Moonwalking With Einstein Read Online Free PDF

lives”—he demonstrated his mnemonic bona fides by learning a seventy-digit number in just over a minute (three times faster than it took S to perform the same feat), and then proceeded straight into a test of the students’ memories, and mine.
    “I’m going to show you guys a bunch of pictures, and I’m going to show them to you really, really fast,” he announced, trying to lift his voice above the clamoring teenagers. “I want you to try to remember as many of them as you can.” He pressed a button on a remote control, and the overhead lights dimmed. A series of slides began to blink across a projection screen at the front of the room, each lingering for less than half a second. There was a slide of Muhammad Ali standing triumphantly over Sonny Liston. Then a slide of barbells. Then Neil Armstrong’s footprint on the moon. Then the cover of Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals . And a red rose.
    There were thirty such pictures, each appearing and disappearing so quickly that it was hard to imagine we’d ever be able to recall any of them, much less all of them. But I tried my hardest to capture some detail from each, and to make a quick mental note of what I was looking at. After the last slide, a picture of a goat, the wall went blank and the lights came back on.
    “Now, do you think you’ll be able to remember all those pictures?” Ed asked us.
    A girl sitting just in front of me sarcastically shouted, “Not a chance!” provoking giggles from several of her colleagues.
    “That’s the spirit!” Ed yelled back, and then looked down at his watch to note the time. Of course, the point of the exercise—why else would he have given it?—was that we would be able to remember all those pictures. Like the girl in front of me, I found it hard to believe.
    After giving us thirty minutes for the curve of forgetting to work its inevitable erasures on the images we’d glanced at so quickly, Ed put up a new set of slides. This time, there were two pictures on the screen. One of them we’d seen before, and one of them we hadn’t: Muhammad Ali on the left and a fizzling Alka-Seltzer tablet on the right.
    He asked us all to point to the picture we recognized. Easy enough. We all knew we’d seen Muhammad Ali, but not the Alka-Seltzer tablet. “Isn’t it striking how easily you remember that?” said Ed, before clicking through to another slide: a deer on the left and the Nietzsche book on the right.
    We all knew that one, too. In fact, he went through thirty slides, and everyone in the room recognized every single one of the photos we’d seen before. “Now here’s the fascinating thing,” said Ed, pacing professorially at the front of the linoleum-tiled auditorium. “We could have done this with ten thousand slides, and you would have performed almost equally well. Your memory for images is that good.” He was referring to a frequently cited set of experiments carried out in the 1970s using the exact same picture recognition test that we’d just taken, only instead of thirty images, the researchers asked their subjects to remember ten thousand. (It took a full week to perform the test.) That’s a lot of pictures for a mind to keep track of, especially since the subjects were only able to look at each image once. Even so, the scientists found that people were able to remember more than 80 percent of what they’d seen. In a more recent study, the same test was performed with 2,500 images, but instead of asking people to choose between an image of Muhammad Ali and an Alka-Seltzer tablet (an easy choice, no matter how effervescent Cassius Clay might have been), they had to choose between alternative images that were almost identical: a stack of five dollar bills versus a stack of one dollar bills, a green train car versus a red train car, a bell with a narrow handle versus a bell with a wide handle. Even when the images differed only in a tiny detail, people still remembered 90 percent of them