Moonwalking with Einstein by Foer

Ref: Joshua Foer (2011). Moonwalking with Einstein: The art and science of remembering everything. Thorndike Press.

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Brain

• Brain: A mutable organ comprised of ~100B neurons, each of which can make upwards of 5-10K synaptic connections with other neurons and capable of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input.

  • Medial temporal lobes: The Hippocampus and several adjacent regions that turn our perceptions into long-term memories.

• Memory: A pattern of connections between neurons stored in the neocortex. Every sensation that we remember, every thought that we think, transforms our brains by altering the connections within the vast network.

  • Declarative Memories: Things you know you remember, like the color of your car.

  • Nondeclarative memories: Things you know unconsciously, like how to ride a bike.

  • Memory is like a spider web that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

  • We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events. Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.

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Learning

• Skill Acquisition

1. Cognitive Stage: You intellectualize a task and discover new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently.

2. Associative Stage: You concentrate less, making fewer major errors, and generally become more efficient.

3. Autonomous Stage: You’ve gotten as good as you need to get at the task and you’re basically on autopilot.

• During that autonomous stage, you lose conscious control over what you’re doing. In typing, for example, we quickly move beyond single finger pecking the keyboard to the associative stage into the autonomous stage. Despite how much or how often you type, you don’t get any faster. Why? Because you’ve reached the “ok-plateau” where your brain is automatically completing the task. What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, known as “deliberate practice.” Therefore, you must force yourself out of the autonomous stage and back into the cognitive stage. Researchers have found that the best way to do this is to practice failing. In typing, or reading, force yourself to type or read 10-20% faster than your comfort pace. And allow yourself to make mistakes.

• Motor Skills learning takes place largely in the cerebellum, perceptual learning in the neocortex, habit learning in the basal ganglia.

• Steps to learning anything:

  • Deconstruct the skill based on desired outcome. Break skills into constituent skill aspects.

  • Learn enough to self-correct (outside research).

  • Remove distractions.

  • Practice at least 20 hours.

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Memory Tricks

• The Method of Loci: Create a space in the mind’s eye, a place that you know well and easily visualize, and then populate that imagined place with images representing whatever you want to remember. To use one's exquisite spatial memory to structure and store information whose order comes less naturally. It's very important to try and remember images multisensory. The more associative hooks a new piece of information has, the more securely it gets embedded into the network of things you already know, and the more likely it is to remain in memory. It's important to deeply process that image, so you give it as much attention as possible. The funnier, lewder, and more bizarre, the better. What distinguishes a great mnemonist is the ability to create these sorts of lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any that has been seen before that it cannot be forgotten, and to do it quickly. Animated images tend to be more memorable than inanimate. Create images of exceptional beauty or singular ugliness, to put them into motion, and to ornament them in ways that render them more distinct. One could disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, or else proceed by assigning certain comic effects to our images.

• Chunking: A method used to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item. Chunking is the reason that phone numbers are broken into two parts and that credit card numbers are split into 4 groups.

• Elaborative Encoding: Transforming boring memories into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you've seen before that you can't possibly forget it. Conscious conversion of information into images and distribute those images along familiar spatial journeys.

• Song: If you can turn a set of words into a jingle, they can become exceedingly difficult to knock out of your head.

• Emotion: Break a poem into small chunks and assign a series of emotions and images to each short segment. Rather than associate words with images, associate them with feelings.

• The Major System: Simple code to convert numbers into phonetic sounds. Sounds can then be turned into words, which can then be turned into images for a memory palace.

• PAO: Person- Action- Object. Every two-digit number from 00-99 is represented by a single image of a person performing an action on an object. 12/22/67 becomes a 1ton weight (12) crushing a nun (22) as she drank a fruit shake (67), which I placed in a freestanding claw-toothed bathtub in the bathroom of my Victorian palace.

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Terminology

• Education: The ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it.

• Neuroplasticity: Readaptation and reorganization of the brain due to new sensory input.

• Ok-Plateau: Where your brain is automatically completing the task.

• Ribots Law: Each time we think about a memory, we integrate it more deeply into our web of other memories, and therefore make it more stable and less likely to be dislodged.

• Synesthesia: A rare perceptual disorder which causes senses to be bizarrely intertwined.

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Misc Quotes

• The average IQ is 115.

• A study by Mcguire suggested that the brain was capable of creating additional neurons in life.

• Floreant Dendrite: May your brain cells flourish.

• Our ability to process information and make decisions in the world is limited by a fundamental constraint: we can only think about roughly seven things at a time. When a new thought or perception enters our head, it doesn’t immediately get stashed away in long-term memory. Rather, it exists in a temporary limbo, in what's known as working memory, a collection of brain systems that hold on to whatever is rattling around in our consciousness at the present moment.

• When mental athletes are learning new information, they engage several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial navigation.

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