I just (almost) finished a book called Moonwalking with Einstein. It was on the topseller and best read lists on Amazon and at my local bookstore, so what could I do. I was hoping, with a title like that, that the book would be a strange tale or something. Not so. It's a book about training one's mind to remember. Specifically, how one person spent a year training his memory in order to compete in the annual Memory Championships.
Don't get me wrong, the book had some definite interesting points. I liked the conversation he started about the need for memory becoming obsolete with the proliferation of technology - like this. I couldn't argue, considering the fact that I blog in order to remember. And there were even some helpful hints about using mnemonic techniques to remember lists and such. But really when it came down to it, I'm just not that interested in remembering those kinds of things. I do want to exercise my brain and "jog" it occasionally. Maybe take a mental stroll around some of the places I've been. We really don't take enough time in our lives to re-experience many things.
However, the fact of the matter is that when I stopped to write down my experience of the book, I forgot the author's name. And that's really okay with me. Josh Foer, by the way. I just looked it up. Thank you, internet...
Interesting that it highlights Einstein, who supposedly said "I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book." That quote regularly comes to mind because I practice it consistently. With Google, there's hardly anything I need to memorize, and it does free up space for free thinking.
ReplyDeleteI guess there could be a problem for me if the cloud goes down for a long time.