by Joshua Foer
“Barring an episode of binge drinking or a wallop to the side of your head, you’re going to find that those images will hold in your mind far longer than you might expect,” Ed promised me. “And if you revisit the journey through your memory palace later this evening, and again tomorrow afternoon, and perhaps again a week from now, this list will leave a truly lasting impression. And having now done this with fifteen words, we could easily do it with fifteen hundred, provided you had an appropriately large memory palace to store them in. And then having mastered random words, we can move onto the truly fun stuff, like playing cards and Heidegger’s Being and Time.”
SIX
HOW TO MEMORIZE A POEM
My first assignment was to begin collecting architecture. Before I could embark on any serious degree of memory training, I first needed a stockpile of memory palaces at my disposal. I went for walks around the neighborhood. I visited friends’ houses, the local playground, Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art. And I traveled back in time: to my high school, to my elementary school, to the house on Reno Road where my family lived until I was four years old. I focused on wallpaper and the arrangement of furniture. I tried to feel the flooring under my feet. I reminded myself of emotionally resonant incidents that occurred in each room. And then I carved each building up into loci that would serve as cubbyholes for my memories. The goal, as Ed explained it, was to know these buildings so thoroughly—to have such a rich and textured set of associations with every corner of every room—that when it came time to learn some new body of information, I could speed through my palaces, scattering images as quickly as I could sketch them in my imagination. The better I knew the buildings, and the more each felt like home, the stickier my images would be, and the easier it would be to reconstruct them later. Ed figured I’d need about a dozen memory palaces just to begin my training. He has several hundred, a metropolis of mental storehouses.
At this point, out of full disclosure, I ought to say a word or two about my living arrangements at the time that I began my dalliance with memory training. I was a recent college grad trying to make it as a journalist, sponging off my parents in the home in Washington, D.C., where I’d grown up. I was sleeping in my childhood bedroom with a pair of Baltimore Orioles pennants above the window and a book of Shel Silverstein’s poems on the shelf, and working in a makeshift office in the basement, at a desk I’d set up between my father’s Nordic Track and a stack of boxes filled with old family photos.
My office was awash in Post-it notes, and long lists of items I needed to catch up on: calls to be returned, article ideas to be investigated, personal and professional chores to be completed. Fortified with confidence from my successes in Central Park, I tore down a handful of the most urgent items, converted them into images, and diligently filed them away in a memory palace I had constructed out of my grandmother’s suburban ranch home. “Get car inspected” became an image of Inspector Gadget circling the old Buick in her driveway. “Find book on African kings” was an occasion to imagine Shaka Zulu hurling a spear at her front door. “Book Phoenix ticket” led me to transform her living room into a landscape of desert and canyons, and to picture a phoenix rising from the ashes of her antique credenza. This was all well and good, and even kind of fun, but it was also exhausting. I noticed, upon memorizing ten or so of my Post-it notes, that I felt physically tired, like my mind’s eye was getting bloodshot. This was harder work than it seemed, and much less efficient than I’d imagined. And there were still a few items on the wall I had no clue what to do with. How was I supposed to turn telephone numbers into images? What was I supposed to do with e-mail addresses? I fell back into my office chair with a handful of Post-its clinging to my palm and looked up at my wall, whose off-white paint now showed through in a few additional patches, and wondered what, really, was the point of all this. In truth, those notes had been working just fine stuck to my wall. Surely the art of memory had more valuable applications.
I stood up and pulled a copy of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry off my bookshelf. It was an 1,800-page brick of a book that I had purchased once upon a time at a used bookstore and had opened not more than twice since. If the ancient art of memory was good for anything, I figured, surely it was learning poetry by heart. Simonides, I knew, was not a hero of the ancient world for having discovered a clever way to remember his to-do lists. His discovery was meant to serve a humanizing agenda. And what could be more humanizing than committing poetry to memory?
Ed, I had already discovered, was always memorizing something. He had long ago learned the bulk of Paradise Lost by heart (at the rate of two hundred lines per hour, he told me), and had been slowly slogging his way through Shakespeare. “My philosophy of life is that a heroic person should be able to withstand about ten years in solitary confinement without getting terribly annoyed,” he said. “Given that an hour of memorization yields about ten solid minutes of spoken poetry, and those ten minutes have enough content to keep you busy for a full day, I figure you can squeeze at least a day’s fun out of each hour of memorization—if you should ever happen to find yourself in solitary confinement.”
This worldview owes a lot to the collection of ancient and medieval texts on memory that Ed had relentlessly tried to foist upon me. For those early writers, a trained memory wasn’t just about gaining easy access to information; it was about strengthening one’s personal ethics and becoming a more complete person. A trained memory was the key to cultivating “judgment, citizenship, and piety.” What one memorized helped shape one’s character. Just as the secret to becoming a chess grand master was to learn old games, the secret to becoming a grand master of life was to learn old texts. In a tight spot, where could one look for guidance about how to act, if not the depths of memory? Mere reading is not necessarily learning—a fact that I am personally confronted with every time I try to remember the contents of a book I’ve just put down. To really learn a text, one had to memorize it. As the early-eighteenth-century Dutch poet Jan Luyken put it, “One book, printed in the Heart’s own wax / Is worth a thousand in the stacks.”
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—chewed them up and regurgitated them like cud—and in the process, became intimate with them in a way that made them one’s own. As Petrarch said in a letter to a friend, “I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening; I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow.” Augustine was said to be so steeped in the Psalms that they, as much as Latin itself, comprised the principle language in which he wrote.
This was an attractive fantasy: I imagined that if I could only learn to memorize like Simonides, I would be able to commit reams of poetry to heart. I could make a clean sweep through the best verse and really absorb it. I imagined becoming one of those admirable (if sometimes insufferable) individuals who always seem to have an apposite quotation to drop into conversation. I imagined becoming a walking repository of verse.
I decided to make memorizing a part of my daily routine. Like flossing. Except I was actually going to do it. Each morning, after waking up and having my coffee, but before reading the newspaper or showering or even putting on proper clothes, I sat down behind my desk and tried to spend ten to fifteen minutes working through a poem.
The problem was that I wasn’t any good at it. When I sat down and tried to fill a memory palace with Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” a twenty-eight-line poem composed almost entirely of nonsense words, I couldn’t figure out how to transform the “brillig” and “slithy toves” into images, and ended up just memorizing the poem by rote, which was exactly what I wasn’t supposed to be doing. Next I tried T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem I’d always adored, and which I already knew in bits and pieces. “In the room the women come
and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” How could I forget that? Or rather, how was I supposed to remember it? Was I meant to put an image of women, coming and going, speaking of Michelangelo in my uncle’s bathroom? And what was that supposed to look like? Or was I supposed to form an image of women, an image of coming, an image of going, and an image of Michelangelo? I was confused. And this was taking forever. These memory techniques, which had seemed so promising while I’d huddled numb-fingered with Ed on a boulder in Central Park, weren’t working out nearly so well now that I was alone in my parents’ basement. I felt like I had tried on a slick pair of sneakers at the store, and now that I’d worn them home, I had blisters. Clearly I was missing something.
I turned to my newly acquired copy of the Rhetorica ad Herennium and opened to the section that discusses the memorization of words. I was hoping it might offer some hints as to why I was failing so badly, but all the two-thousand-year-old book could provide was consolation. Memorizing poetry and prose is extraordinarily difficult, the author willingly concedes. But that’s exactly the point. He explains that learning texts is worth doing not because it’s easy but because it’s hard. “I believe that they who wish to do easy things without trouble and toil must previously have been trained in more difficult things,” he writes.
Having begun to futz around with memory techniques, I didn’t yet have any sense of the true scope of the enterprise I was embarking upon. I still thought of my project as a harmlessly casual experiment. All I wanted to know was whether I really could improve my memory, and, if so, by how much. I certainly hadn’t taken Tony Buzan’s challenge to try to compete in the U.S. Memory Championship seriously. After all, there were more than three dozen American mental athletes who trained each year for the event, which takes place every March in New York City. There was no reason to think a journalist who occasionally forgets his own Social Security number could compete against America’s top memory geeks. But, as I would soon learn, Americans on the international memory circuit are like Jamaicans on the international bobsledding circuit—easily the most laid-back folks at any competition, and possibly even the most stylish, but on the international stage, we are behind the curve in terms of both technique and training.
Even though the best American mnemonists can memorize hundreds of random digits in an hour, U.S. records still pale in comparison to those of the Europeans. Generally, nobody in North America takes memory sport seriously enough to stop drinking three months before the world championship, like the eight-time world memory champ Dominic O’Brien used to do, and from the looks of it, few competitors engage in the rigorous physical training regimen that Buzan recommends. (One of his first, unsolicited pieces of advice to me was to get in shape.) Nobody downs daily glasses of cod liver oil or takes omega-3 supplements. Only one American, the four-time national champion Scott Hagwood, has ever been inducted into the KL7.
Even though America has run its national memory championship for as long as any country in the world, the best American memorizer has only finished in the top five of the world championship once, in 1999. Perhaps it says something about our national character that America has produced none of the world’s best competitive memorizers—that we’re not as detail-obsessed as the Germans, as punctilious as the Brits, or as driven as the Malaysians. Or maybe, as one European soberly suggested to me, Americans have impoverished memories because we are preoccupied with the future, while folks on the other side of the Atlantic are more concerned with the past. Whatever the reason, it became clear that if I wanted to learn more about the art of memory—if I wanted to study with the best in the world—I was going to have to go to Europe.
Having spent several weeks struggling with mixed success to furnish my memory palaces with poetry, I thought it time to enlist some help in order to take my efforts to the next level. The granddaddy of events on the yearlong international memory circuit, the World Memory Championship, was going to be held in Oxford, England, at the end of the summer. I decided I needed to go, and convinced Discover magazine to send me to write an article about the competition. I called up Ed to ask if I could crash at his place. Oxford was his home turf—where he’d grown up, gone to college, and now lived at home with his parents on their country estate located on the town’s outskirts, in a seventeenth-century stone house called the Mill Farm.
When I arrived at the Mill Farm (or simply “the Milf,” as Ed sometimes referred to it) on a sunny summer afternoon a few days before the World Memory Championship, Ed greeted me and carried my bags up to his bedroom, the same one he grew up in, with clothes scattered about the floor and nine decades of cricket almanacs on his bookshelves. Then he took me into the house’s oldest wing, a fourhundred-year-old converted stone barn linked to the kitchen. There was a piano in the corner and colorful fabrics draped from the ceiling, the remnants of a party held years ago that were never taken down. At one end of the room was a long wooden table with eight decks of playing cards arranged at the head.
“This is where I practice,” Ed said, and pointed to a balcony that jutted into the upper part of the barn. “Images of binary digits come pouring down those stairs over there, right across the room. This is exactly where you’d expect a memory champ to exercise, isn’t it?”
Before dinner, an old childhood friend of Ed’s named Timmy stopped by to say hello. Ed and I came downstairs to find him at the table chatting with Ed’s mother and father, Teen and Rod, while his youngest sister, Phoebe, chopped vegetables from the garden at the kitchen island. Timmy now ran an online application development company. He had driven over in a BMW, wore a crisp polo shirt, and had a warm tan.
Teen introduced me and explained, with a wry laugh, that Ed was my memory coach. Timmy seemed not to believe that Ed was still toying with all this memory stuff. Hadn’t it been quite some time since he’d taken that crazy trip to Kuala Lumpur?
“Edward, are you at all nervous that your new student will surpass you?” asked Teen, mostly it seemed for the sake of ribbing her son.
“I don’t think anyone needs to be too concerned about that,” I said.
“Well, I think it’d strike a tremendous blow for education,” said Ed proudly.
“Do you think you could give Ed a nine-to-five job?” Rod asked Timmy.
Ed laughed. “Yes, you know, maybe I could give memory training courses to your employees.”
“You could do programming,” offered Teen.
“I don’t know how to program.”
“Your father could teach you.”
Rod made a small fortune in the 1990s designing computer software, and retired at an early age to a life of leisure and eccentric pursuits. He is a practicing apiarist and gardener and would like to take the Mill Farm off the electrical grid by exercising his ancient water rights and installing a hydroelectric generator in the creek that runs by the house. Teen teaches developmentally disabled kids at a local school and is an avid reader and tennis player. She is mostly tolerant of Ed’s eccentricities, but also cautiously hopeful that Ed might someday direct his considerable talents in a more focused, and perhaps even socially useful, direction.
“What about the law, Edward?” she asked.
“I consider the law to be a zero-sum game, and therefore a pointless use of a life,” said Ed. “Being good at being a lawyer means merely, on average, maximizing injustice.” Ed leaned over to me. “I used to be quite a promising young man when I was eighteen.”
This prompted Phoebe to chime in: “More like thirteen.”
While Ed was in the bathroom, I asked Rod if he would be disappointed if his son ended up becoming the next Tony Buzan, a fantastically wealthy self-help guru. Rod pondered the question for a few seconds and stroked his chin. “I think I’d prefer if he became a barrister.”
The next morning, at the examination hall at Oxford University, which was hosting the world’s finest mnemonists, Ed was sprawled out across a leather sofa, wearing a bright yellow cap and a T-shirt with the words “Ed Kicks Ass—220” emblazon
ed in bold letters across his chest, above a menacing ironed-on photograph of himself, a cartoon of a karate kick, and a photograph of thonged female hindquarters. (In addition to communicating an intimidating bit of trash talk to his opponents, he explained, those three words, “Ed Kicks Ass,” are a mnemonic that helps him remember the number 220.) He was smoking a cigarette (he doesn’t take the physical training part of the sport too seriously), and warmly greeting each of the competitors as they strolled through the door. He informed me that since we’d last seen each other, he’d taken an indefinite leave of absence from his PhD program in Paris to pursue “other projects.” He also told me that his and Lukas’s big plans for the Oxford Mind Academy had been temporarily derailed when, not long after the U.S. championship, Lukas badly seared his lungs in a fire-breathing stunt gone wrong.
Memory championships can be pathologically competitive events, and Ed described his vanity T-shirt as part of a “campaign of pretend intimidation” with the aim of “generally upping the quality of banter between competitors—especially with the Germans.” To that end, he had showed up at the championship bearing copies of a cheeky onepage stats sheet that he was handing out to the press and fellow competitors. It described his character (in the third person)—“Irreverent, flamboyant, ready for anything (especially yesterday)”—and his training regime—“Early Rise, Yoga, Skipping, Superfoods (including blueberries and cod liver oil), Four-hours training, two glasses of wine per day (from the potassium rich soil of the Languedoc-Roussillon in Southern France), 30 minutes reflection period at sunset each evening, keeping a journal online.” It noted that his “unique abilities” include lucid dreaming and tantric sex. It also described Tony Buzan as “a champion ball-room dancer and a mentor for me throughout puberty,” and his thoughts on the future of competitive memory: “Hoping it will be an Olympic sport before 2020,” when he is “planning to retire to a life of synaesthesia and senility.” His plans for after the championship: “Revolutionizing Western Education.”
