Moonwalking With Einstein Read Online Free

understand human memory is to try very hard to optimize it—ideally with a load of bright people in conditions where they get rigorous and objective feedback. That’s what the memory circuit is.”
    The contest itself unfolded with all the excitement of, say, the SAT. The contestants sat quietly at tables staring at sheets of paper, then scribbled answers that they handed off to judges. After each event, scores were quickly calculated and displayed on a screen at the front of the room. But much to the dismay of a journalist trying to write about a national memory championship, the “sport” had none of the public agony of a basketball game, or even a spelling bee. Sometimes it was difficult to tell whether competitors were deep in thought or sleep. There may have been a lot of dramatic temple massaging and nervous foot tapping and the occasional empty stare of defeat, but mostly the drama was inside the competitors’ heads, inaccessible to spectators.
    A troubling thought percolated to the front of my brain as I stood in the back of the Con Edison auditorium watching these supposedly normal human beings perform their almost unfathomable mental acrobatics: I didn’t have a clue how my own memory worked. Was there even such a place as the front of my brain? A slow wave of questions swept over me—things I’d never bothered to wonder about, but which all of a sudden seemed profoundly pressing. What exactly is a memory? How is one created? And how does it get stored? I’d spent the first two and a half decades of my life with a memory that operated so seamlessly that I’d never had cause to stop and inquire about its mechanics. And yet, now that I was stopping to think about it, I realized that it actually didn’t work all that seamlessly. It completely failed in certain areas, and worked far too well in others. And it had so many inexplicable quirks. That very morning my brain had been held hostage by an unbearable Britney Spears song, forcing me to spend the better part of a subway ride humming Hanukkah jingles in an attempt to dislodge it. What was that about? A few days earlier, I had been trying to tell a friend about an author I admired, only to find that I remembered the first letter of his last name, and nothing else. How come that happened? And why didn’t I have a single memory before the age of three? For that matter, why couldn’t I remember what I had for breakfast just the day before, even though I remembered exactly what I was having for breakfast—Corn Pops, coffee, and a banana—four years earlier when I was told that a plane had just crashed into one of the twin towers? And why am I always forgetting why I opened the refrigerator door?

    I came away from the U.S. Memory Championship eager to find out how Ed and Lukas did it. Were these just extraordinary individuals, prodigies from the long tail of humanity’s bell curve, or was there something we could all learn from their talents? I was skeptical about them for the same reason I was skeptical about Tony Buzan. Any self-appointed guru who has earned himself a king’s ransom in the modern “self-help” racket is bound to perk up a journalist’s bullshit detector, and Buzan had set off every alarm bell I’ve got. I didn’t yet know enough to know whether he was selling hype or science, but his over-the-top packaging—“a global education revolution”!—certainly smacked of the former.
    Was it really true that anyone could learn to quickly memorize huge quantities of information? Anyone? I was willing to believe Buzan when he said there were techniques that one could learn to marginally improve one’s memory around the edges, but I didn’t fully believe him (or Ed) when he said that any schmo off the street could learn to memorize entire decks of playing cards or thousands of binary digits. The alternate explanation just seemed a whole lot more plausible: that Ed and his colleagues had some freakish innate talent that was the mental