Thursday, April 28, 2011

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer

Joshua Foer comments: "What exactly is a memory? How is one created? And how does it get stored? I'd spent the first two and a half decades of my life with a memory that operated so seamlessly that I'd never had cause to stop and inquire about its mechanics. And yet, now that I was stopping to think about it, I realized that it actually didn't work all that seamlessly. It completely failed in certain areas, and worked far too well in others. And it had so many inexplicable quirks. That very morning my brain had been held hostage by an unbearble Britney Spears song, forcing me to spend the better part of a subway ride humming Hanukkah jingles in an attempt to dislodge it. What was that about? A few days earlier, I had been trying to tell a friend about an author I admired, only to find that I remembered the first letter of his last name, and nothing else. How come that happened? And why didn't I have a single memory before the age of three?"

Find in New Nonfiction: 153.14 FOER

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