Resume
by : Maulana Alif Asy-Syahrani
Title : Moonwalking with Einstein;
The Art and Science of Remembering Anything
Author : Joshua Foer
Publisher : The Penguin Press
Pages : 269
E-ISBN : 978-1-101-47597-3
It
all began when Josh went for an interview with a theoretical physicist at
Kutztown University. On the way there, through York, Pennsylvania; he didn’t
waste his chance to visit the Weighlifting Hall of Fame and Museum. It turned
out that it was anything but old photograph collections of Weighlifitng. It
didnt’t seem like thing that will linger in mind, except for a photograph of a
man named Joe “The Mighty Atom” Greenstein. When he noticed the label “the
strongest man in the world, right next to Greenstein’s photograph, it came to
his mind that it would be interesting if the world’s mightiest man ever got to
meet the world’s smartest person. But it won’t be as choosing for the muscle
category, it would be rather more difficult to choose for “smart” criterias.
When
Josh browsed for the smartest person in the world, he got plenty of them. Let’s
say like the person who can do rubriks on such very fast time, the person who
can multiply many digits number just for a second, high IQ person who lived in
New York, or the people like Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking. There was
someone he put his interest in. He was Ben Pridmore, a man who can remember
1,528 random digits in an hour and also any poem given to him. He was the
conqueror of the world championship of memory.
Josh
kept thinking about Ben Pridemore and what he said on a newspaper article,
“anyone could do it, really” along some times. It eventually led him to attend
the 2005 U.S. Memory Championship which was held at Con Edison headquarters in
Manhattan. This time, he went there also due to a job to write an article for Slate magazine.
There
were five events in this championship, such as poem remembering, memorizing
ninety-nine photographic head shots with their first and last name of the
person, memorizing three hundred random words, memorizing a page of random
digits, and memorizing a random order of a set of bridge cards. Looking down at
what the contestants were doing, he was amazed by how they could do that. Then
he came to an England young Grand Master named Eddie Cooke. He told Josh that
they weren’t savant nor having some kind of photographic memory, he rather
admited that he and every one in there were just like any other ordinary
person. It was only that mnemonist, the term for them or they usually call
themselves as “mental atheletes”, maximized their brain potential to a higher
level. As Ben Pridmore put it, we had to “think it in a more memorable way.”
Ed
explained that they were using a kind of memory technique called “memory
palace”. He explained that it was an ancient technique invented by a Greek poet
named Simonides of Ceos. It recorded in history that Simonides first discovered
this technique after a tremendous disaster that occured in a party he came in.
He closed his eyes and started visualized how condition before the disaster
happened. He managed to precisely put almost everything in place and after that
he reported it for identifying purpose. So, the technique is focusing on the
materials that are meant to memorize and put them in a place in mind called
loci. Whenever a person wants to recall for that things, he just has to
visualize the place and starts looking for one piece after another.
After
some chats, Ed told that his very pupose was to revolutionize, or in this chase
is to restore, the education system of the western. Apart form his party-guy
attitude, he thought that the west education system had became so corrupted. In
the past, people used to store almost everything now we have in books, records,
etc. in their head. As human discovered how to externalize informations, the
art of memory gradually faded. With the method he had, he had this thought of
making the better thing, especially education for other people. It’s the same
thing when Josh met the person behind the championship and the leader of this around-the-globe
memory training movement, Tony Buzan.
Tony
Buzan was an infamous, sixty-seven year-old, person of brain developmental
world who get his fame from his method he advertise all over the world. Josh
got the chance to have chats with him in Con Edison’s cafetaria. Not so
different with Ed, he told Josh that it is important for people to restore the
art of memory, like what people of the past had taken the art for granted. He
told Josh that he took the concerns of the brain potential. Some things he had
done were such as establishing memory championship in some countries, teaching
and now had found a memory training foundation, and promoting many other things
related to memory.
The
most important thing he emphasized was about revolution of education. He
thought that the education system at the time was all about putting a lot of
information into students brain through rote-dead-drill method. It’s not
effective and killing the creativity. It’s very important as well to teach
students not only what to learn, but also how to learn. Josh wondered what it
was like to have the ability of those mental atheletes. So, Buzan encouraged
him to try it himself, by joing the championship too!
He
came away from the championship inclined to do some short of research. His findings
on memory stuffs consisted of the history about memory and the extreme cases on
people. He concluded from the sources he explored that actually the method the
mental athletes refered to had long time ago been used by the ancient
civilization, especially when there was still a minimum use of ‘external’
memory.
Like
as it is part of human evolution, storing information from mind to a spescific mean
also got it way through the time. It was said to begin when people started
painting pictures on cave walls. These pictures later simplified and
generalized into symbols like what the Egypt did. As symbols grew into letters,
letters into complex and abstract words, words into sentece, and the
brilliantly invented space between words and the addition of word marks. As
what is stored improved, so did its media. Before book, people used papyrus
leaf to carry out what they wrrote. To make it as portable as possible, they
turned it into scrolls. It wasn’t that easy to find a certain information in
many through scroll. That’s why the data converting was meant not to be ultimately
the tool to replace our memory. It was just a media to store the data so it was
likely possible to maintain. The human’s memory function had been changed from
a completely data storing media into an indexing tool for information.
When
people invented the way to put those letters out of scrolls to flipped books,
they also accomplished one more way to reduce its inefectiveness, the table of
content. And then, at the industrial era, the production of books was greatly
increased. It made the distribution of book vastly increased as well. Before it
happened, book was viewed as something luxurious and not everyone could have
it. Until now, the externalization of memory has reached a very different level
from years than the past millenials. Those improvements makes life easier but,
in return, we now has our memory quality detoriating.
After
that championship too, Josh got a better chance to know Ed better. One day he
made an appointment with Ed to follow him teaching in a certain highschool as
his trip to promote (as for advertise himself as memory trainer) after the
championship before he headed back to England. He told Josh to follow him if he
wanted to know more about this memory things. So Josh followed Ed all day long
teaching in highschools and ended up in a bar. They were chating some
conversation as Josh were digging down about Ed. When Ed discovered Josh’s
passion in memory, he was willing to serve as Josh’s mentor in memory training,
as he also encouraged Josh to join in the U.S Championship.
As
part of Josh research to understand human memory better, he came to Tallahassee
to helped a group of Neuroscientist led by Anders Ericsson to be a subject of
their test. So Josh was asked to be tested with a set of cognitive tests, which
consist of general knowledge test, memory test, and so on; at the time and
later after his memory training (after the championship he planned to join).
The test was held in the group place called Human Performance Lab.
As
Josh continued his research, he found in a Russian neuroscientist, A. R.
Luria’s journal, a person who had a unique case on remembering. It was S
(initial only as in medical journal rules), a journalist, who had a rare case
which he could retell everything that’s experienced by him. He just simply
barely forgot. As it was turned out that the everything that comes to S’s
memory seemed to directly stored up to the long-term memory with a unique
mechanism. He admited that whenever he wanted to recall something, he got this
visualization of a street where he lived and put the thing he wanted to
remember on particular place. What he did is just like what the mnemonist does,
but in his case he could do that naturally. So basically, the mental athletes,
who are not as extraorndinary as S, are trained to the limit to memorize like
S.
Later on, S was also diagnosed with a
syndrome called synesthesia, a condition when an information recieved by a sense
can be intepreted into the other senses, for example if S were shown the number
9. He would imidiately sense the feeling of sweet, rough, and hard. As well as
if he did it with his other senses. With that condition, it allowed him to
greatly make the difference of the quality of memory he made compared to
ordinary person. Having a great capacity of memory is one thing many people
wish as it will help out get things easily, but what S was undergoing is not
like that. It was hard for him to eliminate something he remembered but he
wasn’t willing to remember. Moreover, he could barely distinguish whether an information
is important or just trivial.
Contrary to S case, what about the
person who forget things as extraordinary as in proportion to S memorize
things? Josh was able to make a chance to find one example directly. He made
contact with Larry Squire, a neuroscientist from University of California, to
get a chance to meet his research subject. As the counterpart of S, a
eighty-four-year-old man with the initial EP was the man with very bad
forgetfulness. He couldn’t hold a memory long enough from one conversation to a
new one. From Larry’s diagnosis, EP’s brain was impaired with a herpes simplex
virus attack which crumbled down his neo-cortex and hippocampus area. This fact
helped the scientist to understand the system of remembering. The mechanism
goes like this, when a new memory is written in our brain it first stays in our
short-term memory. It will take some repetition or a certain condition before
it transfered into our long-term memory. Without the hippocampus that EP had
problem at, the memory only stays for some short of time before it completely
disapears.
But as though EP short-term memory
was unlikely to be able to be stored in the long one, he still maintained his
memory thirty years ago from that time. Also, what had been done by EP as
habits in the time he had already been easily forgeting, though he couldn’t
remember, he managed to perform the exact same thing the other time. For example
when he strolled around the neighborhood. He could manage to get back to his
house while also greeted his neighbour along the way which he in his thought
always recognized as a new person he’d never met before. With EP’s condition,
it seems very hard to live the life but we won’t even care about that because
what in the world we will think nor what we care about. A life without a single
memory that gets stay long enough for us to comprehend will let us live a happy
life, like what EP experienced.
After
a while, Eddie swanted to get back to his country. Before that, Josh had
promised him to take him to the Central Park where Ed’d never gone before.
There, Ed began his training to Josh. He introduced him the method of loci or
the memory palace though the classic manual, Ad Herennium. It took Josh to concentrate deeply into his mind. Ed
gave him some trick he usually does in daily life that uses the memory palace.
He picked some random words out of his memory, his to-do-list that day. He
wanted Josh to remember it too. He told Josh to think about a place served as
the palace that would be used as the place to store up the list. Then, he told
Josh to put the list in order in spesific place in his palace (Josh’s palace
was his childhood house) with exageration. He told Josh that the wilder,
odd-er, and nastier the thing asociated with what was wanted to memorize, the
more lingering the thing would be. Josh was so impressed that he could renounce
the list back easily.
It
took Josh a lot of practice with the method Ericsson recomended him to do, the
deliberate practice. The method was to be as efficient in practice in such
amount of time. It was meant so Josh could be continously developing, without
being trapped in the ok plateu. When a person has reached his ok plateu, that
person does a particular activity without realizing it, or in another word
being in auto-pilot. It’s the condition that keeps, let’s say, a driver that
has been spent ten years driving without any improvement compared to his driving
five years ago. It is also what distincts a mediocre sportman with the very
good one. While the ordinary player keeps playing the game over and over, the
better one is focusing his practice on a certain movement that he has to master
to overcome the game.
Josh
training brought him to Ed’s homeground in Oxford, England. There, Josh wanted
to learn more from Ed the latest technique for different events which were
competed on the last U.S. Championship, as he also wanted to watch the more
competitive memory championship in that town which Ed and Ben Pridemore took
part in. The memory championship in europe had been viewed as way more
competitive rather the one that is held in U.S. As it turned out, the result of
the event was quite surprising. Ben only finished on the fourth place, while Ed
couldn’t even make it into big ten.
After
coming back from England, Josh took most of his spare time practicing for the
championship. Month after month, he made a promising progress. Sticking to the
methods he had from Ed and Ericsson, and also with the help of a software that
could track his progress, he was sure he got a chance on the champioship,
though the other competitor seem to be more experienced than him.
One
thing he that came to Josh’s mind when recalling the last memory championship
he saw was that he also found out that the mnemonic method was used by Ramon
Matthew, a history teacher at a church school which was one of Tony Buzan’s
diciples. He thought that with this method he could help to bring up the education
into a better level. But it left contradictory with the principle that Tony
Buzan had. In Buzan’s point of view, the education system shouldn’t be
necessarily judging the students by one parameter and on certain level it can
be helped with enhancing the memory capacity with creativity, the two things
that seems contradictory in the past education system but now has got it’s way
to a better understanding that those two things are unseperatable. To get to
know better about it, while also on an occasion for his job, he flew to England
again to attend Ed’s twenty-fifth birthday party and also to visit Buzan’s home
near the Thame River.
It
had been a year since the first time Josh knew about mnemonic world and now he
stood on the stage as one of them. This time, like never before, there were
additional events for the big six who made it through the four classic events–names
and faces, speed numbers, speed cards, and poem. The classic events took time
inthe morning session, after that, the big six would compete in an three
elimination round that were also aired on national channel. Josh had a surprise
upon himself that he could make it to the main event by the second position,
and even broke the U.S. record for the speed cards event. The other five
contestants who also made it to complement the big six were Maurice Stoll for
the first place, whom Josh had been worried about; Chester Santos for one place
behind Josh, who got a problem with Josh because of the article Josh wrote
about last year’s championship; Ram Kolli, the defending champion; Paul Mellor,
a forty-seven years old marathoner; and Erin Luley, who also set a record for
the poem.
The
main event consisted of “Words to Remember”, then continued with “Three Strikes
and You’re out of the Tea Party”, and “Double Deck’r Bust”. First of all the
six of them gathered in a circle and memorized random words that were handed to
them. After that they, one-by-one, each called out the next word on the words
list they’d memorized. The first two contestant who miss a word would be
knocked out. Those first two were Erin and then Mellor.
Next, they got into the next event,
the tea party which apparently became Josh’s worst part. In this event, five strangers,
posing as guest at a tea party walked onto the stage and tell information about
themsleves which the contestant should memorize. The rule for this event was
that the first two contestants to forget three pieces of information would be
knocked out. This time Maurice and Chester had to leave the stage.
The last battle of mind was set
before the two finalist, Josh and Ram. They had to memorize the same two decks
of bridge card. In the ten minutes pause before the grand finale, as Maurice
stepped off the stage, he congratulated Josh not for his accomplishment for the
finale but rather for winning the championship which he hadn’t done. He said to
Josh that Ram was prety bad at cards. The same thing went from Ben as he were
there speculating the championship like what he usual does. And what they told
Josh was true. When it was decided for Ram to recite first, he stop it only at
the fifth card. That was it! Without Josh even said a single word at the last
event, he was the new U.S. memory champion.
