers: it popularizes scientific concepts in a breezy, accessible fashion while cheerfully dispensing some practical insights and lots of entertaining anecdotes. But whereas Mr. Gladwell’s 2008 book, “Outliers,” reads like a parody of his own formula, devolving into an unconvincing mash-up of gauzy hypotheses and highly selective illustrations, Mr. Foer writes in these pages with fresh enthusiasm. His narrative is smart and funny and, like the work of Dr. Oliver Sacks, it’s informed by a humanism that enables its author to place the mysteries of the brain within a larger philosophical and cultural context.
In the course of the book (which provided the basis for a recent New York Times Magazine article), we meet Mr. Foer’s memory coach, Ed Cooke, “a young grand master” of memory from England, who has learned the bulk of “Paradise Lost” by heart (“at the rate of 200 lines per hour”), and who is now working his way through Shakespeare. Mr. Cooke’s “philosophy of life is that a heroic person should be able to withstand about 10 years in solitary confinement without getting terribly annoyed.” We also meet Ben Pridmore, a world memory champion, who “could memorize the precise order of 1,528 random digits in an hour” and any poem handed to him.
How did Mr. Foer come to join the ranks of these competitive mnemonists? How did he go from being a guy with an average memory — who regularly forgot his friends’ phone numbers and where he left his car keys (or, for that matter, his car) — to being one of those extraterrestrials able to memorize a deck of cards in 1 minute 40 seconds? The chronicle of his metamorphosis forms the spine of this engaging book.
As Mr. Foer works on improving his memory, he learns a lot about how the brain operates, and in doing so he gives us some intriguing asides about things like “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” (“we can only think about roughly seven things at a time”); the “O.K. plateau”(by which people improve at a skill until they achieve an acceptable level of competence, then hit a seemingly insurmountable wall); “Ribot’s Law” (which suggests that older memories are more stable because the more a memory is revisited in our minds, the more it is consolidated and integrated into a web of other connections); and the “curve of forgetting,” quantified by a German psychologist who found that in the first hour after learning a set of nonsense syllables, more than half of them would be forgotten; after a day, another 10 percent would disappear; and after a month, another 14 percent.
Mr. Foer provides a brief history of memorization and the declining role it plays in modern culture, where books, photographs, museums and digital media have promoted “the externalization of memory” and changed the very notion of erudition and what it means to be an educated person.
Before writing was common, human beings had to use their own brains for information storage, and before books were indexed — making it possible to gain access to them in a nonlinear way — people labored under the “imperative to hold” books’ contents in their own mental hard drives simply to find particular bits of information. Poets in the oral tradition, like Homer, relied on repetition and rhythms and other patterns to recite their work from memory, and in the ancient world, exceptional memories were both exalted and widely known.
“King Cyrus could give the names of all the soldiers in his army,” Mr. Foer writes, citing Pliny the Elder’s report in “Natural History,” a first-century encyclopedia. “Lucius Scipio knew the names of the whole Roman people.”
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Comment by Mountain Fog
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QUOTE ME NO QUOTES!
I wondered what was going on, in terms of worsening memories, I suspect our chemical cocktail, that permeates the air, water and food might be a culprit...
Well written too, katyzzz,
cheers
fog
Comment by katyzzz
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Interesting reading, must get around to it sometime
Comment by Mountain Fog
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QUOTE ME NO QUOTES!
I did wonder...it seemed unlike your usual style... no matter, but, quotation marks help and source of text reference too, within the body of the work, I now see the NY Times link, but technically you must put the author of the review's name with the text, or, you can get sued.
cheers
fog
Comment by katyzzz
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Rules...bah, humbug, I write my own rules, rules were made to be broken and I thought it was I not you who is the conservative one.
Girls just love to have fun, may the extra terrestrials roll on.
Hope this one doesn't disappear, if it does my next response will be very brief indeed.
Comment by Mountain Fog
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Screen Trek
QUOTE ME NO QUOTES!
No matter, I was just trying to give some friendly advice, albeit it is unlikely that the NY Times journo would visit Orble, it is still worth noting that we are just as susceptible to copyright law as someone in print.
Conservative...hardly my scene...however, as a writer, critic and poet, I do respect the rights of people to protect their own work.
cheers
fog
Comment by katyzzz
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I find this way a bit more honest than people rewriting stuff in their own way and then claiming it as their own, a very common practice and did they but know it equally subject to copyright laws.
I'm not suggesting this of you,fog, I know your work is entirely original, but personally I am committed to keeping people informed without the use of my scarcely paid input.
I have no interest in that although I used to.
just keep fogging fog, thanks for the visit and your well intentioned comment.
Loves ya!