Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 474

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything," by Joshua Foer.

Physiologically, we are virtually identical to our ancestors who painted images of bison on the walls of the Lascaux cave in France, among the earliest cultural artifacts to have survived to the present day. Our brains are no larger or more sophisticated than theirs. If one of their babies were to be dropped into the arms of an adoptive parent in twenty-first-century New York, the child would likely grow up indistinguishable from his or her peers. 

All that differentiates us from them is our memories. Not the memories that reside in our own brains, for the child born today enters the world just as much a blank slate as the child born thirty thousand years ago, but rather the memories that are stored outside ourselves—in books, photographs, museums, and these days in digital media. Once upon a time, memory was at the root of all culture, but over the last thirty millennia since humans began painting their memories on cave walls, we’ve gradually supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of external memory aids—a process that has sped up exponentially in recent years. Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that all the world’s ink had become invisible and all our bytes had disappeared. Our world would immediately crumble. Literature, music, law, politics, science, math: Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.

If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also painfully linked to our own transience. When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality. It allows ideas to be efficiently passed across time and space, and for one idea to build on another to a degree not possible when a thought has to be passed from brain to brain in order to be sustained. 

The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued. Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory. It’s a telling statement that pretty much the only place where you’ll find people still training their memories is at the World Memory Championship and the dozen national memory contests held around the globe. What was once a cornerstone of Western culture is now at best a curiosity. But as our culture has transformed from one that was fundamentally based on internal memories to one that is fundamentally based on memories stored outside the brain, what are the implications for ourselves and for our society? What we’ve gained is indisputable. But what have we traded away? What does it mean that we’ve lost our memory?

The three-pound mass balanced atop our spines is made up of somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion neurons, each of which can make upwards of five to ten thousand synaptic connections with other neurons. A memory, at the most fundamental physiological level, is a pattern of connections between those neurons. Every sensation that we remember, every thought that we think, transforms our brains by altering the connections within that vast network. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, your brain will have physically changed. 

If thinking about the word “coffee” makes you think about the color black and also about breakfast and the taste of bitterness, that’s a function of a cascade of electrical impulses rocketing around a real physical pathway inside your brain, which links a set of neurons that encode the concept of coffee with others containing the concepts of blackness, breakfast, and bitterness. That much scientists know. But how exactly a collection of cells could “contain” a memory remains among the deepest conundrums of neuroscience.

But the most striking finding of all from these early studies of chess experts was their astounding memories. The experts could memorize entire boards after just a brief glance. And they could reconstruct long-ago games from memory. In fact, later studies confirmed that the ability to memorize board positions is one of the best overall indicators of how good a chess player somebody is. And these chess positions are not simply encoded in transient short-term memory. Chess experts can remember positions from games for hours, weeks, even years afterward. Indeed, at a certain point in every chess master’s development, keeping mental track of the pieces on the board becomes such a trivial skill that they can take on several opponents at once, entirely in their heads.

As impressive as the chess masters’ memories were for chess games, their memories for everything else were notably unimpressive. When the chess experts were shown random arrangements of chess pieces—ones that couldn’t possibly have been arrived at through an actual game—their memory for the board was only slightly better than chess novices’. They could rarely remember the positions of more than seven pieces. These were the same chess pieces, and the same chessboards. So why were they suddenly limited by the magical number seven? 

The chess experiments reveal a telling fact about memory, and about expertise in general: We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context. A board of randomly arranged chess pieces has no context—there are no similar boards to compare it to, no past games that it resembles, no ways to meaningfully chunk it. Even to the world’s best chess player it is, in essence, noise.

Our subjective experience of time is highly variable. We all know that days can pass like weeks and months can feel like years, and that the opposite can be just as true: A month or year can zoom by in what feels like no time at all. 

Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before the big Paris vacation. I was doing Y in the first summer after I learned to drive. Z happened the weekend after I landed my first job. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events. Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time. 

It’s a point well illustrated by Michel Siffre, a French chronobiologist (he studies the relationship between time and living organisms) who conducted one of the most extraordinary acts of self-experimentation in the history of science. In 1962, Siffre spent two months living in total isolation in a subterranean cave, without access to clock, calendar, or sun. Sleeping and eating only when his body told him to, he sought to discover how the natural rhythms of human life would be affected by living “beyond time.” 

Very quickly Siffre’s memory deteriorated. In the dreary darkness, his days melded into one another and became one continuous, indistinguishable blob. Since there was nobody to talk to, and not much to do, there was nothing novel to impress itself upon his memory. There were no chronological landmarks by which he could measure the passage of time. At some point he stopped being able to remember what happened even the day before. His experience in isolation had turned him into EP. As time began to blur, he became effectively amnesic. Soon, his sleep patterns disintegrated. Some days he’d stay awake for thirty-six straight hours, other days for eight—without being able to tell the difference. When his support team on the surface finally called down to him on September 14, the day his experiment was scheduled to wrap up, it was only August 20 in his journal. He thought only a month had gone by. His experience of time’s passage had compressed by a factor of two. 

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890: “In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out,” he wrote. “But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.” Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. “If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human,” said Ed.

There is perhaps a bit of Peter Pan to Ed’s quest to make his life maximally memorable, but of all the things one could be obsessive about collecting, memories of one’s own life don’t seem like the most unreasonable. There’s something even strangely rational about it. There’s an old philosophical conundrum that often gets bandied about in introductory philosophy courses: In the nineteenth century, doctors began to wonder whether the general anesthetic they had been administering to patients might not actually put the patients to sleep so much as freeze their muscles and erase their memories of the surgery. If that were the case, could the doctors be said to have done anything wrong? Like the proverbial tree that falls without anyone hearing it, can an experience that isn’t remembered be meaningfully said to have happened at all? Socrates thought the unexamined life was not worth living. How much more so the unremembered life?

Much as our taste for sugar and fat may have served us well in a world of scarce nutrition, but is now maladaptive in a world of ubiquitous fast food joints, our memories aren’t perfectly adapted for our contemporary information age. The tasks that we often rely on our memories for today simply weren’t relevant in the environment in which the human brain evolved. Our ancestors didn’t need to recall phone numbers, or word-for-word instructions from their bosses, or the Advanced Placement USA history curriculum, or (because they lived in relatively small, stable groups) the names of dozens of strangers at a cocktail party. 

What our early human and hominid ancestors did need to remember was where to find food and resources, and the route home, and which plants were edible and which were poisonous. Those are the sorts of vital memory skills that they depended on every day, and it was—at least in part—in order to meet those demands that human memory evolved as it did. 

The principle underlying all memory techniques is that our brains don’t remember all types of information equally well. As exceptional as we are at remembering visual imagery (think of the two-picture recognition test), we’re terrible at remembering other kinds of information, like lists of words or numbers. The point of memory techniques is to do what the synasthete S did instinctually: to take the kinds of memories our brains aren’t good at holding on to and transform them into the kinds of memories our brains were built for.

Every mental athlete has a weakness, an Achilles heel. Ben’s is names and faces. His scores in the event are always near the bottom of the pack. “I don’t tend to look at people’s faces when I talk to them,” he told me. “In fact, I have no idea what lots of people I know really look like.” To get around this problem, he has been developing a new mnemonic system for the event that would assign numerical codes to eye color, skin color, hair color, hair length, nose, and mouth shape. He figures that if people’s faces could only be turned into a string of digits, they’d be a cinch to remember.

The last century has been an especially bad one for memory. A hundred years of progressive education reform have discredited memorization as oppressive and stultifying—not only a waste of time, but positively harmful to the developing brain. Schools have deemphasized raw knowledge (most of which gets forgotten anyway), and instead stressed their role in fostering reasoning ability, creativity, and independent thinking. 

But is it possible we’ve been making a huge mistake? The influential critic E. D. Hirsch Jr. complained in 1987: “We cannot assume that young people today know things that were known in the past by almost every literate person in the culture.” Hirsch has argued that students are being sent out into the world without the basic level of cultural literacy that is necessary to be a good citizen (what does it say that two thirds of American seventeen-year-olds can’t even tell you within fifty years when the Civil War occurred?), and what’s needed is a kind of educational counterreformation that reemphasizes hard facts. Hirsch’s critics have pointed out that the curriculum he advocates is Dead White Males 101. But if anyone seems qualified to counter that argument it is Matthews, who maintains that for all the Eurocentrism of the curriculum, the fact is that facts still matter. If one of the goals of education is to create inquisitive, knowledgeable people, then you need to give students the most basic signposts that can guide them through a life of learning. And if, as the twelfth-century teacher Hugh of St. Victor put it, “the whole usefulness of education consists only in the memory of it,” then you might as well give them the best tools available to commit their education to memory. 

“I don’t use the word ‘memory’ in my class because it’s a bad word in education,” says Matthews. “You make monkeys memorize, whereas education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can’t have higher-level learning—you can’t analyze—without retrieving information.” And you can’t retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between “learning” and “memorizing” is false, Matthews contends. You can’t learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can’t memorize without learning.