The USA Memory Championship is an annual competition held in New York since the early 90s. There are several events, including name-face recall, memorizing long numerical sequences, and remembering the order of shuffled decks of cards. Joshua Foer attended the competition as a reporter one year and a competitor the next. This book details Foer’s unexpected immersion into the world of memory in the intervening year. Through extensive research, interviews on the topics, and training with “mental athletes”, he came to realize anyone can drastically improve their memory, and proved it by winning the USA Memory Championship after only a year of concerted effort.

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Most of us have trouble remembering; for the Russian journalist Solomon Shereshevsky, the difficulty was in forgetting. The book The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory documents Solomon’s singular case. Solomon could recount what he had done and seen on any given day with crystal clarity—even if the day was over a decade ago. While most of our memories dissipate within minutes, Solomon did not have this problem.

Most would consider Solomon a savant, endowed with the uncanny capacity to memorize. Exceptional as this case might seem, however, it is a skill that anyone can learn. Solomon would automatically connect experiences with associated images and shapes. In his mind’s eye, he would place these associative objects along a street with which he was familiar, in Moscow’s city center or near his childhood home. Solomon intuitively harnessed memory techniques that most have had to be taught throughout the centuries.

If you go to the memory competitions, you will meet people who have performed seemingly superhuman feats of memory. Former World Memory Champion, Ben Pridmore, could memorize a deck of cards in under thirty-two seconds. Another mental athlete managed to memorize twenty-seven shuffled decks of cards in one hour. The poem memorization record is 280 lines in fifteen minutes. Any of these competitors would readily concede that his memory is average, and that anyone can do the same with the proper motivation, tools, and understanding of how memory works. Savants they are not—like Solomon, they’ve simply utilized the mnemonic technique of efficiently placing representative images in familiar spatial locations.

Memory is a skill to be cultivated—not an immutable trait like facial structure or eye color. To improve your memory, you need to create a structure that can house colorful, meaningful associations. When Solomon accessed his memories, he would visualize a street with which he was very familiar, placing objects along the way that would signify certain ideas or experiences. The “mental athletes” who compete in memory competitions as well as the literature on mnemonics refer to these memory-storing structures as “memory palaces.”

Anyone can construct a memory palace. As in experiment, visualize your childhood home. Look at the front door: observe its color and texture, the shape of the knob. Walk inside and scan the foyer. Soak in the details, the textures, the hangings, and fixtures. Go from room to room until you are intimately acquainted with the space—the more detailed your palace, the better.

Experienced “mental athletes” often have hundreds of these “memory palaces,” but you can start with just one or two to try on the idea. Your palace can be a building, street, even your body, just as long as it is an entity with which you are very familiar. 

With the structure internalized, you can begin to fill it. If there is an idea, experience, or to-do list to be stored, take each item and attach an image to it. Make the image as distinct as possible, and engage as many senses as possible. For example, if you need to pick up salmon from the store, don’t just picture a fish sealed in a transparent wrap like you would get from the deli. It’s too nondescript; it will blend in with all your other salmon experiences, and you’ll be far less likely to retrieve it again. Instead, picture an eight-foot-long fillet, levitating above the kitchen table, rotating on some unseen spit, receiving a slow roasting from a single white candle atop the table. What would that look like? Smell like? It’s an image as absurd as it is detailed, but that’s the point: it will make for easy recall when you’re running errands.

Find your memory palaces, familiarize yourself with them, and fill them up!

Memory techniques have been around for a while. Legends trace the art of remembering back to the poet Simonides of Ceos at a banquet in ancient Greece, 2,500 years ago. In the middle of the festivities, the banquet hall collapsed, crushing all the guests except for Simonides, who was conversing with someone just outside. Simonides was able to mentally reconstruct the hall and visualize where everyone had been seated, so that families could locate the bodies of their loved ones.

Several centuries after Simonides’ remarkable reconstruction of the palace, an anonymous author wrote the Rhetorica ad Herennium. It’s an ancient Roman text that details techniques for improving memory, and it’s the oldest surviving Latin book on the subject of rhetoric. While there have been numerous developments to the art of memory since then, the fundamental ideas of utilizing images and structures to store information have changed very little.

The Rhetorica ad Herennium draws the distinction between natural and artificial memory. Natural memory is what nature’s given us, regardless of education or cultivated effort. Artificial memory is not intuitive, but a capacity to be developed through discipline. The basic building blocks of the artificial memory are images and places—images that symbolize the thing to be remembered, and places that house those images. In other words, the Ad Herennium provides the tools to help you build memory palaces. 

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells of an exchange between the Egyptian god, Theuth, and Thamus, the king of Egypt. Theuth presents the invention of writing to Thamus as a tool that will improve people’s memory. Thamus is leery of the invention. To write things down, he argues, can remind us, but it will not strengthen our capacity to remember.  Plato anticipated what the effects of relying on writing for recall would have on people and cultures. Externalizing memory through writing would lead to a people who do not truly possess knowledge, but become puffed up with the mere appearance of intelligence.

People used to rely on memory far more. Even during the Middle Ages, when books were rare and precious resources, memorization was still important. With limited access to only a smattering of books, retaining a book’s contents remained thoroughly ensconced in classical education, an art on par with grammar and logic. Over time, scribes began to include page numbers, tables of contents, and indices to make books easier to reference. There was less pressure to internalize a book’s contents when particular topics or passages could be readily revisited. With the Gutenberg press came a maelstrom of books, which led to a wider dissemination of information. These shifts revolutionized the way we read books and store information.

In the past, reading was intensive. The goal was to become deeply acquainted with an author’s thoughts. With wider availability of books and texts that were easier to access and peruse, reading extensively became the new ideal. This changed the measure of intelligence from ability to recite massive treatises from memory to the ability to navigate a growing sea of information efficiently and retrieve relevant material. Technological advances have improved our ability to store documents, banking information, emails, photos, and videos. We certainly have less to remember now, but is that really an improvement? Are we supplanting our natural memory with digital archives? Will there come a time when our technology almost entirely replaces the biological function of remembering? These are questions that the Information Age is now bringing to our attention.

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