Moonwalking with Einstein Summary of Chapters 6 and 7

Towards the beginning of this section of the book, Foer discusses how in past times, memorizing texts was key in mastering life, just as learning old chess games is the key to become a chess grand master.  He takes from this and explains how he struggled to memorize poetry.  When he searched in his copy of an old, respected memorization book, he came upon the idea that too be able to memorize easy things, you must train in memorizing difficult things, such as poetry (and this is applicable to many things throughout life).  It then explains that the best mnemonists are generally not in American because it says American is more concerned about the future, while Europe is more concerned about the past.  Next, Foer tells of his experience going to the World Memory Championship in Oxford, England; and that he met some people he believed only in myth to be true.  He says that many people started this the same way he did, they were impressed by mnemonists, then developed their memory themselves.  The championship lasted 3 days with 10 memorization events, consisting of poetry, decks of cards, binary code, random digits, book lines, and others. 

Foer then goes on to discuss memoria rerum  and memoria verborum, which is the memorization of things and of words, respectively.  Our brains are good at remembering what matters most: the meaning of words, or memoria rerum.  It is often times not necessary for someone to memorize something verbatim, but it may be necessary for someone to remember the concept behind what is being said.  In the past, transmitting culture meant transmitting it by mouth, or orally, so there were many more people with great memories.  Especially easy to remember is song, for example, turning something into a jingle is more memorable than trying to memorize a monotone speech.

Also, the whole basis of memory in this book is associating images within a place to the words you are remembering.  Though, abstract words are difficult to picture, so often times, people associate those words with other words that rhyme with it.  After that, Foer focuses the rest of his discussion on written language.  He says that when it was introduced, surprisingly memory did not experience an immediate drop, instead it increased, as the books served as a reminder more than the memory itself.  The people still memorized things, but used written language as a way to ensure permanence throughout history.

Book club this week was productive, though I feel that the first week's book club was most productive because that was when the main topic of the book was introduced.  This week, we talked about the importance of memorizing the gist of things versus memorizing words verbatim.  Another topic of discussion was books; we discussed how books have evolved from when they were first introduced, and how they affected people's memories when they started to become mass produced.