When I was in high school, I happened upon a book at my local library called “Page-a-Minute Memory Book” by Harry Lorayne. Harry Lorayne is a mentalist – one of those magicians who would do mental tricks like asking you to pick a number and then figuring out what it is, or feats of “telepathy” where he would ask you a few simple questions and then from there be able to figure out everything about you (it’s called cold reading). One of Lorayne’s specialty was in amazing feats of memory – being introduced to 50 people and their life stories and after an hour recalling every single detail about them. Or being shown a shuffled deck of cards and being able to recall their order – backwards. For a teenager going to through school studying and trying to learn and memorize a million different things at once, this seemed like a godsend. I read the book, and learned some of the techniques, techniques that I’d later learn are called mnemonics. I applied some of them to my classes, some subjects better than others, and made some use of them. They held a lot of promise, and if I had pursued the matter further, I’d have gotten quite good at it. But, as with any other skill that isn’t diligently practiced continuously, I didn’t do that and the skill slipped away. I made some half-hearted effort to revive it in my college days, but I was struggling though engineering classes and problem sets and frankly couldn’t figure out a way to make them work for me.

Now, some 15-20 years later (!!) I’m about to have a son and perhaps by coincidence, perhaps by fate, I recently came across a book called “Moonwalking with Einstein” by Joshua Foer. I couldn’t put down, and I read the thing in three days. The author was a freelance science journalist who one day decided to cover the US National Memory Championships and by doing so, became exposed to the esoteric world of “mental athletes.” Not as glamorous as physical athletes, but nonetheless equally impressive (in my not-so-humble opinion). The book was essentially about how Foer went from journalist, to participatory chronicler, to actually winning the event and becoming the US Memory Champion – all in the span of one year. In the book he talks about his training, and how we underwent “deliberate practice” (a topic I intend to write about in a later post) to progressively improve and enhance his skillset. He writes about how we mastered the “method of loci,” the “major system,” amongst many others – all part of the mnemonist’s toolbox and arsenal. And, incidentally, all things that I had once learned once upon a time from Harry Lorayne. But more importantly, Foer provides a little history to what he calls the “art of memory.”

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