Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

 The smartest man is hard to find

• Junk food in: junk brain. Healthy food in: healthy brain
• Because normal is not necessarily natural
• By spending an hour day, six days a week on memory you can be world champion.
• The nonlinear associative nature of our brains makes it impossible for us to consciously search our memories in an orderly way. A memory only pops directly into consciousness if it is cued by some other thought or perception - some other node in the nearly limitless interconnected web.

The man who remembered too much

• It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think is to forget." 
• Bill Clinton is supposed to never forget a name and, well, look where that got him.
• It is always to associate the sound of a person's name with something you can clearly imagine. It's all about creating a vivid image in your mind that anchors your visual memory connected to the person's name.
• The secret to success in the names and faces event and remembering people's name in the real world is simply turn Bakers into bakers, Foers into fours, Reagans into ray guns. It's a simple trick, but highly effective.

The Expert Expert

• Experts see the world differently, They notice things that nonexperts don't see.
• We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.
• Most of the things that pass through our brain don't need to be rememberd any longer than the moment or two we spend perceiving them and, if necessary, reacting to them.
• Notice that the process of chunking takes seemingly meaningless information and reinterprets it in light of information that is already stored away somewhere in our long term memory.
• In most cases, the skill is not the result of conscious reasoning, but pattern recognition. 
• The greatest chess players in the world didn't seem to possess a single major cognitive advantage. Even Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess prodigy of all time, had been playing intensely for nine years before he was recognised as a grand master at age fifteen.
• A great memory isn't just a byproduct of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.

The most forgetful man in the World

• The more we pack our lives with memories, the slower time seems to fly.
• Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.
• Unconscious remembering is known as priming.
• The general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you've seen before that you can't possibly forget it. 
• When you're that effective at learning, it's a bit of a temptation to not bother oneself with feelings of academic guilt until the last possible moment.
• Keep a to-do list in memory.
• Convert something unmemorable, like a string of numbers or a deck of cards or a shopping list or paradise lost, into series of engrossing visual images and mentally arrange them within an imagined spece, and suddenly those forgettable items becomes unforgettable.

The memory Palace

• Places-or loci, as they're called in the original latin are those images are stored.\The idea is to create a space in the mind's eye, a place that you know well and can easily visualise, and then populate that imagined place with images representing whatever you want to remember. Known as the "method of loci" by romans, such a building would later come to be called a "Memory palace"
• Dr. Yip Swee Chooi, used his own body parts as loci to help him memorise 56000 words in 1774 pages oxford dictionary. 
• Humans are very very good at learning spaces. If you left alone for 5 minutes in someone else's house, think about how much of that house could be fixed in your memory in that brief period. You'd be able to learn not just where all the different rooms are and how they connect with each other, but their dimension and decoration, the arrangement of their contents and where the windows are.
• The principle of memory palace, is to use one's exquisite spatial memory to structure and store information whose order comes less naturally.
• The more associative hooks a new piece of information has, the more securely it gets embedded into the network of things you already know, and the more likely it is to remain in memory
• The Ad Herennium advises readers at length about creating the images for one's memory palace: the FUNNIER, LEWDER, and more BIZARRE, the better.
• What distinguishes a great mnemonist, is the ability to create these sorts of lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any that has been seen before that it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly.
• When forming images, it helps to have a dirty mind. Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: Jokes and sex- and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.
• If you wish to remember quickly, dispose the images of the most beautiful virgins into memory places; the memory is marvelously excited by images of women.
• Animate images tend to be more memorable than inanimate images. create images of Exceptional beauty or singular ugliness, to put them into motion and to ornament them in ways that render them more distinct. One could "disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red pain"
• E-male should be visualised as SHE-MALE.
• Before I could embark on any serious degree of memory training, I first needed a stockpile of memory palaces at my disposal. I went for walks around the neighborhood. I visited friends houses, the local playground, Oriole park at camden yards in baltimore, the East wing of national gallery of Art.
• The goal was to know these buildings so thoroughly- to have such a rich and texture set of associatiosn with every corner of every room- that when it came time to learn some new body of information, I could speed through my palaces, scattering images as quickly as I could sketch them in my imagination.

How to memorise a Poem

• Just as the secret to becoming a chess grand master was to learn old games, the secret to becoming a grand master of life was to learn old texts. TO REALLY LEARN A TEXT, ONE HAD TO MEMORIZE IT. The memorised text need to be ruminated, chewed them up and regurgitated them like cud.
• Make memorisation a part of your life, first thing in the morning to do.
• I believe that they who wish to do easy things without trouble and toil must previously have been trained in more difficult things.
• Take Omega 3 supplements daily.
• Being good at being a lawyer means merely, on average, maximising injustice.
• Early rise, yogs, skipping, superfoods (including blueberries, cod liver oil), 4 hours of training, 30 minute reflection period. => Mental Athlete routine.
• The best way to memorise a speech is point by point, not word by word. Orator delivering a speech should make one image for each major topic he wants to cover, and place each of those images at a locus.
• There were mnemonic aid that helped the bard(s) fit the meter and pattern of the line, and remember the essence of the poems. THE MOST USEFUL OF ALL MNEMONIC TRICK EMPLOYED WAS SONGS.
• The best method for remembering poetry word by word is to repeat a line two or 3 times before trying to see it as a series of images.
• Metrodus developed a system of shorthand images that would stand in for conjunctions, articles and other syntactical connectors. He has created his own dictionary of images for each 200 most common words that can't be easily be visualised. 
• And is denoted as circle ring
• The is denoted as die 
• Visualize a SIMILARLY SOUNDING OR PUNNING WORD for unknown word.
• To remember syllable, 
• ab- should be pictured as abbot.
• ba- should be pictured as balistarius.
• In order to memorise a worn by it's sound, it's meaning has to be separately linked.
• It will be easier to memorise if you understand the meaning of the text and you can feel it. Associate words with feelings to have better understanding.
• Method acting
• used by many actors, who try to empathise with character they playing.
• If you want to remember "pick up a pen", you should pick up the pen physically as you learn. 
• Vast majority of us don't trust our memories. We find shortcuts to avoid relying on them.

End of Remembering

• Once upon a time, there was nothing to do with thoughts except remember them. There was no alphabet to transcribe them in, no paper to set them down upon.
• Writing for Socrates, could never be anything more than a cue for memory- a way of calling to mind information already in one's head.
• Without sophisticated artificial intelligence capable of figuring out context, a computer has no way of telling the difference b/w "the stuffy nose may dim liquor" and "the stuff he knows made him lick her"
• Our internal memories are associational, non-linear. You don't need to know where a particular memory is stored in order to find it.
• Indexes were a major advance because they allowed books to be accessed in non-linear way we access our internal memories.
• If something is going to be made memorable, it has to be dwelled upon, repeated. 
• Memory training, for Bruno, was the key to spiritual enlightenment.
• Samuel L Clemens aka. Mark Twain
• SenseCam by Gordon Bell to fix an elemental human problem: that we forget our lives almost as fast as we live them. But why should any memory fade when there are technological solutions that can preserve it. A surrogate memory that recalls everything and can be accessed as naturally as the memories stored in our neurons: it would be the decisive weapon in the war against forgetting.
• If we could give someone a perfect memory and a mind that taps directly into the entire collective knowledge of humanity, well, that's when we might need to consider expanding our vocabulary.

Remembering Numbers

• Major System by Johann Winkelmann in 1648 based on sounds
• 0: S
• 1: T or D
• 2: N
• 3: M
• 4: R
• 5: L
• 6: Sh or Ch
• 7: K or G
• 8: F or V
• 9: P or B 
• But nobody wins an international memory competition using major system. For that you need PERSON-ACTION-OBJECT system or PAO.
• every 2 digit number b/w 00-99 is represented by a single image or a person performing an action on an object.
• For eg: 39 is frank sinatra crooning into a microphone, 13 is david Beckham kicking a soccer ball, 79: could be superman flying with a cape.
• 34-13-79: single image by combining person from first number, action from second number and object from 3rd number. Then it would be Frank Sinatra kicking a cape.
• In major system, those associations are entirely arbitrary, and have to be learned in advance, which is to say it takes a lot of rmembering just to be able remember.
• PAO Images tend, by their nature, to be memorable.
• Millennium PAO, contain 1000 different Person action object images.
• Mental athletes memorise decks of playing cards in mush the same way using a PAO system in which each of the fifty two cards is associated with it's own person/action/object image.
• To be maximally memorable, one's images have to appeal to one's own sense of what is colorful and interesting. Which means that a mental athlete's stock of PAO images is a pretty good guide to the gremlins that live in someone's subconscious.

The OK Plateau

• The point at which you decide you're OK with how how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving.
• What separates experts from the rest is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine called DELIBERATE PRACTICE.
• They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous state while they practice by doing three things
• Focus on technique
• stay goal oriented and push the limit
• Get constant and immediate feedback.
• in other words, they force themselves to stay in the COGNITIVE PHASE.
• The best ice skaters spend more of their practice time trying jumps that they land less often, while lesser skaters work more on jumps they've already mastered. Deliberate practice, by it's nature, must be hard.
• WHEN YOU WANT TO GET GOOD AT SOMETHING, HOW YOU SPEND YOUR TIME PRACTICING IS FAR MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE AMOUNT OF TIME YOU SPEND.
• Consciously challenge yourself: Review, Respond, Rethink, Rejigger. REGULAR PRACTICE ISN'T ENOUGH. TO IMPROVE, WE MUST WATCH OURSELVES FAIL, AND LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKES.
• to end OK plateau, is actually practice failing. One way to do that is to put yourself in the mind of someone far more competent at the task you're trying to master, and try to figure out how that person works through problems. 
• THE SECRET TO IMPROVING AT A SKILL IS TO RETAIN SOME DEGREE OF CONSCIOUS CONTROL OVER IT WHILE PRACTICING- To force oneself to stay out of autopilot.
• Force yourself to type faster than feels comfortable and to allow yourself to make mistakes.
• Barriers we collectively set are as much psychological as innate. Once a benchmark is deemed breakable, it usually doesn't take long befor someone breaks it.
• Keep a spreadsheet to keep track of how long you practice, and mentions difficulties, failures, techniques you find to overcome that.
• NO PAIN, NO GAIN is highly true
• one has to hurt, to go through a period of stress, a period of self-doubt, a period of confusion. And then out of that mess can flow the richest tapestries.
• "There are no limits, There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you."- Bruce Lee.

The Talented Tenth.

• The memorization of quotes allows a person to seem more legitimate
• "The whole usefulness of education consists only in the memory of it"- Hugh of St. Victor.
• You can't learn without memorising, and if done right, you can't memorize without learning.
• Memory needs to be taught as a skill in exactly the same way that flexibility and strength and stamina are taught to build up a person's physical health and well being.
• STUDENT NEED TO LEARN, HOW TO LEARN, FIRST YOU TEACH THEM HOW TO LEARN, THEN ONLY WHAT TO LEARN. -Tony Buzan.
• Tony Buzan seems to cultivate the sense of aloofness and inaccessibility that are a prerequisite for any self-respecting guru. He says that the source of his incredible self-confidence, is due to his extensive training in martial arts.
• The paradox is that : IT TAKES KNOWLEDGE TO GAIN KNOWLEDGE. Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches. 

A little Rainman in All of us

• Course of Tedious Training was the only way to achieve a more perfect memory. Nobody comes into the world with an inborn ability to remember loads of random digits or poetry at a single glance, or take pictures with mind.
• Hyperglot: A small number of people who can speak more than 6 languages. 
• The fact that people can become savants so spontaneously suggest that those exceptional abilities must lie dormant, to some degree, in all of us.
• There are several very simple calendar calculation formulas, published widely in internet.
• But perhaps Daniel exemplifies an even more inspiring idea: that we all have remarkable capacities asleep inside of us. If only we bothered ourselves to awaken them.

The US memory championship

• I had constructed five imaginary buildings, one of each of the tea party guests.
• Girls dig scars and glory lasts forever.
• lack of sleep is enemy of memory.
• Any kind of information that couldn't be neatly converted into an image and dropped into a memory palace was just as hard for me to retain as it had always been. 
• With focus, motivation and above all, time, the mind can be trained to do extraordinary things.
• What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.
• Inability to distinguish b/w those details that were worth paying attention to and those that weren't.
• How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. 
• Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks, it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.