Memory Palace: Superpower or just a Party Trick?

Review of Joshua Foer’s "Moonwalking with Einstein" (2011)

Mar 12, 2025

Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein (2011) starts with a simple premise: What if an average person could train their brain to have a memory so sharp it borders on the absurd?

What follows is a mix of science, history, and personal experiment, as Foer—just a journalist covering the U.S. Memory Championship—ends up competing in it himself a year later.

But this isn't one of those brain-training manuals promising to supercharge your mental capacities through gimmicky exercises. Foer's approach is refreshingly honest:

"The techniques I was learning were unquestionably effective, but I couldn't help wondering: Was this really the kind of memory improvement that was going to make me smarter?"

This critical perspective lifts the narrative off self-help pablum into something more nuanced—an investigation of memory as both biological reality and cultural practice.

“Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory.”

The Accidental Mnemonist

Foer didn’t set out to become a memory champion. He was just supposed to be writing an article. But when he meets Ed Cooke, a British memory expert who assures him that anyone can learn to memorise decks of cards, long strings of numbers, and entire pages of text, Foer decides to test the theory himself.

What follows is a deep dive into the world of “mental athletes” and their bizarre techniques.

"The principle underlying all memory techniques is that our brains don't remember all types of information equally well."

There’s the “memory palace,” where you mentally store information in imaginary locations. Hence the book’s title—Einstein moonwalking through a house is an absurd image, which makes it unforgettable.

There are ancient mnemonic tricks used by orators before writing was common. Medieval scholars could recite entire books verbatim.

"Until the invention of movable-type printing, memory was the library."

There’s even a guy who can recite pi to tens of thousands of digits, despite claiming he has a completely average brain.

Foer’s journey is fascinating because he’s not naturally gifted. He struggles, he fails, he doubts the whole thing—but in the end, he proves the point. Memory isn’t about intelligence. It’s about technique.

“Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.”

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Where Foer shines

Foer's prose, especially his metaphorical approach to technical material makes complex memory concepts digestible. There’s a good chance you'll find yourself underlining passages for both their insight and their elegant construction.

“If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you'll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.”

Foer's historical dives, dating back to Simonides of Ceos in 5th century BCE Greece, don't feel like academic detours but essential context for understanding memory's diminished role in our 21st century life. Memory seems deeply connected to moral reasoning, creativity, and our sense of self.

"How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a 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 memories.

In portraying the competitive memory circuit, Foer doesn’t fall for the easy mockery a lesser writer might employ. These "mental athletes" emerge as fascinating characters rather than quirky caricatures.

From Ed Cooke, Foer's British memory mentor who "could memorize the order of a deck of playing cards in less than forty-three seconds," to German memory champion Gunther Karsten, who ran memory-improvement seminars in the nude, these individuals challenge conventional notions of intelligence and cognitive potential.

Foer also has conversations with exceptional individuals outside memory sports, including Kim Peek (the real-life inspiration for "Rain Man"), who can recall everything but struggle with basic reasoning.

And he looks at what happens when memory completely breaks down, as in the case of amnesia patients who live in an eternal present.

"Our memories make us who we are, which is why forgetting can be such a terrifying experience."

These raise profound questions about the relationship between memory and intelligence. For all the effort Foer puts into supercharging his memory, he realises that extreme recall isn’t necessarily useful. The memory champions he meets aren’t geniuses in any other way. They just have better filing systems in their heads.

The real question isn’t how to remember more, but what is actually worth remembering.

What might disappoint you

The book succumbs to the TED Talk syndrome—simplifying complex neuroscience to serve a predetermined narrative arc. When Foer writes in passing that "our brains aren't designed to remember phone numbers or to-do lists," he glosses over significant scientific debates about evolutionary psychology and memory function.

His occasional conflation of correlation and causation regarding memory studies reveals a journalistic tendency to favour the compelling story over scientific precision.

Most readers probably won’t apply what they learn. The memory palace method works, but it requires constant practice.

"My daily runs through my memory palace had become like actual morning jogs: difficult while you're huffing through them, but satisfying when they're complete."

You might use it to memorise a shopping list once, but unless you’re planning to compete in a memory championship, you’re unlikely to make it a habit.

Foer himself, after winning the U.S. Memory Championship, admits he stopped using the techniques. His memory went back to normal. Which raises the question: If he didn’t stick with it, will you?

The Verdict: Entertaining, Smart, but perhaps Not Essential

Moonwalking with Einstein is packed with interesting tidbits—why we remember emotionally charged moments better, how oral cultures passed down epic stories before writing existed, why our brains are wired to forget most of what we learn. Foer’s writing is witty, self-deprecating, and engaging. You’ll learn a lot without feeling like you’re in a lecture.

In an age when we've outsourced remembering to our devices, the book also makes a compelling case for reclaiming this fundamentally human capacity.

"Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human."

Unfortunately, like many pop-science books, like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, this is a book that makes you feel smarter while you’re reading it, but it probably won’t transform your life, unless you really lean into it.

“If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.”

So, there's a good chance you'll forget most of the techniques in this book in a few months. And much of the rest in about a year. Maybe all you’ll remember is that this was a fun-read about remembering.

“Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read. When I read a book, what do I hope will stay with me a year later? If it’s a work of nonfiction, the thesis, maybe, if the book has one. A few savory details, perhaps. If it’s fiction, the broadest outline of the plot, something about the main characters (at least their names), and an overall critical judgment about the book. Even these are likely to fade. Looking up at my shelves, at the books that have drained so many of my waking hours, is always a dispiriting experience. One Hundred Years of Solitude: I remember magical realism and that I enjoyed it. But that’s about it. I don’t even recall when I read it. About Wuthering Heights I remember exactly two things: that I read it in a high school English class and that there was a character named Heathcliff. I couldn’t say whether I liked the book or not.”

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