Page 141 - A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

{ 10 }

enhancing your memory

oshua Foer was a normal guy. But sometimes normal people can do very
Junusual things.
A recent college grad, Foer (pronounced “four”), lived with his parents
while trying to make a go of being a journalist. He didn’t have a great memory;

he regularly forgot important dates like his girlfriend’s birthday, couldn’t recall
where he’d put his car keys, and forgot he had food in the oven. And in his work,
no matter how hard he tried to catch himself, he still wrote its instead of it’s.
But Foer was amazed to find that some people seemed very different. They
could memorize the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards in only thirty
seconds, or casually absorb dozens of phone numbers, names, faces, events, or

dates. Give these people any random poem, and in minutes, they could recite it
to you from memory.
Foer was jealous. These brilliant masters of memory, he thought, must have
some unusual way their brains were wired that helped them easily remember
prodigious amounts of data.