Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

by Joshua Foer

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the first modern critics to suggest that Homer might not have been an author in the contemporary sense of a single person who sat down and wrote a story and then published it for others to read. In his 1781 Essay on the Origin of Languages, the Swiss philosopher suggested that the Odyssey and Iliad might have been “written only in men’s memories. Somewhat later they were laboriously collected in writing”—though that was about as far as his inquiry into the matter went. Also writing in the eighteenth century, an English diplomat and archaeologist named Robert Wood suggested that Homer was illiterate, and that his works had to have been committed to memory. It was a revolutionary theory, but Wood couldn’t back it up with a hypothesis that explained how Homer might have pulled off such an astounding mnemonic feat.

  In 1795, the German philologist Friedrich August Wolf argued for the first time that not only were Homer’s works not written down by Homer, but they also weren’t even by Homer. They were, rather, a loose collection of songs transmitted by generations of Greek bards, and only redacted in their present written form at some later date.

  In 1920, an eighteen-year-old scholar named Milman Parry took up the question of Homeric authorship as his master’s thesis at the University of California, Berkeley. He suggested that the reason Homer’s epics seemed unlike other literature was because they were unlike other literature. Parry had discovered what Wood and Wolf had missed: the evidence that the poems had been transmitted orally was right there in the text itself. All those stylistic quirks, including the formulaic and recurring plot elements and the bizarrely repetitive epithets—“clever Odysseus” and “gray-eyed Athena”—that had always perplexed readers were actually like thumbprints left by a potter: material evidence of how the poems had been crafted. They were mnemonic aids that helped the bard(s) fit the meter and pattern of the line, and remember the essence of the poems. The greatest author of antiquity was actually, Parry argued, just “one of a long tradition of oral poets that ... composed wholly without the aid of writing.”

  Parry realized that if you were setting out to create memorable poems, the Odyssey and the Iliad were exactly the kinds of poems you’d create. It’s said that clichés are the worst sin a writer can commit, but to an oral bard, they were essential. The very reason that clichés so easily seep into our speech and writing—their insidious memorability—is exactly why they played such an important role in oral storytelling. And the Odyssey and Iliad, excuse the cliché, are riddled with them. In a culture dependent on memory, it’s critical, in the words of Walter Ong, that people “think memorable thoughts.” The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized. The principles that the oral bards discovered, as they sharpened their stories through telling and retelling, were the same basic mnemonic principles that psychologists rediscovered when they began conducting their first scientific experiments on memory around the turn of the twentieth century: Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don’t; concrete nouns are easier to remember than abstract nouns; dynamic images are more memorable than static images; alliteration aids memory. A striped skunk making a slam dunk is a stickier thought than a patterned mustelid engaging in athletic activity.

  The most useful of all the mnemonic tricks employed by the bards was song. As anyone who has ever found himself chanting “By Mennen!” can attest, if you can turn a set of words into a jingle, they can become exceedingly difficult to knock out of your head.

  Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language. It’s the reason Homeric bards sang their epic oral poems, the reason that the Torah is marked up with little musical notations, and the reason we teach kids the alphabet in a song and not as twenty-six individual letters. Song is the ultimate structuring device for language.

  After moving to Harvard and becoming an assistant professor, Parry took an unconventional turn in his work. Rather than hunkering down with old Greek texts, the young classicist took off for Yugoslavia in search of the last bards who still practiced a form of oral poetry resembling the Homeric arts. He returned to Cambridge with thousands of recordings that formed the basis for a new branch of academic research into oral traditions.

  In his fieldwork, Parry found that rather than transmitting the text itself from bard to bard and generation to generation, the contemporary Balkan rhapsodists (presumably like their ancient Homeric predecessors) would impart a set of formulaic rules and constraints that allowed the bard—any bard—to reconstruct the poem each time he recited it. Each retelling of the story was not exactly like the one that came before, but it was close.

  When the Slavic bards were asked whether they repeated their songs exactly, they responded, “Word for word, and line for line.” And yet when recordings of two performances were held up against each other, they clearly were different. Words changed, lines moved around, passages disappeared. The Slavic bards weren’t being overconfident; they simply had no concept of verbatim recall. Not that this should have been surprising. Without writing, there is no way to check whether something has been repeated exactly.

  The variability that is built into the poetry of oral traditions allows the bard to adapt the material to the audience, but it also allows more memorable versions of the poem to arise. Folklorists have compared oral poems to pebbles worn down by the water. They’re made smooth over many retellings as the harder-to-remember pieces get chipped away, or made easier to retain and repeat. Irrelevant digressions are forgotten. Long or rare words are avoided. Between imagery, alliteration, and having to fit the meter of the line, the epic bard usually doesn’t have that many possible words to choose from. The structure writes the poem. Indeed, work by Parry’s successors has found that virtually every word in the Odyssey and the Iliad fits into some sort of schema, or pattern, that made the poems easier to remember.

  It’s no coincidence that the art of memory was supposedly invented by Simonides at exactly the moment when the use of writing was on the rise in ancient Greece, around the fifth century B.C. Memory was no longer something that could be taken for granted, as it had been during Greece’s preliterate epoch. The old techniques of the Homeric bards, of rhythm and formula, were no longer adequate to holding in mind the new and complex thoughts that people were beginning to think. “The original oral performance with its poetry was stripped of functional purpose and relegated to the secondary role of entertainment, one which it always had but which now became its sole purpose,” writes Havelock. No longer burdened by the requirements of oral transmission, poetry was free to become art.

  By the time the author of the Ad Herennium sat down to compose his handbook on oration in the first century B.C., writing was already a centuries-old craft, as fundamental a part of the Roman world as computers are a part of our own. The poems produced by his contemporaries—Virgil, Horace, and Ovid all wrote their masterworks within a century of the Ad Herennium—lived on the page. Each word was painstakingly selected, the product of a single artist expressing his singular vision. And once set down, those words were considered inviolable. If you were going to try to commit such poetry to memory, memoria verborum was what was called for. Rerum simply wouldn’t do.

  The anonymous author of the Ad Herrenium suggests that the best method for remembering poetry ad verbum is to repeat a line two or three times before trying to see it as a series of images. This is more or less the method that Gunther Karsten uses in the poem competition. He assigns every single word to a route point. But this method has a glaring problem: There are lots of words that simply can’t be visualized. What does an “and” look like? Or a “the”? Some two thousand years ago, Metrodorus of Scepsis, a Greek contemporary of Cicero’s, offered a solution to the quandary of how to see the unseeable. Metrodorus developed a system of shorthand images that would stand in for conjunctions, articles, and ot
her syntactical connectors. It allowed him to memorize anything he read or heard verbatim. Indeed, Metrodorus’s library of symbols seems to have been widely used in ancient Greece. The Ad Herennium mentions that “most of the Greeks who have written on memory have taken the course of listing images that correspond to a great many words, so that persons who wished to learn these images by heart would have them ready without expending effort in search of them.” Though Gunther doesn’t use Metrodorus’s symbols, which unfortunately have been lost to history, he has created his own dictionary of images for each of the two hundred most common words that can’t easily be visualized. “And” is a circle (“and” rhymes with rund, which means round in German). “The” is someone walking on his knees (die, a German word for “the,” rhymes with Knie, the German word for “knee”). When the poem reaches a period, he hammers a nail into that locus.

  Gunther could just as easily be memorizing a VCR repair manual as a Shakespearean sonnet. In fact, a VCR repair manual would probably be a good deal easier, since it is filled with concrete, easily visualized words like “button,” “television,” and “plug.” The challenge of memorizing poetry is its abstractness. What do you do with words like “ephemeral” or “self” that are impossible to see?

  Gunther’s method of creating an image for the un-imageable is a very old one: to visualize a similarly sounding, or punning, word in its place. The fourteenth-century English theologian and mathematician Thomas Bradwardine, who was later appointed archbishop of Canterbury, took this kind of verbatim memorization to its highest and most absurd level of development. He described a means of memoria sillabarum , or “memory by syllables,” which could be used to memorize words that were hard to visualize. Bradwardine’s system involved breaking the word into its constituent syllables and then creating an image for each syllable based on another word that begins with that syllable. For example, if one wanted to remember the syllable “ab-,” one would picture an abbot. For “ba-” one might visualize a crossbowman (a balistarius). When strung together, a chain of these syllables becomes a kind of rebus puzzle. (The Swedish pop group Abba could be recalled as an abbot getting shot by a crossbow.) This process of transforming words into images involves a kind of remembering by forgetting: In order to memorize a word by its sound, its meaning has to be completely dismissed. Bradwardine could translate even the most pious benediction into a preposterous scene. To remember the topic sentence of a sermon that begins “Benedictus Dominus qui per,” he’d see “the sainted Benedictine dancing to his left with a white cow with super-red teats who holds a partridge, while with his right hand he either mangles or caresses St. Dominic.”

  The art of memory was, from its origins, always a bit risqué. Preoccupied with Gothic and sometimes downright lewd imagery, it was bound to come in for harsh criticism from the prudes eventually. It’s amazing, in a way, that the casual marriage of the reverent and irreverent that Bradwardine practiced in his imagination was not more upsetting to some of the more priggish clergy. When the moralistic attack finally came, it was led by the sixteenth-century Puritan reverend William Perkins of Cambridge. He decried the art of memory as idolatrous and “impious, because it calls up absurd thoughts, insolent, prodigious, and the like which stimulate and light up depraved carnal affections.” Carnal indeed. Perkins was particularly steamed by Peter of Ravenna’s admission that he used the lustful image of a young woman to excite his memory.

  Of the ten events in the World Memory Championship, the poem has bred the greatest number of different strategies. But broadly speaking, mental athletes take two general tacks, which happen to segregate the pool of competitors fairly neatly by gender. While Gunther and most of the other men on the circuit subscribe to a methodical strategy, the women tend to approach the challenge in a more emotional way. Fifteen-year-old Corinna Draschl, an Austrian in a red T-shirt and matching red socks and red baseball cap, told me she can’t memorize a text unless she understands what it means. Even more than that, she has to understand how it feels. She breaks the poem into small chunks and then assigns a series of emotions to each short segment. Rather than associate the words with images, she associates them with feelings.

  “I feel how the writer feels, what he is meaning. I imagine whether he’s happy or sad,” she told me in the hallway outside the competition hall. This is not dissimilar from how actors are taught to memorize scripts. Many actors will tell you that they break their lines into units they call “beats,” each of which involves some specific intention or goal on the character’s part, which they train themselves to empathize with. This technique, known as Method acting, was pioneered in Russia by Konstantin Stanislavski around the turn of the last century. Stanislavski was interested in these techniques not for their mnemonic potential but rather as tools to help the actor more realistically depict his character. But Method acting is a technique for giving a line more associational hooks to hang on by embedding it in a context of both emotional and physical cues. Method acting is a way of making words memorable. Indeed, studies have found that if you ask someone to memorize a sentence like “Pick up a pen,” it’s much more likely to stick if the person literally picks up a pen as they’re learning the sentence.

  Ultimately, Gunther ended up losing the poetry event to Corinna Draschl, and losing the championship as well. The top prize went to one of his protégés, a quiet and intensely focused eighteen-year-old Bavarian law student named Clemens Mayer, who spoke only choppy English and made it clear that he had no interest in practicing the language on me. After botching the spoken numbers and names-and-faces events, Ben Pridmore landed in fourth place overall, lowered the brim of his black hat, and walked out the door alone, vowing that he would begin preparing the next day to reclaim his title one year hence.

  Ed fared even worse. Of the three dozen competitors, he was one of only eleven who failed to memorize an entire deck of cards in either of the two speed cards trials, which is like a place kicker missing an extra point twice in a row. He’d been gunning for an especially low time that would take him to the upper ranks, but he’d lost control and burned too hard. He ended up finishing a disappointing eleventh place overall, and sulked out the door, sodden with sweat. I ran after him and grabbed him to ask what had happened. “Too much ambition,” was all he would say, shaking his head. “I’ll see you back at the house.”

  He walked across the Magdalen Bridge to go find a pub where he could watch some cricket and drink Guinness until he’d forgotten his failure.

  Standing at the front of the Oxford examination hall, watching the competitors scratch their heads and twiddle their pens as they struggled to recall “Miserare,” I felt acutely aware of how odd it was that we’ve come to this: that the only place left where the ancient art of memory is being practiced, or at least celebrated, is in this rarefied competition, and among this quirky subculture. Here in one of the world’s most storied centers of learning were the last vestiges of a glorious Golden Age of Memory.

  It is hard not to feel as though a tremendous devolution has taken place between that Golden Age and our own comparatively leaden one. People used to labor to furnish their minds. They invested in the acquisition of memories the same way we invest in the acquisition of things. But today, beyond the Oxford examination hall’s oaken doors, the vast majority of us don’t trust our memories. We find shortcuts to avoid relying on them. We complain about them endlessly, and see even their smallest lapses as evidence that they’re starting to fail us entirely. How did memory, once so essential, end up so marginalized? Why did these techniques disappear? How, I wondered, did our culture end up forgetting how to remember?

  SEVEN

  THE END OF REMEMBERING

  Once upon a time, there was nothing to do with thoughts except remember them. There was no alphabet to transcribe them in, no paper to set them down upon. Anything that had to be preserved had to be preserved in memory. Any story that would be retold, any idea that would be transmitted, any piece of information that would be
conveyed, first had to be remembered.

  Today it often seems we remember very little. When I wake up, the first thing I do is check my day planner, which remembers my schedule so that I don’t have to. When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. When I sit down to work, I hit the play button on a digital voice recorder or open up a notebook that holds the contents of my interviews. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge, and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind’s collective memory. Growing up, in the days when you still had to punch seven buttons, or turn a clunky rotary dial, to make a telephone call, I could recall the numbers of all my close friends and family. Today, I’m not sure if I know more than four phone numbers by heart. And that’s probably more than most. According to a survey conducted in 2007 by a neuropsychologist at Trinity College Dublin, fully a third of Brits under the age of thirty can’t remember even their own home land line number without pulling it up on their handsets. The same survey found that 30 percent of adults can’t remember the birthdays of more than three immediate family members. Our gadgets have eliminated the need to remember such things anymore.

  Forgotten phone numbers and birthdays represent minor erosions of our everyday memory, but they are part of a much larger story of how we’ve supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of technological crutches—from the alphabet to the BlackBerry. These technologies of storing information outside our minds have helped make our modern world possible, but they’ve also changed how we think and how we use our brains.