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after champion US wascrowned memory Foer Joshua can the Anyone learn same for training just oneyear. is Pisani, it worthdoing? Elizabeth tricksbut,wonders
We're in a bar in Dalston. No smoking, of course, so no matchbooksto scribble a phone number on. It's solong sinceI memorised one that I know better than to try, especially after severalpink drinks. I proffer the inside of my wrist. My young companion looks at me blankly. "Write your number here," I say.He shakeshis head, unsure I still deserveit. "That is soLAME." He asksmy number, calls my mobile; I save his number under the name "Pete Superstore" or some such. There it will sit, along with "Angela Tango" and "Resty Fishnet," until I either get to know him well enough to remember his surname or I delete him along with the other random mrmbers that have entered my phone without their owners entering my consiiousness. In his new bookMoonwalki,ngWi'thEi'nstei,n(Penguin), Joshua Foer teaches us tricks to remember phone numbers, and even their owners' names-at least until we have a chance to write them down on a-matchbook. His book, misleadingly subof titled TheArt and,Sc'ience Remembering Everythi,ng,deals mostly with a handful of well-established methods for remembering ofplaying cards. numbers and sequences It is nonethelessdelightfirl. Foer meanders through a history of memory from the oral traditions of the Greek bards to the thankfully-not-yet-realised merging of neurons and nanochips by way of the intermediate manstonetablets, scrolls,. technologies: uscripts, printed books,indexedvolumes, searchableelectronic files, the Googlenet. With each new technology, our ability to outsource the functions of memory has grown. For information to be useful over the long term, it has to be both
60 . PROSPECT. APRIL2O1l

stored and retrievable. Marble slabs are pretty good for long-term storage-much less likely to be ruined by a wayward coffee cuo than a CD-Rom-but not terriThe papyrus scrolls ofthe bly searchable. Greekswere at least more portable but they were WRITTENALLASSINGLEORWORDINCAPSWITHOUTSPACES PUNCTUATIONAND\MITHR/.ND OMLINEBREAKSANDREALLYHARD TOREADLETALONESEARCH. Indexing allowed us to find information in a book without having read the whole thing, but we still had to keep enough data in our heads to tell us which books to look in. Now, most of us have freed up the space in our brains that was given over to phone numbers, appointments and train timeta-

"&lost of us have freed up the space in our brains that wa^s grven oYerto phone numbers, appointments an$'train timetables by leai'ing the information orl some electronic device or other"
bles by leaving the information on some it electronic deviceor other and accessing only when we need to. Soon,poetry, Iiterature and eventhe historical performance of way. sports teams will go the sa;me Foer, ajournalist in his early twenties, was writing an article about the tribe of (mostly) young men who buck the trend of outsourced memory and enter competitions to show off how much data they can keep in their heads.He sot sucked in

to their bizarre world of random numbers, name-to-face pairing and the memorisation of unmemorable verse. The attraction was not the free drinks that flow from being able to recall the order ofall 52 cards in a shuffied deck after looking at them for under a minute. It was the fact that the cocky blokes on the circuit (most of them British or Germanic) claimed there was nothing to it, that any old monkey could learn to do it. Foer set himself to the task. Within a year, he becameUS memory chamPion. Like the other memory athletes, Foer uses a variation ofa systemattributed to Simonidesof Ceos,a Greekpoet who lived yearsbeforeChrist. It's basedon some5OO the fact that humans are better at remembering specific images than abstracts such as numbers. Foer createsa physicalspace in his mind, a "memory palace," and populates it with vivid images of recognisable people doing loopy things-the supermodel Claudia Schiffer frolicking naked in a tub of cottage cheese,for example, or Foer himself moonwalking with Einstein. For standard competitions, for which you have to recall random numbers or the order of playing cards, these images are prepared beforehand duringhours of training. Aperson, an object and an action are combined into one "sticky" image that correspondsto a particular card or two-digit number. David Beckham peeling potatoes might be thejack ofhearts, for example,Johnny Depp kissing me is the two of diamonds, Mickey Mouse eating a string bean is the ten of clubs. When memorising the order of cards in a pack you mash the person from the fust with the action of the second and the object of the third. This allows you to remember three cards, in order, with a single image,which you put in a specific place in your memory palace. If the first three cardsare thejack ofhearts, two of diamonds and ten of clubs. vou visualise

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rrow many images can you fit in your head? A drawing (left) created by samuer R wells in 187o for hi sbook rroztsto Read character; the 2o1o world memory champion' 2o-year-old Wang Feng from China (bottom right); and participants at the zoo7 US competition (top right)

David Beckham kissing a string bean, and put him in the first location, the driveway ofyour palaceperhaps.You hope that thl image will stick with you while you form the V mash-upsthat representthe other 49 cards, so you can retrieve it when you stroll through the memorypalaceand rlad back. A-lthough marry memorisers favour sexual imagery, it restricts the people you can include. The image of your mother baking cookiesis fine, but when it qets mashed up with oral sexand an orang-utan,it can provetoo distracting. The best competitor_s can memorise a pack ofcards in around 2d seconds. Grand, but it seemslike an arvful lot of work. It doesnt swprise me that when the 16th-century Jesuit rnissionaryMatteo Ricci tried to teach Simonides'ssystemto Chinese mandarias,who attained their position bv learning the Confucian canon by rote, they thought it too much trouble. Perhaps their part-visual,part-phoneticscript ii an aicl to memory il itself. And perhapssomeof them believed that it was worth learnins

oolber creates a ph3'sica|space in his mind, a memory palace, and populates it u.ith vidd irntrgesof recognisable people dorng loopy things"
the canon as a sourceof wisdom. reflection or mental stimulation, rather than as a party trick, and that they should therefore remember the essence, just the words. not Foer does reflect on this, thouqh not untiJ surprisinglylate in rhebook, when he finds himself sitting in his undies at 6.45am weariag earmuffs and dark glassesto blank out anythiag that might distract him from a sheetof random numbers.Are his abilities ultimately a peacock's tail, impressive but useless? concludes He not, defendins memory as essentialfor the acquisition oT information, a spiderweb old factswhich of give context to new facts and allow them to stick. He is frustratingly unwilling to expoundon the distinctionbetween memo-

ries and knorrledge,using them almost s1.nonynnously. They are not the same. I learn poems because they evoke imagesand emotions that I want as part of my mental spiderweb.I'm happy if a painting of an arch by Turner I seein somerandom provincial gallery evokesthe ageing Ulysses's untravelJed world, whosemarEin fades forever and forever when I in -one, turn evoking Hamlet's undiscoveredcountry, in turn evoking...But I'm not surehow that happensif, to memoriseTennysonor Shakespeare, need to turn eachline into I a seriesof imagesof garden gnomesdriving sport carsacross doctor'skitchen table. my After his victory in the US and his predictable humiliation in the international contest (where America always scores poorly) anAustrian Grand Masterof Memory suggested JoshuaFoerthat he could to probably put his mind to better use. By writing this empathetic, thought-provoking and probablymemorablebook, he has. Elizabeth Pisani an epidemiologist the is and author "TheWisdom Whores" of of
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