Moonwalking with Einstein

How can an ordinary person train their memory to perform extraordinary feats? In Moonwalking with Einstein, journalist Joshua Foer embarks on a year-long experiment to answer that question. He begins as a curious observer at the U.S. Memory Championship and ends as a champion himself, proving that memory is a trainable skill, not an innate gift. The book blends personal narrative, cognitive science, and cultural history to explore how humans remember, why we forget, and what memory reveals about our minds and identities.

Foer’s journey ties together two central claims. First, memory is not fixed—it can be expanded by deliberate practice and by learning how the mind encodes and retrieves information. Second, the way societies externalize memory—through writing, books, and now digital lifelogs—reshapes what it means to know and to be human. As he trains with world-class mnemonists such as Ed Cooke and Ben Pridmore, and learns from scientists like K. Anders Ericsson, Foer uncovers a universal truth: the limits of your memory are often the limits of your attention and technique, not your biology.

Memory as Trainable Skill

Foer’s first revelation is that “memory champions are made, not born.” Studies by Ericsson and others show that ordinary people, given structured methods, can rival natural prodigies. The story of the undergraduate S.F.—whose digit span grew from seven to nearly eighty through two years of practice—demonstrates that mental capacity expands with chunking and meaningful encoding. Using domain-specific associations (like running times), S.F. restructured raw numbers into meaningful patterns. Foer learns to do the same through spatial and visual systems like the memory palace, linking data to familiar places in the mind.

Ancient Techniques, Modern Science

At the heart of Foer’s training is the method of loci—an ancient Greek invention that transforms memory into architecture. By placing bizarre and vivid images along a mental path (his childhood home, for instance), Foer engages the hippocampus, the brain’s spatial-navigation engine. Neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire’s fMRI scans confirm that expert memorizers recruit these same spatial circuits when remembering numbers or cards. In Ed Cooke’s playful lessons—imagine Claudia Schiffer swimming in cottage cheese or jars of garlic blocking the driveway—Foer learns that the brain remembers through emotion, exaggeration, and image.

From Skill to Sport

Foer’s narrative shifts from psychology to performance as he enters the competitive world of memory sport. The World Memory Championship is a mental decathlon featuring poetry, numbers, and faces, where discipline meets creativity. Competitors use mnemonic architectures like the Major System and PAO (Person–Action–Object) method to compress data into imagery that can be walked through mental palaces. By training under pressure with metronomes and spreadsheets, Foer applies Ericsson’s principle of deliberate practice: push beyond comfort, track errors, and correct them systematically. This process propels him from journalist to U.S. champion in less than a year.

Memory’s Broader Meanings

Beyond competition, the book reflects on memory’s cultural and moral meaning. Foer contrasts ancient orators—who saw memory as a civic art—with our digital age, where we outsource remembering to devices and networks. He revisits inventions from the alphabet to the index to the Internet, showing how each externalization changed intelligence itself. This leads to contemporary thought experiments: Microsoft’s Gordon Bell records his entire life in data, raising questions about whether external archives become part of who we are. Foer warns that offloading memory can erode inner reflection and the continuity that gives life coherence.

Forgetting and Identity

At its most poignant, the book explores the edge cases of memory—amnesiacs like EP, who live in an eternal present, and hypermnestics like Luria’s “S.”, who drown in unwanted details. These figures illustrate that memory’s purpose is not just storage but the construction of autobiographical continuity. Forgetting is not merely loss—it is the mental process that allows you to think abstractly, to forgive, and to live unburdened by an exhaustive past. The art of memory, Foer concludes, is about balance: improving what matters, accepting what must fade.

Core message

To practice remembering is to expand how fully you experience time and life. Memory is not a static ability; it’s a craft shaped by technique, culture, and attention. The more intentionally you remember, the more meaning you draw from living.

Foer’s training journey begins by rejecting the myth of innate genius. At the U.S. Memory Championship, he learns from competitors like Ed Cooke and Ben Pridmore that memory performance rests on methods and repetition, not superhuman capacity. Techniques like the memory palace, chunking, and coded imagery reveal how anyone can learn to store vast information.

How Practice Rewires Ability

Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson demonstrated that deliberate practice—goal-focused, feedback-driven, and effortful work—changes the underlying cognitive process. Foer references Ericsson’s subject SF, who raised his digit recall tenfold. The experiment shows that working memory limits are not fixed but depend on structure and familiarity. The principle mirrors athletes’ training: repeated challenges create systematic improvements in speed and accuracy.

Escaping the OK Plateau

Most learners hit what Foer and Ericsson call the OK Plateau—a comfort zone of automatic performance. To progress, you must re-enter the cognitive stage of learning by pushing speed, finding feedback, and analyzing mistakes. Foer uses a metronome to increase card-memorization tempo until errors reveal weak spots. Recording results and refining imagery keeps the process analytical and uncomfortable—the opposite of coasting.

Domain-Specific Expertise

A key lesson of cognitive science, reflected in chess and taxi-driver studies, is that memory expertise emerges within specific domains. Chess masters or London cabbies excel because they build internal representations of familiar patterns, not because they have general photographic recall. To grow expertise, you must choose a meaningful domain and spend time noticing recurring configurations—be it anatomy, legal codes, or musical structures.

Practical takeaway

To master memory, practice deliberately in a focused domain, confront errors intentionally, and never confuse comfort with improvement. Expertise arises from structured struggle, not repetition alone.

The method of loci—or memory palace—is the oldest and most effective mnemonic technique Foer learns. You convert abstract information into surreal, multisensory images and deposit them along a familiar spatial route. Because the brain’s spatial memory is robust, this architecture allows vast recall through mental “walkthroughs.”

Building and Using Palaces

You start with a memorized environment like your house. Each spot, or locus, holds a unique image representing a fact or line. To recall information, you mentally walk through the place in the original order. The stranger and more emotional the image, the stronger the trace. Foer’s coach Ed Cooke insists that smell, motion, and humor make images stick—Claudia Schiffer in cottage cheese beats “buy dairy products” every time.

Why It Works

Eleanor Maguire’s fMRI work confirms that memory athletes use hippocampal navigation pathways while recalling lists or numbers. The method essentially hijacks your spatial mapping system to order information that has none. This is why it scales—from grocery lists to epic poems—if you maintain distinct routes and rehearse them periodically.

Beyond Palaces: Major and PAO Systems

For efficiency, competitors adapt advanced mappings. The Major System converts digits to consonants, then words, allowing you to memorize long numbers by sound-visual association. The PAO System (Person–Action–Object) compresses sequences—six digits become one image by combining three elements. Ben Pridmore’s 2,704 two-card dictionary reduces each deck to nine palace locations. These mnemonic architectures demand tedious setup but explode retrieval capacity once automated.

Core principle

Memory thrives on spatial order and emotional absurdity. You don’t memorize facts—you memorize stories and sensations attached to them.

Foer traces the history of memory as both a discipline and a lost art. In pre-literate cultures, memory sustained religion, law, and civic speech. Greek orators used loci systems to deliver hours-long speeches verbatim, and medieval scholars like Peter of Ravenna memorized entire books. But as writing evolved from scroll to codex to indexed volumes, society shifted from internal mastery to external reference.

The Rise and Fall of the Art of Memory

From Renaissance “memory theaters” like Giulio Camillo’s to Bruno’s mystical wheels, mnemonics once symbolized human potential. The printing press ended that prestige: knowledge became something you looked up rather than carried. Modern education often follows suit, privileging creativity over recall. Yet Foer argues, echoing thinkers like E.D. Hirsch, that memory is the foundation of creativity—you can’t synthesize what you can’t retrieve.

External Memories and Modern Extensions

In the 21st century, the process of externalizing memory continues through technology. Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell’s lifelog—hundreds of thousands of photos, voice logs, and emails—functions as an external hippocampus. Digital storage raises new dilemmas: does possessing perfect recall in data form mean you remember? Foer cautions that indiscriminate recording replaces recollection with clutter unless shaped by interpretation.

Insight

Outsourcing memory frees mental bandwidth but risks eroding internal knowledge and self-understanding. True intelligence lies in integration—knowing when to remember and when to record.

Foer explores neuroscience’s decomposition of memory into distinct systems—declarative and nondeclarative. Cases like HM and EP (who lost new memory formation after hippocampal damage) and Luria’s S. (who remembered everything) reveal how selective deficits and excesses reshape identity.

The Necessity of Forgetting

Perfect recall, as Borges’ fictional Funes shows, can cripple thought. You need forgetting to generalize, abstract, and forgive. Foer reframes forgetting as a design feature, not a flaw: it keeps experience manageable and ideas transferable. Cognitive psychology confirms that memory decays predictably (Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve), and spaced repetition or sleep-based consolidation can slow that decay.

Memory and Time

Your sense of time depends on memory density. Experiments by Michel Siffre, who lived in caves without clocks, show that varied experiences (and thus richer memories) make time feel longer. Ed Cooke’s ambition to “expand subjective time by remembering more” connects memory training to experiencing life more vividly. Amnesic patients’ perpetual present illustrates the opposite—without memory, continuity and meaning collapse.

Moral reflection

To remember better is to enrich your sense of self and time, but accepting forgetfulness preserves your ability to adapt and to think abstractly. The art lies in the balance.

Foer connects his discoveries to education and daily behavior. In classrooms, memory has been undervalued in favor of “critical thinking.” Yet Raemon Matthews’s Bronx high-school project shows that teaching mnemonics restores engagement and achievement—students using loci and imagery outperform peers dramatically. Memorization, Foer argues, is not mechanical but transformative: it creates the raw material for reasoning.

Mind Mapping and Applied Mnemonics

Tony Buzan’s Mind Mapping brings spatial structuring onto paper—color-coded branches radiating from a central idea, mirroring the mental palace. Empirical studies confirm mild gains in retention, but the deeper lesson is that organization and visualization help encode meaning. Both teachers and professionals can use these tools to structure speeches, planning, or study material.

Choosing What to Remember

Foer admits that even as a memory champion, he still misplaces his car. Mnemonics are task-specific: they help for structured data but not spontaneous details. Thus, in everyday life, you must choose deliberately when to train recall and when to rely on devices. The goal isn’t perfect retention but better attention.

Everyday wisdom

Improving memory sharpens attention more than it expands storage. The real benefit of mnemonic training is mindfulness—it forces you to notice and cherish what you wish to keep.