Recently I read Moonwalking with Einstein, a book ostensibly about memory championships, but one that goes subtly and deeply into other themes, such as the development of expertise and the exploration of human mental potential.

This book will be interesting to those studying memory techniques, but not only to them. In general, I think it’s a very interesting book and I recommend it.

I had read the book before, but, ironically, because I didn’t take notes, I barely remembered anything from it. So I re-read it taking notes. Here they go:

• How better would own’s life be with a vast, dependable memory?
• “To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.”
• Grandmaster of memory: 1h to memorize a thousand random digits, an hour to memorize ten decks of cards and two minutes to learned one deck of cards.
• “even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly.”
• Memory palace: the core technique, 2500 years old.
• “rescue a long-lost tradition of memory training that had disappeared centuries ago. Once upon a time, Ed insisted, remembering was everything.”
• Tony Buzan created the Memory Championships in 1991.
• Alexander Technique: health and performance through posture.
• “the art of memory is a more elegant of remembering through technique.”
• Buzan: memory makes the brain stronger.
• “normal is not necessarily natural (…) The reason for the monitored declined in human memory performance is because we actually do anti-Olympic training.”
• To make it to the top three of the US championship, an hour a day, six days a week. For the World Chaimpionship, 3-4 hours a day for the final six months before the championship.
• “I figure that there are two ways of figuring out how the brain works (…) The other way follows from the logic that a system’s optimal performance can tell you something about its design. Perhaps the best way to undersatnd human memory is to try very hard to optimize it – ideally with a load of bright people in conditions where they get rigurous and objective feedback. That’s what the memory circuit is.”
• “It’s about how I learned firsthand that our memories are indeed improvable, within limits, and that the skills of Ed and Lukas can indeed be tapped by all of us. It’s also about the scientific study of expertise, and how researchers who study memory champions have discoveed general principles of skill acquisition”
• All that differentiates contemporary humans from ancient humans is their memories: the externalized memories “in books, photographs, museums, and these days in digital media.”
• “Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.”
• “Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory.”
• Hermann Ebbinghaus: the curve of forgetting. “S’ s memories seemed not to follow the curve of forgetting.”
• Human brain has exceptionally capacity for remembering images.
• “The notion that our brains don’t ever really forget is certainly embedded in the way we talk about our memories.”
• Wagenaar: “in light of this one cannot say that any event was completely forgotten.”
• “it’s become clear that the fading (…) of memories over time is a real physical phenomenon that happens in the brain at the cellular level.”- No such thing as photographic memory. Only one case described in the literature.
• S experienced pervasive synesthesia.
• “S was simply unable to think figuratively.”
• Brain: ~100 billion neurons.
• Memory is nonlinear and associative. “A memory only pops directly into consciousness if it is cud by some other thought or perception (…) Because our memories don’t follow any kind of linear logic, we can neither sequentially search them nor browse them.”
• But S could! “his memories were always stored in linear chains.”
• “Most often (…) he would ‘distribute’ [images prompted by inputs] along some roadway or street he visualized in his mind.”
• When he forgot something, “these omissions (…) were not defects of memory but where, in facts, defects of perception”
• S learned to forget by convincing himself “that the information (…) was meaningless.”
• Borges: “To think is to forget.”
• The brain changes physical shape depending on the activities we engage over time: Maguire’s study on London cab drivers showed their hippothalamuses were 7% larger than average.
• Not so with memory athletes: their brains appeared anatomically indistinguishable. Also average general cognitive ability. “When Ed and Lukas told me they were average guys with average memories, they weren’t just being modest.”
• When memorizing, memory athletes activated more and different areas of the brain than control subjects: areas related to visual memory and spatial navigation.
• “the mental athletes said they were consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial journeys. (…) The mental athletes had taught themselves to remember like S.”
• “Ed conceded that the KL7 has never actually done much of anything, except get drunk together the evening after memory contests”
• “It’s all about creating a vivid image in your mind that anchors your visual memory of the person’s face to a visual memory connected to the person’s name.”
• “It occurred to me that this was a kind of manufactured synesthesia.”
• “The secret to success in the names-and-faces event (…) is simply to turn Bakers into bakers (…). It’s a simple trick, but highly effective.”
• “even the best professional sexers can’t describe how they determine gender in the toughest, most ambiguous cases. Their art is inexplicable.”
• K Anders Ericcson: researcher on expertise. Human Performance Lab. “Ericcson is probably the world’s leading expert on experts.”
• “There is something about mastering a specific field that breeds a better memory for the details of that field.”
• Ericcson: 10k hours of training are required to become world-class.
• “Experts see the world differently. They notice things that nonexperts don’t see. They home in on the information that matters most, and have an almost automatic sense of what to do with it. And most important, experts process the enormous amounts of information flowing through their senses in more sophisticated ways. They can overcome one of the brain’s most fundamental constraints: the magiacal number seven.”
• “We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.” That’s the size of working memory.
• “those seven things only stick around for a few seconds, and often not at all if we’re distracted.”
• Phonological loop: “the little voice that we can hear inside our head when we talk to ourselves.” It serves as an echo.
• To go past number seven, store in long term memory, through “a technique called chunking. Chinking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item.”
• Note: chunking must be associated to levels of scale.
• “NOtice that the process of chunking takes seemingly meaningless information and reinteprets it in light of information that is already stored away somewhere in our long-term memory.”
• “when it comes to chunking (…) what we already know determines what we’re able to learn.”
• “This, of course, is what all experts do: They use their memories to see the world differently. Over many years, they build up a bank of experience that shapes how they perceive new information.”
• “In most cases, the skill is not the result of conscious reasoning, but pattern recognition. It is a feat of perception and memory, not analysis.”
• Canonical example: chess. “Practically since the origins of the modern gae in the fifteenth century, chess has been regarded as the ultimate test of cognitive ability.”
• “The greatest chess players in the world didn’t seem to possess a single major cognitive advantage.”
• What distinguishes world-class players from merely good ones?
• De Groot’s experiment: “the chess experts didn’t look more moves ahead (…) They tended to see the right moves, and they tended to see them almost right away. It was as if the chess experts weren’t thinking so much as reacting.”
• Note: beginner’s mind becomes even more valuable, if expertis e is getting into the same groove but deeper.
• The languages of experts was different. “They were seeing [the board] as chunks of pieces, and systems of tension. Grand masters literally see a different board.”
• “later studies confirmed that the ability to memorize board positions is one of the best overall indicators of how good a chess player somebody is.”
• “When the chess experts were shown random arrangements of chess pieces (…) their memory for the board was only slightly better than chess novices’.”
• We remember things in context.
• “At the root of the chess master’s skill is that he or she simply has a richer vocabulary of chunks to recognize.”
• “higher-rated chess players are more likely to engage the frontal and parietal cortices of the brain when they look at the board, which suggests that they are recalling information from long-term memory. (…) The lower-ranked players are seeing hte board as something new.”
• Ericcson: expertise is “vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and plannign mechanisms acuired over many years of experience in the associated domain.”
• “a great memory (…) is the essence of expertise.”
• Anterograde amnesia: no new memories. Retrograde: can’t ecall old memories.
• “Without time, there would be no need for a memory. But without a memory, would there be such a thing as time?”
• “The more we pack our lives with memories, the slower time seems to fly.”
• “Our lives are structured by our memories of events.”
• “Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. (…) Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lenghens our perception of our lives.”
• “people who lose their memories are still capable of yet other inds of unremembeed learning.”
• unconscious remembering: priming.
• Declaative vs non-declarative memory systems. Non-declarative: motor skills, perceptual learning, habit learning.
• Episodic vs semantic memories.
• “it’s the most recent memories that blur first in most amnesics, while distant memories retain their clarity.” Ribot’s Law.
• Older memories are reconstructed and reinterpreted by the brain as years go by. “the brain naturally turns episodes into facts.”
• Sleep consolidates memories and draws meaning out of them.
• Average age of first memory recalled as an adult: three and a half.
• “many of our basic day-to-day actions are guided by implicit values and judgments.”
• “hairlines and waistlines”
• “What binds that me to this me, and allows me to maintain the illusion that there is continuity from moment to moment (…) is some relatively stable but gradually evolving thing at the nucleus of my being. (…) that element of continuity is entirely dependent on memory.”
• The shaping of human brains happened in the Pleistocene: 1.8mya to 10kya. Hunter gatherers.
• “The point of memory techniques is to (…) take the kinds of memories our brains aren’t good at holding on to and transform them into the kinds of memories our brains were built for.”
• “Just about anything that could be imagined [Simonides reckoned] could be imprinted upon one’s memory, and kept in good order, simply by engaging one’s spatial memory in the act of remembering.”
• something unmemorable -> engrossing visual images mentally arranged in an imagined space.
• “Memory training was considered a centerpiece of classical education (…) Students were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it.”
• Memory palaces can be routes through a town or station stops along a railway. Big, small, indoors, outdoors, real or imaginary, “so long as there’s some semblance of order that links one locus to the next, and so long as they are intimately familiar.”
• “Myth and map became coincident.”
• “Humans just gobble up spatial information.”
• Attention has to be pulled in by the details.
• “Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex.”
• “My first assignment was to begin collecting architecture (…) I first needed a stockpile of memory palaces at my disposal.”
• “For those early writers, a trained memory (…) was the key to cultivating “judgment, citizenship, and piety.””
• “To really learn a text, one had to memorize it.”
• “The ancient and medieval way of reading was totally different from how we read today. One didn’t just memorize texts; one ruminated on them (…) and in teh process, became intimate with them in a way that made them one’s own.”
• Ad Herennium: “I believe that they who wish to do easy things without trouble and toil must previously have been trained in more difficult things.”
• Memory championship started in 1991.
• Memorizing poetry is the most dreaded event by competitors.
• Memorizing at too low a level of detail not only takes more space, but it can also make you forget of a big chunk if you lose track of one image.
• “Topic” comes from topos, “”in the first place” is a vestige from the art of memory.”
• Brain: 2% of body’s mass, uses 20% of oxygen we breathe and uses 25% of our glucose.
• “Strip away the emotions, the philosophizing, the neuroses, and the dreams, and our brains, in the most redutive sense, are fundamentally prediction and planning machines. And to work efficiently, they have to find order in the chaos of possible memories.”
• “The Buddha’s teachings were passed down in an unbroken chain of oral tradition for four centuries until they were committed to writing in Sri Lanka in the first century B.C.”
• “First, how could Greek literature have been born ex nihilo with two masterpieces? (…) And second, who exactly was their author?” Rousseau was the first to suggest they had an oral origin.
• The sylystic quirks were mnemonic aids. Cliches are sins for writers but essential for bards. “In a culture dependent on memory it’s critical that people think memorable thoughts.”
• Rhymes and concrete nouns are more memorable. The most powerful mnemonic element is song.
• “Song is the ultimate structuring device for language.”
• One retelling is close, but not identical, to the previous one. Note: chaotic, strange attractor stability.
• “Without writing, there is no way to check whether something has been repeated exactly.”
• “The structure writes the poem.”
• In ancient Greece around 5th Century BC, transition from oral to written culture.
• “People (…) invested in the acquisition of memories the same way we invest in the acquisition of things. (…) How, I wondered, did our culture end up forgetting how to remember?”
• “What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding.”
• “Socrates feared that writing would lead the culture down a treacherous path towards intellectual and moral decay, because (…) they themselves would come to resemble empty vessels.”
• Books were conceived as memory aids!
• Innovations from original writing in papyrus: codex (book format), spaces, lowercase letters, punctuation. Silent reading became common only in the ninth Century AC. More innovations: page numbers, table of contents, chapter divisions, index, outward facing spines, printing press.
• Indexes alowed for nonlinear access to books.
• Erudition went from “possessing information internally to knowing where to find information in the labyrinthine world of external memory.
• “If something is going to be made memorable, it has to be dwelled upon, repeated.”
• Giordano Bruno: memory training as the key to spiritual enlightenment.
• “Perhaps, in retrospect, the resemblances between Dr. Loisette and today’s memory gurus should ahve sent me running for the hills. And yet they didn’t.”
• Lifelogging: record everything.
• “I call them information barbs. All you need is to remember a hook.”
• Neuroprosthetics: “[they] essentially wiretap the brain, and allow di rect communication between man and machine.”
• “In fact, what we think of s “me” is almost certainly something far more diffuse and hazier than it’s comfortable to contemplate.”
• “As least as far back as Socrates’ diatribe against writing, our memories have always extended beyond our brains and into other storage containers. Bells’ lifelogging project simply brings that truth into focus.”
• “But nobody wins any international memory competitions with the Major System.” What is used for numbers in competitions is PAO (person-action-object). “It traces its lineage directly back to the loopy combinatorial mnemonics of Giordano Bruno and Ramon Llull. “Unike the Major System, those associations are entirely arbitrary, and have to be learned in advance”. The system creates an unique image for a million numbers.
• Three stages of learning: cognitive (when you’re figuring it out), associative (reducing errors, concentrating less, being more efficient), autonomous (autopilot). “As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the “OK plauteau””.
• “What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice” (…) They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they rpactice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the “cognitive phase”.”.
• “Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard. When you want to get ggood at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.”
• “The bet way to get out of the autonomous stage and off the OK plateau, Ericsson has found, is to actually practice failing. One way to do that is to put yourself in the mind of someone far more competent at the task you’re trying to master, and try to figure out how that person works through problems.”
• “The secret to improving at a skill is to retain some degree of conscious control over it while practicing”
• “the most efficient method is to force yourself to type faster than feels comfortable, and to allow yourself to make mistakes.”
• Go faster, when something gives you problems, make a note of it and then figure out why.
• Note: a life of deliberate practice! How would that be?
• In many professions, OK plateau makes performance decrease over time.
• This doesn’t happen with surgeons, because they “are constantly receiving feedback on their performance.”
• “What’s changed is the amount and quality of training that athletes must endure to achieve world-class status.”
• Memory not as a sense, but as a skill.
• What differentiates top memorizers from the second tier: “They approach memorization like a science.”
• Collect data, analyze it for feedback: keep track of length and difficulties.
• Memory techniques enhance attention/mindfulness.
• Problem: distractions. Solution: earmuffs and blinders.
• “The art of memory is learning how little of an image you need to see to make it memorable.”
• Solution: focus on a single aspect of the image.
• Problems: card triggers multiple images; images fading too quickly. Solution: become more engrossed in the images.
• “I eventually had to excise my mother from my deck. I recommend you do the same.”
• On memorization: “It’s the diffrence between only teaching a kid multiplication and giving him a calculator.”
• “The only activity more antithetical than memorization to the ideals of modern education is corporal punishment.”
• Latin was taught to 50% of American high school students at the turn of the 20th Century.
• New education: “child centered”, doing away with rote.
• “But you can’t have higher-level learning – you can’t analyze – without retrieving information.”
• “The dichotomy between “learning” and “memorizing” is false”
• The art of memory had almost disappeared in the 19th Century.
• Tony Buzan: “What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus (…) The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Crativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images to create something new”
• Mnemosyne was the mother of the Muses.
• “Remembering and creativity seem like opposite, not complementary, processes. BUt the idea that they are one and the same is actually quite old, and was once even taken for granted.” Inventio: inventory + invention.
• “Where do new ideas come from if not somealchemical blending of old ideas?”
• Note: composing as a mixing of things you already have. It’s in the word itself.
• “My own impression of Mind Mapping, having tried the technique to outline a few parts of this book, is that much of its usefulness comes from the midfulness necessary to create the map. Unlike standard note-taking, you can’t Mind Map on autopilot.”
• Note: habits to eliminate autopilot. An autopilot to prevent autopilot.
• “But Matthews’s point is that you’ve got to start somewhere, and you might as well startby installing in students’ minds the sorts of memories that are least likely to be forgotten.”
• To remember, you must already know something, so you can bind what you are learning to what you already know.
• Note: learning as Alexander’s fundamental differentiating process in action, in the brain.
• The paradox: “it takes knowledge to gain knowledge”.
• “But even if facts don’t by themselves lead to understanding, you can’t have understanding without facts. And crucially, the more you know, the easier it is to know more.”
• “Nobody comes into the world with an inborn ability to remember loads of random digits or poetry at a single glance, or take pictures with the mind.”
• Treffert’s classification of savants: “splinter skill” (something very specific); “talented savants” (a general area of expertise, such as drawing or music, “which is remarkable only because it stands in such stark contrast to their disability”); prodigious savants (“have abilities that would be spectacular by any standard, even if they weren’t accompanied by handicaps in other areas.”)
• Danniel Tammet: possible prodigious savant. Memorized 22514 digits of pi, “and he says he did it without any mnemonic techniques beyond his powerful raw memory.”
• “I knew how the mnemonists did it: They’d improved their memories through rigorous training, using ancient techniques.”
• Note: rigorous training, using ancient techniques!
• Autism: “a form of social impairment where patients “treat people as if they were things.”” Besides inability to emphathize: language impairment, extremely focused range of interests, and desire to maintain sameness.
• Note (from https://www.autism-society.org/what-is/aspergers-syndrome): Asperger has no language delay and no cognitive hampering. But there is social clumsiness/awkwardness and frequently motor skill delays.
• “Interestingly, the exaggerated abilities of savants are almost always in right-brain sorts of activities, like visual and spatial skills, and savants almost always have trouble with tasks that are supposed to be primarily the left-brain’s domain, such as language.”
• Damage to the left hemisphere might bring out outstanding right hemisphere abilities.
• “There may be (…) “a little Rain Man” hiding inside every brain. He’s just kept under lock and key by the inhibitory “tyranny of the dominant left hemisphere.””
• “Treffert further speculates that savants with exceptional memories may somehow hand over the duties of maintaining declarative memori es, like facts and figures, to the more primitive nondeclarative memory systems”
• When learning to draw, lower-level perceptual processing should be freed from the higher level conscious processing.
• In the 19th Century, “savant” was a term of praise for people of learning. “A savant was someone who had mastered multiple fields, who traded in abstract ideas”
• The current term came from “idiot savant”, after “idiot” was dropped.
• “we all have remarkable capacities asleep inside of us. If only we bothered ourselves to awaken them.”
• “I had constructed five imaginary buildings”
• “[Ed Cooke’s] thesis that our immediate perception of the world is powerfully shaped by memory.”
• “All you have to do is to savor the images, and really enjoy them. So long as you’re surprising yourself with their lively goodness, you’ll do just fine.”
• “the PAO system I was using packed three cards into a single image, which eant that it was at least 50 percent more efficient”
• “The art of speed cards is in finding the perfect balance between moving quickly and forming detailed images. You want to catch just enough of a glimpse of your images so as to be able to reconstruct them later, without wasting precious time conjuring up any more color than necessary.”
• “But life, for better or worse, only occasionally resembles high school.”
• “Any kind of information that couldn’t be neatly converted into an image and dropped into a memory palace was just as hard for me to retain as it had always been. I’d upgraded my memory’s sotware, but my hardware seemed to have remained fundamentally unchanged.”
• “My experience had validated the old saaw that practice makes perfect. But only if it’s the right kind of concentrated, self-conscious, deliberate practice.”
• “I’d learned firsthand that with focus, motivation, and, above all, time, the mind can be trained to do extraordinary things. This was a tremendously empowering discovery. It made me ask myself: What else was I capable of doing, if only I used the right approach?”
• “You’re clearly not a random person, but on the other hand, I’m nost sure there’s anything in how you improved that is compltely outside the range of what a motivated college student could do.”
• “What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.”
• “It’s that it is so hard to find occasion to use [memory techniques] in the real world in which paper, computers, cell phones, and Post-its can handle the task of remembering for me.”
• “How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory.”
• “Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory.”
• “it’s about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have become estranged.”