✒ Books read in 2021 #02
A vivid recount of how the author, a science journalist, became a “mental athlete” and won the US Memory Champion with a year of practice.
I picked up this book years ago but hesitated to give it a read, not because I am not interested in the science of remembering, on the contrary, it is because I have explored the ideas of the memory palace (aka the journey method or the method of loci) before and wondered how this simple (yet difficult in application) technique warrants a whole book of this length.
As it turned out, this book is not in any way a self-help book that teaches you how to memorise grocery / to-do list or phone numbers. It is a thorough investigation on the history, literature, scientific/medical research, misconception and deception about human’s capability to retain information in the brain, an organ that accounts for only 2% of the body’s mass, yet uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and burns a quarter of all our glucose.
I enjoyed every chapter of this book, although I am still struggling to understand how it is related to “Einstein” and “moonwalking”. Perhaps it’s a reminder that we have to make use of our imagination for better memorisation, I suppose?