Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

      Moonwalking with Einstein is the story of how Joshua Foer went from an investigative reporter for a minor news network to U.S. Memory Champion in one year. While reporting on the competition, Foer becomes intrigued. How are people able to memorize seven decks of cards, pages of numbers or poems in mere minutes? This was especially fascinating considering the contestants were regular people, not especially brilliant. Foer found a mentor and decided to try. A year later, by practicing everyday, he wins the competition by a small margin.

     Moonwalking with Einstein is this tale, but it also goes through explanations of the importance of memory and some of the major techniques used in the competitive memory world.

         In our modern world, information is becoming more and more externalized. We can look things up on our laptops, our iPods or our phones. While this availability is certainly helpful and useful, it comes with a cost, the cost of memory. Our ability to externalize information has made us not want to or bother to know information in the same way that people used to because we can always just look it up later. A couple problems evolve because of this attitude. Firstly, we remember less. Common examples prove this. Before I had a cell phone, I remembered a ton of my friend's phone numbers, now who knows anyones unless they had to for some specific reason? These types of "loses of memory" while not normally so bad, can cause issues in everyday life. This can apply to even writing things down. Because we do that we tend to not spend the time to really know what we wrote down. Giving ourselves the security blanket of being able to look at it later can at times hinder our ability to actually gather information. A larger problem that comes with externalizing information is in the form of becoming an expert in what we are trying to learn. In order to push forward and really understand a topic you need to know basic facts so that you can analyze and look farther into a situation. Always being able to look at the facts themselves stops this from ever occurring. Chess grandmasters need to know an immense amount of situations by heart for them to try and see which situation applies in the given game. Being able to look it up in a book does not allow this to happen. This is an extreme case but is still relates to everyday life. 

             After he makes the argument for working on and the importance of memory, Foer goes on to explain his journey too becoming a memory champion, including a few of the major techniques. The main concept that is used in memory training is called the memory palace. Instead of trying to memorize information which is harder, memory training tries to translate information into pictures and places. The main example that Foer gives for this is the difference between Baker and baker. It is hard to remember the name for Mr. Baker, but it is much easier to remember if you imagine him in a big white bakers hat. This picture is exceedingly more powerful than the word baker. Now if you want to memorize a list or a lot of information, one picture is not good enough. For many pictures, you create a memory palace. You use a place you know really well, and walk through it with the pictures placed in different places in your palace. To then remember the list later, all you have to do is look back in your mind at the place and the images will come back. Since reading the book, I have used this trick many times, making it easy to remember without writing down a list that I can easily lose. But what makes this work? Certainly, the images and places are more exciting than the list that you started with, but that can't be the only reason, i think it's more basic than that.  Many times we see or hear information, but we don't engage it, we don't really pay attention to what we are hearing. The memory palace makes us put effort into the words we are trying to remember. Really thinking about and absorbing the information allows it to not just be forgotten. 

             Because it was the event that Foer broke the world record in, Foer goes on to explain who he learned to memorize a deck of cards. Here you have to memorize a list of 52 things that are very similar to each other in a  a short period of time. I have tried to take on this endeavor and hope to soon be able to be able to see a new deck and be able to recite it a couple minutes later. These type of exercises allow a person to be able to use their memory as a tool in a way that they couldn't before. The story Foer writes is compelling and important for anyone interested in memory, which probably is everyone. It is both a theoretical and a practical book, made for the uninitiated, which is most of us. He explains alot of his experience in the TED talk seen here.

              As the high holidays come up there may not be a better time to think about memory. What exactly happened this past year.  Perhaps if we were able to pay more and more attention in our lives, not only will we remember our lives better, but we will also be able to remember what we should be doing at all times. 

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowieki, explains how crowds can be smarter than the best of people, given certain circumstances. Surowieki discusses three types of problems Cognition problems, those with certain answers, cooperation problems and coordination problems. I found how he shows that crowds can be excellent at cognition problems to be the most illuminating. Perhaps this is because it is the type of problem that he is able to give many examples of it working, and show that it works in a wide variety of questions makes his theory work so well. It is also able to be tested, as I did this summer  a couple of times. For cognition problems, Surowieki explains that given three prerequisites crowds will be remarkably smart. If they are discreet, meaning the people being asked do not effect each other, diverse, meaning they will not all have the same opinions, and that you have a way to aggregate the information you get from the crowd. Even if the people being asked have very incomplete information about the problem, as an average  of the disparate people the crowd can be remarkably exact.  A very simple example that Surowieki talks about is tracking guesses at a county fair of the weight of a bull. While no person got all that close to the actual weight of the bull, the aggregate average of all the guesses were within one pound of the bulls actual weight. This theory sounded so interesting so I decided to try it myself. I asked ten people how many spoons were in a bag. I added up their answers, took an average and then counted the spoons in the bag. The average added up to 277 and there were 279 spoons in the bag. No singular person was anwhere near that number and as Surowieki predicted the crowd was smarter than any of the parts of the group. It is as a group when individuals are strong.

         The implications for how we should be making decisions, and running government, is substantial. Singular people or small groups of people cannot approach the genius of the general population. Except for democracy in Greece, where every one could come and vote, we usually assume we should have a couple people making discussions. We can choose those people, but we choose to trust their judgement. Instead, those that are making decisions, rather than making them on their own, they should be aggregating what the public thinks and acting accordingly. 

      Recently, I have be watching a lot of The West Wing. In one episode (Inauguration 2), President Bartlett says: "There's a promise that I ask everyone who works here to make: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Do you know why? To which Will Bailey replies: "Because it's the only thing that ever has.  While this may be true that generally it has been special individuals, the public has a power that the individuals can not have. The book makes a powerful statement about the power of the people, something democracy has helped use, but perhaps not enough. 

           I would definitely suggest this book as great insight into the wisdom of crowds. There is a lot from the book that I was not able to discuss here, so it is well worth it to read through the book.