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Moonwalking with Einstein Book Review

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Go on then. Imagine yourself moonwalking with Albert Einstein. Not an image you’re likely to forget, is it? This is exactly the point of mnemonics (silent “m”), the central aspect of this book.

In Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer explores the world of mnemonics and memory championships.

A mnemonic is a tool to help you remember, such as the alphabet song helps you to remember the sequence of letters.

The book documents Foer’s journey of training for the United States Memory Championship while being mentored by Ed Cooke, a fellow mnemonist.

As Foer explores memory, he writes about people who hardly forget anything to those who hardly remember. He looks into whether outsourcing memory tasks to technology is causing our minds to deteriorate.

The characters Foer meets are very interesting and his descriptions allow you to get a real picture of the quirkiness and seriousness of mnemonists. This takes up a vast chunk of the book and I found that while being very interesting, my mind sometimes did wander.

Foer also writes about the mnemonic devices he learns in his training. I would have liked to know more about how to use them, not just about how he used them. But this is a story of Foer’s experience, not a self-help book.

Overall the book is an interesting read mainly because it is about something very different.

I would give it a 3 out of 5.

Below is a TED talk Foer gave about his experience training for the US Memory Championships.

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