An epidemic of amnesia, as potent as one of the surreal plagues in Gabriel GarcÃ­a MÃ¡rquezâs novels, seems to have hit our culture. Itâs not just aging baby boomers who are complaining about their lousy memories. Their kids, too, have forgotten how to remember phone numbers, driving directions and the basic data of daily life. After all, why bother to memorize anything when there are cellphones and Google to do it for you?  In his captivating new book, âMoonwalking With Einstein,â the young journalist Joshua Foer tackles the subject of memory the way George Plimpton tackled pro football and boxing. After a year of memory training, this novice not only began competing against the countryâs best mental athletes but also unexpectedly found himself in the finals of the U.S.A. Memory Championships. His story shows, he says, that âour memories are indeed improvableâ and that there are established techniques â pioneered by the Greeks and Romans â to help train the brain.  âMoonwalking With Einstein,â which grew out of an article for Slate, and which in 2006 reportedly earned its author, then 23, a $1.2 million advance, has a lot in common with Malcolm Gladwellâs best sellers: it popularizes scientific concepts in a breezy, accessible fashion while cheerfully dispensing some practical insights and lots of entertaining anecdotes. But whereas Mr. Gladwellâs 2008 book, âOutliers,â reads like a parody of his own formula, devolving into an unconvincing mash-up of gauzy hypotheses and highly selective illustrations, Mr. Foer writes in these pages with fresh enthusiasm. His narrative is smart and funny and, like the work of Dr. Oliver Sacks, itâs informed by a humanism that enables its author to place the mysteries of the brain within a larger philosophical and cultural context.  In the course of the book (which provided the basis for a recent New York Times Magazine article), we meet Mr. Foerâs memory coach, Ed Cooke, âa young grandmasterâ of memory from England, who has learned the bulk of âParadise Lostâ by heart (âat the rate of 200 lines per hourâ), and who is now working his way through Shakespeare. Mr. Cookeâs âphilosophy of life is that a heroic person should be able to withstand about 10 years in solitary confinement without getting terribly annoyed.â We also meet Ben Pridmore, a world memory champion, who âcould memorize the precise order of 1,528 random digits in an hourâ and any poem handed to him.  How did Mr. Foer come to join the ranks of these competitive mnemonists? How did he go from being a guy with an average memory â who regularly forgot his friendsâ phone numbers and where he left his car keys (or, for that matter, his car) â to being one of those extraterrestrials able to memorize a deck of cards in 1 minute 40 seconds? The chronicle of his metamorphosis forms the spine of this engaging book.  As Mr. Foer works on improving his memory, he learns a lot about how the brain operates, and in doing so he gives us some intriguing asides about things like âThe Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Twoâ (âwe can only think about roughly seven things at a timeâ); the âO.K. plateauâ(by which people improve at a skill until they achieve an acceptable level of competence, then hit a seemingly insurmountable wall); âRibotâs Lawâ (which suggests that older memories are more stable because the more a memory is revisited in our minds, the more it is consolidated and integrated into a web of other connections); and the âcurve of forgetting,â quantified by a German psychologist who found that in the first hour after learning a set of nonsense syllables, more than half of them would be forgotten; after a day, another 10 percent would disappear; and after a month, another 14 percent.  Mr. Foer provides a brief history of memorization and the declining role it plays in modern culture, where books, photographs, museums and digital media have promoted âthe externalization of memoryâ and changed the very notion of erudition and what it means to be an educated person.  Before writing was common, human beings had to use their own brains for information storage, and before books were indexed â making it possible to gain access to them in a nonlinear way â people labored under the âimperative to holdâ booksâ contents in their own mental hard drives simply to find particular bits of information. Poets in the oral tradition, like Homer, relied on repetition and rhythms and other patterns to recite their work from memory, and in the ancient world, exceptional memories were both exalted and widely known.  âKing Cyrus could give the names of all the soldiers in his army,â Mr. Foer writes, citing Pliny the Elderâs report in âNatural History,â a first-century encyclopedia. âLucius Scipio knew the names of the whole Roman people.â
With our collective memories slipping, Joshua Foer explores how to keep a firmer mental grasp on our experiences and why itâs important not to forget.