Portrait of Joshua Foer
Reading List
Joshua Foer
Journalist and Author
Joshua Foer is an American journalist who set out to report on the USA Memory Championship, trained in the techniques he was writing about, and won it the following year.
Moonwalking with Einstein (2011) is the account of that year: the memory palace, the mnemonists he met, and what the experience suggested about attention and expertise more than about memory alone.
He co-founded Atlas Obscura, the compendium of unusual places, and the Sukkah City design competition. He is the brother of the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer.
The Mind of a Mnemonist
A Little Book About a Vast Memory
by Aleksandr R. Luria
“Luria is a terrific writer, but he didn’t document S’s skills with the kind of detail that is required to compare S with people who live today. Luria is so concerned with telling a good story that he doesn’t rigorously describe S’s abilities. We don’t have any other records of S, this seemingly singular character in the history of psychology. As a result, it’s hard to draw too many conclusions from this book.” — via Interview, October 2012
Metaphors of Memory
A History of Ideas About the Mind
by Douwe Draaisma
“This is a book that should be more widely known. Draaisma is a Dutch historian of psychology and ideas who has written a couple of books about the mind that are filled with wonderfully weird anecdotes and terrific insights. Metaphors of Memory is a history of how we’ve talked about memory over time. Today, we talk about photographic memory or digital memory; we analogise our memories to the technologies of our era.” — via Interview, October 2012
Memory in Oral Traditions
The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes
by David C. Rubin
“This is such a good book. He applies learning from cognitive science to help us understand oral traditions, stories passed down by word of mouth, including The Iliad and The Odyssey. He takes a cross-disciplinary approach. One of the things he writes about is that the ancients understood things about cognition that have only been rediscovered recently.” — via Interview, October 2012
The Book of Memory
A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture
by Mary Carruthers
“This is the best study of the role that memory plays in medieval culture. We reserve the term genius for people who are creative, who are innovators, who think in ways that are entirely new. In the Middle Ages, the term genius was reserved for people with the best memories. That is telling.” — via Interview, October 2012
The Art of Memory
by Frances A. Yates
“It’s the book that started the whole field of academic research into the art of memory. For anyone interested in the subject, it’s the first thing to read. Yates starts with the ancient Greeks and tells the story of how the art of memory began, then went through a number of transformations. In the Middle Ages, it became associated with religious remembering.” — via Interview, October 2012