SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Moonwalking with Einstein

The latest addition to our lending library is Moonwalking with Einstein: The art and science of remembering everything. The author is a journalist who got interested in memory training when he covered the U.S. Memory Championship. Although the author had no previous aptitude for or interest in memory training, he decided to train for the contest - which he ended up winning the next year. Most people assume that memory is memory (and it deteriorates as you age), but it turns out that this is not true. "The brain is like a muscle, ... and memory training is a form of mental workout. Over time, like any form of exercise, it'll make the brain fitter, quicker, and more nimble." The book reveals many techniques (ancient and modern) for improving memory, and along the way relates many interesting stories about the denizens of the quirky subculture of memorizers. Memory, it seems, is a gift we all possess but which all too often slips our minds.

The excerpt (pp 18-19) deals with mankind's shift in memory preservation away from the oral tradition of pre-literate societies (for example, India's priests who were charged with memorizing the Vedas or the Greek epics such as the Odyssey and the Iliad). These memorized passages were repositories of useful knowledge that could be passed on to successive generations. Today, much of our collective memory has been externalized.

• Physiologically, we are virtually identical to our ancestors who painted images of bison on the walls of the Lascaux cave in France, among the earliest cultural artifacts to have survived to the present day. Our brains are no larger or more sophisticated than theirs. If one of their babies were to be dropped into the arms of an adoptive parent in twenty-first-century New York, the child would likely grow up indistinguishable from his or her peers.
• All that differentiates us from them is our memories. Not the memories that reside in our own brains, for the child born today enters the world just as much a blank slate as the child born thirty thousands years ago, but rather the memories that are stored outside ourselves - in books, photographs, museums, and these days in digital media. Once upon a time, memory was at the root of all culture, but over the last thirty millennia since humans began paining their memories on cave walls, we've gradually supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of external memory aids - a process that has sped up exponentially in recent years. Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that all the world's ink had become invisible and all our bytes had disappeared. Our world would immediately crumble. Literature, music, law, politics, science, math: Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.
• If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also painfully linked to our own transience. When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we've created is a way of fending off mortality. It allows ideas to be efficiently passed across time and space, and for one idea to build on another to a degree not possible when a thought has to be passed from brain to brain in order to be sustained.
• The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued. Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory. It's a telling statement that pretty much the only place where you'll find people still training their memories is at the World Memory Championship and the dozen national memory contests held around the globe. What was once a cornerstone of Western culture is now at best a curiosity. But as our culture has transformed from one that was fundamentally based on internal memories to one that is fundamentally based on memories stored outside the brain, what are the implications for ourselves and for our society/ What we've gained is indisputable. But what have we traded away? What does it mean that we've lost our memory?