Today I read a fascinating article by a journalist, Joshua, Foer, about memory sports - the art of memorizing anything from random numbers to a poem. During his reporting, of the conpetitors continued to say that anyone could learn the techniques that they were using to improve their own memory. As a follow-up story for the magazine, he decided to spend a year learning the techniques everyone was describing to see whether they actually worked or not. A brilliant man, Ed Cooke, liked the idea of teaching an American mnemonic strategies, so he trained Josh over the next year.After his year of training, Josh competed in the very competition he set out to report on. And won.
Josh wrote a book, "Moonwalking with Einstein," that described his experiences over the year he was training. It discusses all of the baseline tests he went through and how much he improved. It also discusses the history of memory and a lot more extremely interesting information.
I was fascinated by his article, so I decided to read the book for the fun of it. It did not take long to become extremely interested in trying these techniques for myself, but I was extremely suspicious of the true power of these techniques. I decided to journal interesting facts from his book, as well as my own attempts at trying the strategies he discusses. The following blog entries are a summary of the notes that I took after reading his book and several of the most recent entries will discuss other books that I have read/are in the process of reading.
The purpose of this blog is as much to inform anyone interested that there are extremely powerful and simple techniques in improving your memory as it is to simply document my findings and improve my writing ability.
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