Moonwalking with Einstein

Foer, a journalist, covered the United States Memory Championship, became interested in the techniques competitors use, trained for a year under British competitor Ed Cooke and won the following year's championship. The book alternates between his training and reporting on memory science, memory history and unusual cases.

The technique is the method of loci, also called the memory palace, which converts information into vivid images placed at specific locations along a familiar route. Foer explains why it works: human memory is poorly adapted to abstract information and well adapted to spatial and visual material, so translating one into the other exploits a capacity that already exists. He covers the PAO system for numbers and card sequences, and the practice regime required.

The reporting sections cover the amnesiac EP, who could form no new memories; Kim Peek, the savant who inspired Rain Man; Daniel Tammet, whose claims Foer investigates sceptically; the history of memory as a discipline before printing made external storage cheap; and the finding that memory champions have ordinary brains and ordinary memory outside their trained domain.

The useful general argument concerns deliberate practice and what Ericsson calls the OK plateau, meaning the point where performance becomes automatic and stops improving. Foer describes deliberately staying in a mode of conscious control, working at speeds where he made errors, in order to keep improving. The book is journalism rather than instruction, and a reader wanting to learn the techniques will need a manual. The memory competition skills transfer poorly to general knowledge work, which Foer states honestly. The OK plateau material and the account of how expertise is built are the parts with wider application.