In 2005 journalist Joshua Foer wrote an article about the U.S. Memory Championships for Slate.com. Fascinated by the “mental athletes” he met while reporting the story, he decided to enter the contest himself—and won. The result is Moonwalking with Einstein (Penguin), a witty, meticulously researched report on remembering. Meredith Maran talks with Foer about the year he devoted to training his brain.

You hung out with competitive memorizers, amnesiacs and brainiacs. What did you learn?

Memory champs figure out ways to make otherwise meaningless information meaningful. Let’s say you want to remember a shopping list. “Eggs and orange juice” is easily forgettable. But if you conjure up an image of a muscleman having an egg cracked on his head while he swims in a pool of OJ, that’s more likely to stay with you.

Now that we have Google, smart phones and Shazam, is there a future for memory?

I sure hope so. Before we had all these devices, wehad to keep a lot of information in our heads: phone numbers, birthdays, the names of our friends’ children. Now it seems we remember almost nothing. We’ve stopped trusting ourselves. We’ve let our minds atrophy, and we may be losing something that gets at the essence of what makes us human.

What are you doing to keep your memory sharp into middle age and beyond?

Memory is a network in the brain: The more you know, the more you can remember. Anything that challenges the brain in new ways is worthwhile—from working a crossword puzzle to learning a language. Since the competition, I’ve been keeping my bank-account and credit card numbers in my head. It’s all about building up cognitive reserves—and if I lose
my wallet, I’m not totally screwed.