Bill Gates recommends reading this book and I like his book recommendations so I decided to buy this book on Amazon. Being a UX designer, I have read some academic books in the field of memory and cognitive psychology but this book by Joshua Foer is different. As the subtitle of this book states, the book is about the art and science of remembering everything.

I really enjoyed the first 80% of the book but then after that the book starts becoming little boring and kind of repetitive. In the first few chapters, Joshua talks about human brain and memory. Memory, at the fundamental level is a pattern of connection between neurons and if we want to remember something, the stronger (and more) the connections are, the better we would remember that thing. Also our memory is non-linear and thus it is difficult to search things in our memory in a linear way. We can not browse our memory in a linear way — have you experienced the frustration after you cannot remember someones name and something that you were about to say and then you forgot!

Chicken sexing industry: “it is best not to be born chicken at all, but it would be especially bad luck to be born as a cockerel” this is because male chickens are almost useless. And thus, determining gender of a chicken at early stage is crucial. Gender determination for chickens is an extremely difficult task and if you can master that, there is a lot of money in that business ☺ — I wouldn’t connect this with human memory here, you should read book for that ☺

Declarative Memory (Things you remember — your car color, first school name, phone number) and Non-Declarative Memory (Things you know subconsciously — how to swim, how to draw a shape) — Within declarative, there are semantic (memories of facts — color or your car) and episodic memories (memories of your experiences — what you had in breakfast).

The chapter of Memory Palace is my favorite. Joshua talks about the basic principle of mnemonics, “elaborative encoding”. Our brains don’t remember all types of information equally well. Human brains are exceptional at remembering visual imagery but very poor at remembering a list of objects. So, if we want to remember something that our brain is not good at remembering, we should transform that into a format that we remember very well (visual imagery) — here is my recall of a list 15 of things that is mentioned in the book — Salmon, 6 bottles of wine, hula-hoop, snorkel, dry ice, write email to Sophia, some movie (I don’t remember the exact name), skin toned cat suite, sausage, director’s chair, rope — Just by storing this list in a spatial way (My memory palace), I am able to remember 10.5/15 things in the list after almost 25 days!! I could do better but this isn’t bad considering this was a list of 15 random things.

Quotable things or storytelling points (these are my notes to self) —

1. Baker-baker paradox was quite interesting.
2. Experience is sum of our memories and wisdom is sum of our experiences.
3. Brain remembers things that are repetitive, rhythmic and rhyming and structured (देवे, मंत्रपुष्पांजली, आरत्या आणि पुरुषसुक्त ह्या कारणामुळे लक्षात राहिले आहे .)
4. Story point of Scriptio Continua — We don’t speak with spaces!! “The stuffy nose may dim liquor” vs. “The stuff he knows made him lick her”
5. We read read and read and forget forget and forget — why read then?? to establish more network connections?? creating new memories streches out psychological time, and lengthen our perception of our lives.
6. One thing you always want to be cautious about — the OK PLATEAU. regular practice wouldn’t help us become expert , to improve, one must watch ourselves fail and learn from our mistakes — what we fail to remember is something we remember the best if we learn from our mistake.