What I've Been Reading

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. Daniel Kahneman in his lecture on Edge had highly recommend this book. If someone like Kahneman's recommends a book, it's sheer stupidity not to jump on it. Memories being the raison d'etre of this blog, I simply gobbled this book. 

Notes:

• Elaborative Encoding: Basic principle is to convert our non-synesthesia-tic   brains into synesthesia (excellent video on synesthesia here) driven machines and make memories out of vivid imagery. Our memories weren't built for the modern world. Like our vision, our capacity for language, our ability to walk upright, and every other one of our biological faculties, our memories evolved through a process of natural selection in an environment that was quite different from the one we live in today.
  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, we're terrible at remembering other kinds of information, like lists of words or numbers. The point of memory techniques   is to take the kinds of memories our brains aren't good at holding on to and transform them into the kind of memories our brains are built for. 
• Remembering Names: Use Baker/baker paradox. The paradox goes like this - A researcher shows two people the same photograph of a face and tells one of them that the guy is baker and the other the last name is Baker. A coupe of days later, the researcher shows the same two guys the same photograph and asks for the accompanying word. The person who was told the man's profession is much more likely to remember it than the person who was given this surname. Why different amount of remembering for the same? When we hear that the man is a baker, the fact gets embedded in a whole network of ideas what it means to be a baker: cooks bread, wears a big white hat etc. The name Baker, on the other hand, is tethered only to a memory of the person's face. That link is tenuous, and should it dissolve, the name will float off irretrievably into the netherworld of lost memories. But when it comes to the man's profession, there are multiple strings to reel the memory back in. Even if you don't at first remember that the man is a baker, perhaps you get some vague sense of breadiness about him, or see some associate between his face and a big white hat, or may be we conjure up a memory of a neighborhood bakery. The secret to success in the names-and-faces event-and to remembering people's names in real world--is simply to turn Bakers into bakers-or Foers to fours or Reagans into ray guns.
  Another lesser effective technique is called phonological loop; which is just a fancy name for the little voice that we hear inside our head when we talk to ourselves. The phonological loop acts as an echo, producing a short-term memory buffer that can store sounds just a couple of seconds, if we're not rehearsing them. 
• Remembering Numbers: Use Chunking technique. Chucking is a way to decrease the number of items we have to remember by increasing the size of each item. Chunking is the reason phone numbers are broken into two parts plus an area code and that credit card number are split into groups of four. And chunking is extremely relevant to the question of why experts so often have such exceptional memories. 
• Memory Palace: Greek poet Simonides, according to the story, left a banquet early after being accosted by a messenger, and the building where he has been celebrating then crumbled to the ground the very instant he left the behind, leaving the victims inside unrecognizable. Simonides was able to identify the bodies by remembering where they had been sitting by mentally walking through the banqueting hall. Due to  mentally walking through a familiar location Simonides invented the idea of the memory palace.
  A memory palace is a location or series of locations that you know well. You mentally walk through the palace and place the item (or word) you are trying to learn or remember in each location. The location must be a place you know well, for example it could be your house or a city that you know well, depending on what it is you are trying to learn.
  When you want to recall the items you retrace your steps mentally picking the items up as you go. For language learning as you are learning a word you need to visualize it in the location that you have chosen. The act of visualization  helps in later recall. This idea is like a smaller version of the movie Inception (those awesome dreams!!). The idea is to create as many familiar places (helps if we travel a lot) as a memory palace, then destroy it and re-create it as the need goes. And yes, it's easier said than done!!
• Overcoming the O.K plateau (complacency): Use the technique in speed typing literature. When people first learn to use keyboard, they improve very quickly from sloppy finger pecking to careful two-handed typing, until eventually the fingers move so effortlessly across the keys that the whole process becomes unconscious and the fingers seem to take a mind of their own. At this point, most people's typing skills stop progressing. They reach a plateau.
  In the 1960's, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner attempted to answer this question by describing the three stages that anyone goes through when acquiring a new skill. During the first phase, known as the "cognitive stage," we're intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second "associative stage," we're concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally yo reach the "autonomous stage," when we figure that we're gotten as good as we need to get at the task and basically running on autopilot. During the autonomous stage, we lose conscious control over what we're doing. Most of the time that's a good thing since mind has one less thing to worry about. This is called Galton's wall (after 1869 book Hereditary Genius by Sir Francis Galton) - who argued that a person could only improve at physical and mental activities up until they reached a certain point, which cannot by any education or exertion be overpassed. But now psychologists believe that Galton's wall has much less to do with our innate limits than simply with what we consider an acceptable level of performance. What separates experts from rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine called deliberate practice. Experts develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the cognitive phase. 

We have outsourced our memories so effortlessly that I had to even outsource these notes on art of remembering everything. So the most obvious question is why we have to invest in our memory, given the ubiquity of external memories? Foer decimates that implausible question:

"How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We're all just bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by external memory (not yet, at-least).
Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human."