If thinking about the word “coffee” makes you think of the colour black, and also about breakfast and the taste of bitterness, ‘that’s a function cascade of electrical impulses, rocketing around a real physical pathway inside your brain. Every sensation that we remember, every thought we think, transforms our brains by altering the connections within that vast network. A memory, at the most fundamental physiological level, is a pattern of connections between the neurons. The brain is a costly organ – though it only accounts for 2% of the body’s mass, it uses up a fifth of all oxygen we breathe and it’s where a quarter of our glucose gets burned. Moonwalking with Einstein gives practical advice on how to retain memory, from the US 2006 Memory Champion. Our memories are fading with our increased reliance on gadgets. When we climb into the car, we use GPS, when we sit to work, we hit play on the voice recorder or open up a notebook with contents of interviews, photographs store images etc. Today we don’t need our memory like we used to. Until one of those memories calls to mind the one we’re looking for… “Ah yes, her name was Lisa!” So when a memory goes missing, like a name gets caught on the tip of the tongue, hunting it down can be frustrating and futile “Her name begins with L… she’s a painter… I met her at that party a couple of years ago…. From the moment you grasp a piece of information, your memory’s hold on it begins to loosen, until finally it lets go altogether ‘The art and science of remembering everything’įor normal humans, memories gradually decay with time along what’s known as the ‘curve of forgetting’.
When a memory goes missing, such as someones name, it can be frustrating and futile and can come at some social cost. We’ve outsourced our memory to technology and devices such as GPS systems, google and online notebooks. Moonwalking With Einstein tells Joshua Foer’s journey from journalist to US Memory Champion in twelve months, and talks about different memory techniques and phenomena of the brain along the way.
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