{4.5\/5} “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.”<\/p>\n
Moonwalking With Einstein<\/strong> by Josh Foer, published in 2011<\/p>\n The subtitle of this book is: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything<\/strong>. I’ve been going around for years saying I have a bad memory. This book presented the idea that people can improve their memory with certain techniques, so I decided to check it out.<\/p>\n I used the memory palace technique to remember a list of items from the book. I remembered them later that day. A few days later I still remembered them. A week later I still remembered them perfectly — it’s obviously a technique that works. All you have to do is form a vivid image in your mind (the title of the book comes from one of the author’s vivid images) and associate that image with a certain position in a location that you’re familiar with. For example, the first item was pickled garlic and I pictured it at the mailbox at the end of my parents’ lane. The second item was cottage cheese and I pictured it at the door to the house. And so on.<\/p>\n The author, Josh Foer, is a journalist who initially is interested in writing about memory competitions — but then he decides to compete himself. The book is the story of his year-long practice of memory techniques — and it’s also about people with unusual memories, how people have thought of memory through history, and the place of memorization in education.<\/p>\n Foer’s writing style makes it easy to read. Parts of the book felt like a Malcolm Gladwell book (The Tipping Point<\/strong>, Outliers<\/strong>) in the way that some of the things he explains make you think: Why didn’t I know that before?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" {4.5\/5} “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.” Moonwalking With Einstein by Josh Foer, published in 2011 The subtitle of this book is: The Art and Science of Remembering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,41,37,23,5],"class_list":["post-251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-book","tag-education","tag-memory","tag-nonfiction","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10544,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions\/10544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}