Blog this item

Moonwalking with Einstein

The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

By Joshua Foer

(31)

| Others | 9781846140297

Like Moonwalking with Einstein?
Join aNobii to see if your friends read it, and discover similar books!

Critics

Speak, Memory

One day, the American journalist Joshua Foer is surfing the net, trying to find the answer to a specific question: who is the most intelligent person in the world? He can’t find a definitive answer. But he sees that a man called Ben Pridmore is the w ... (read full critics)

spectator published on Fri, 3 Jun 2011

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, By Joshua Foer

Abook that promises to discuss how we remember everything is a curious thing. After all, we live in a culture of forgetfulness, surely one of the fringe benefits of modernity. Since Gutenberg and the invention of print, we have steadily found the anc ... (read full critics)

independent published on Fri, 6 May 2011

See all critics

1 Review

*** This comment contains spoilers! ***

The book is not exactly what I had expected it to be after reading the front and back flaps. Nevertheless, it's an amazing feat for a journalist to win the US Memory Championship considering that he started only as a journalist to investigate what memory (and memory championship) is !
In contrary ... (continue)

The book is not exactly what I had expected it to be after reading the front and back flaps. Nevertheless, it's an amazing feat for a journalist to win the US Memory Championship considering that he started only as a journalist to investigate what memory (and memory championship) is !
In contrary to what I expected/hoped, the book doesn't really teach you every detail to win a memory championship. It has taught me that our memory can be trained (eg. by creating unusual images for numbers or objects that we want to remember) to remember many more things than we used to. But one needs to work hard in order equip oneself to remember better. The author discusses mostly about the science and psychology of the memory and brain and the characters and experiences of those memory geeks. Almost one chapter is devoted to convince us that Daniel Tammet is not a savant but trained mnemonist, which is the least enjoyable chapter.
At the end, it's a journalistic journey of his interaction with the scientists and the mnemonists in the year leading up to the US Memory Championship (I've googled it to be Mar. 11, 2006). Apart from the knowledge that image helps us remember, the author doesn't offer us any easy trick to lead to better memory. In fact, at the end, the author has found that his memory in daily life has not been enhanced though he's learnt the techniques to remember structured information. The author has also made us realize that we have outsourced rememberance to various modern tools from paper to cell-phones such that we tend to remember less and less. However, human beings are really what they can remember ! Eroding memory is probably a threat to who we are.
The one feature that has annoyed me is the endnotes. They should just put a number or symbol next to the words/sentences in the main book where they're relevant and use that number or symbol in the lists of endnotes. But in this book, there is no number nor symbol in the trunk of the book and each of the endnote has a page number associated with a few words or a sentence, but one may need to check the entire page before one can find where the endnote is related to !! Very inefficient. Maybe, the author is testing our memory ?!
[ I haven't come across typos except probably on p. 119: "like watch cartoon" should be "like watching cartoons" and "bête noir" should be "bête noire"; and on p. 204, I guess "ouevre" should be "oeuvre". ]

Is this helpful?

Yip Kin said on Jul 4, 2011 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback