Don’t Forget the Pickled Garlic

Four! Whoever remembers four telephone numbers! I’m not sure I’d remember even the one number I do if I did not re-memorise it every week,for fear of being lost without my phone and,therefore,with no way of making contact with anyone I know. The Art and Science of Remembering Everything is certainly for folks like me.

Foer came to be possessed with a desire to be the best memoriser — in the competitive spaces where such skills are tested,he’d be called a mental athlete — with more than a

desire to recall his phone book. He thought having “all that otherwise-lost knowledge” always at his fingertips would make him a smarter person,more persuasive,more attentive,“perhaps even wiser”. And so,what began as a magazine article for him became an obsession,till he was finally acclaimed the 2006 US Memory Champion — yes,there are such competitions,and American entrants don’t traditionally measure up in global contests. Memory workouts,in this scheme,even acquires a fitness dimension: the human brain may be only 2 per cent of the body mass,but it consumes a fifth of the oxygen a person breathes,and is the site where a quarter of her glucose gets used up.

In his quest,Foer goes to the masters,who teach him the age-old technique of memory palaces to ace feats of memorisation. Reaching back to a system of mnemonics going back to Simonides of Ceos in the fifth century BC,it builds on the principle of visual memory. Put simply,“the idea is to create a space in the mind’s eye,a place that you know well and can easily visualise,and then populate that imagined place with images representing whatever you want to remember.” The champions have their own ways: one would use luxury homes featured in Architectural Digest,another uses his own body parts as spatial coordinates (the latter,we are told,rendered to memory “the entire 56,000-word,1,774-page Oxford Chinese-English dictionary” thus).

For starters,Ed,the tutor,asks Foer to use his own home to memorise a shopping list: “We can start at the foot of the driveway. I want you to close your eyes and try to visualise in as much detail as possible a large bottle of pickled garlic standing right where the car should be parked… Things that grab our attention are more memorable,and attention is not something you can simply will. It has to be pulled in by the details… So try to imagine the pleasant smell of pickled garlic,and exaggerate its proportions. Imagine tasting it… And make sure you see yourself doing this at the foot of your driveway… Now… visualise the next item on our to-do list at the front door. It’s cottage cheese. I want you to close your eyes and see an enormous wading-pool-size tub of cottage cheese… Now I want you to imagine Claudia Schiffer swimming in this tub of cottage cheese.” This is why,Foer realises,they say that memory championships are less tests of memory than of creativity.

It’s all rather amusing,even silly,frequently exhausting. It can also seem pathetically desperate,this endeavour to pit your memory against the other guy’s to memorise useless detail. But,as Foer explains,in the loveliest passages in this book,so much of our cultural heritage exists because once upon a time,oral storytellers used every ploy — alliteration,cliché,rhythm too — to consign to memory everything they knew,and so pass it on. The history of the art of memory is,thus,really a history of us. Except I’d rather not memorise it.

mini.kapoor@expressindia.com