Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Saturday March 12, 2011
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MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Joshua Foer
Penguin Press
ISBN 978-1594202292
307 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Marie Arana
It's hard to imagine a world in which all you can do with a thought is recall it: a world in which written words do not exist and the only way to hoard knowledge is to remember. That may sound like an extravagantly imagined story by Philip K. Dick, but once upon a time, long ago, before Gutenberg, before alphabets, before scribbles on cave walls, it was so. Memory was all the information we had -- and we were very good at holding on to it.
These days, it seems, we hardly remember anything. We have gadgets that do it for us: day planners, GPS devices, cell phones that log every number we've ever called, tiny motherboards with gargantuan gigabyte capacities. We're lucky if we know five telephone numbers by heart. A recent survey revealed that a third of all British citizens under age 30 couldn't remember their home phone numbers without checking their mobiles. Thirty percent couldn't remember the birthdays of more than three family members. But the devaluation of memory has deeper cultural implications: Fully two-thirds of American teenagers do not know when the Civil War occurred; one-fifth don't have a clue whom we fought in World War II. Why waste brain cells on remembering when we can summon facts so easily on our cell phones?
Now comes science writer Joshua Foer -- a formerly absent-minded young man who became the 2006 U.S. memory champion -- to argue that in exchange for scientific progress, we may have traded away our most valuable human resource. Can you name the 44 American presidents? Can you list the capitals of all 50 states? Chances are you can't. And yet if you can read this review, your brain may have the capacity to recall 50,000 digits of pi, permanently commit to memory 96 historical facts in the course of five minutes, maybe even memorize every line of Yeats' mammoth poem "The Wanderings of Oisin."
"Anyone could do it, really," says the reigning world memory champion, Ben Pridmore. More likely, if you are like the rest of us, you will spend -- according to Foer -- a staggering average of 40 days a year making up for everything you've forgotten.
Foer, who was born in Washington, D.C., is the brother of former New Republic editor Franklin Foer and novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. He chanced upon the U.S. Memory Championships in Manhattan in 2005 while doing research for a story about Pridmore.
"The scene I stumbled on," he writes, "was something less than a class of titans: a bunch of guys (and a few ladies), widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep, poring over pages of random numbers and long lists of words." One year later, after grueling months of training, Foer won that competition by memorizing a set of 52 cards in one minute and 40 seconds, breaking the American record. But the book that he offers us is far more than a personal chronicle of that triumph.
Devalued though human memory has become, it is what makes us who we are. Our memories, Foer tells us, are the seat of civilization, the bedrock of wisdom, the wellspring of creativity. His passionate and deeply engrossing book, "Moonwalking With Einstein," means to persuade us that we shouldn't surrender them to integrated circuits so easily. It is a resounding tribute to the muscularity of the mind.
In the course of "Moonwalking," we learn that our brains are no larger nor more sophisticated than our ancestors' were 30,000 years ago. If a Stone Age baby were adopted by 21st-century parents, "the child would likely grow up indistinguishable from his or her peers." The blank slate of memory hasn't changed one bit, except that we've lost the incentive to use it to store large amounts of information. As one of Foer's fellow mental athletes puts it, in the course of ordinary modern life, "we actually do anti-Olympic training ... the equivalent of sitting someone down to train for the Olympics and making sure he drinks ten cans of beer a day, smokes fifty cigarettes ... and spends the rest of the time watching television."
Foer introduces us to memory prodigies such as the young journalist S, who irked his employer because he took no notes but could memorize 70 digits at a time, reciting them forward and backward after one hearing. He could replicate complex formulas, although he didn't know math; was able to repeat Italian poetry, though he spoke no Italian; and, most remarkable of all, his memories never seemed to degrade. There are, too, master chess players who can remember every move of a match weeks or even years after the event. They become so skilled at recalling positions that they can take on several opponents at once, moving the pieces in their heads, with no physical board before them. There are London cabbies with such intricate maps committed to memory that their brains have enlarged right posterior hippocampuses. There is the child relegated to "the dunces' class" because he cannot perform school tasks well, although he can identify distant birds by how they fly, having memorized dozens of flight patterns.
Foer sets out to meet the legendary "Brainman," who learned Spanish in a single weekend, could tell if any number up to 10,000 was prime, and saw digits in colors and shapes, enabling him to hold long lists of them in memory. The author also tracks down "Rain Man" Kim Peek, the famous savant whose astonishing ability to recite all of Shakespeare's works, reproduce scores from a vast canon of classical music and retain the contents of 9,000 books was immortalized in the Hollywood movie starring Dustin Hoffman.
When Foer is told that the Rain Man had an IQ of merely 87 -- that he was actually missing a part of his brain; that memory champions have no more intelligence than you or I; that building a memory is a matter of dedication and training -- he decides to try for the U.S. memory championship himself. Here is where the book veers sharply from science journalism to a memoir of a singular adventure.
Foer enters the strange and hermetic world of mental athletes, the great majority of whom are white males living on the margins of society -- jobless, eccentric, superstitious -- who know each other's weaknesses and strengths as well as any Homeric hero might know his enemy. Foer learns to anchor memory to the visual, to shut out all sound when concentrating, to blinker himself.
He masters the art of building memory palaces, on whose imaginary walls he hangs impossibly long lists of complicated data.
The more vivid and lewd the associations he assigns, the more easily he can access the information. Numbers become people; images come alive; Foer remembers a sequence of three cards by visualizing himself moonwalking with Einstein.
As Foer explains it, what makes our brains such extraordinary tools is not just the volume of information we are able to store, but the ease and efficiency with which we can locate it. Look no further than your own head to find "the greatest random-access indexing system ever invented" -- a search engine of amazing proportions. No computer you can buy will come close to replicating it.
In the end, "Moonwalking With Einstein" reminds us that though brain science is a wild frontier and the mechanics of memory little understood, our minds are capable of epic achievements. The more we challenge ourselves, the greater our capacity.
It's a fact that every teacher, parent and student would do well to learn.
The lesson is unforgettable.
Marie Arana is a writer at large for The Washington Post. She can be reached at aranam(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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PLAYING CATCH-UP
A. B. Guthrie
Bison
ISBN 978-0803230309
183 pages
$16.95
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
In the 1940s and '50s, Montana writer A.B. Guthrie Jr. (1901-1991), was more than just a regional figure. His 1947 novel, "The Big Sky," earned him popular and critical acclaim; his next, "The Way West," won a Pulitzer Prize; and he wrote the screenplay for "Shane," one of the first "adult Westerns" that Hollywood and the TV networks became so enamored of in the '50s and '60s. Soon, however, the magic touch deserted Guthrie (no more best-sellers or blockbuster films). But he kept writing just the same, and late in life produced five mysteries, set in Montana and featuring Sheriff Chick Charleston and his young sidekick, Jason Beard, who narrates.
Bison Books, a division of University of Nebraska Press, has been returning these Western mysteries to print, and for anyone who doesn't know Guthrie's work, "Playing Catch-Up" is a fine place to start.
In the opening scene, Jason interviews the madam of the town "sporting house," one of whose "girls" has been found murdered. Both the chore and the setting make Jason uncomfortable, though not because of prudishness. His discomfort has more to do with being forced to confront the seamy side of the male sex drive at a time when he is looking for love. A little later, Chick, his mentor, explains why nobody should be shocked when good women go bad: "Poverty's a stinking thing. It mixes up values. It doesn't team up with purity. What's a little whoring ... when the belly's empty?" Soon another local young woman is raped and killed -- this one no prostitute but a young singer of such promise that the community had been raising money to send her off to a conservatory for training.
Chick and Jason's efforts to prevent any more killings are complicated by the arrival of Gewald, a boorish and arrogant state investigator. He tends to bully witnesses, redo perfectly good police work by Chick and Jason and generally make a nuisance of himself. Guthrie's point: A local lawman who knows the people and conditions around him is more apt to succeed than an overweening outsider. In the end, though, it's Sheriff Chick's analytical ability -- along with some timely athleticism from Jason -- that leads to a solution.
You won't find pulse-pounding sensationalism in these mysteries. But they aren't cozies, either. The violence perpetrated against the dead women is ugly enough to give Jason second thoughts about his choice of law enforcement as a career. Guthrie's strengths include well-sketched characters, a sure sense of place and milieu, and a tale that hangs together well. In short, it's entertainment of a high order that's good to see back in print.
Dennis Drabelle is the mysteries editor of The Washington Post Book World.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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