Moonwalking With Einstein (6 page)

Over the course of the evening, Ed regaled me with story after story of his adventures and instructive misadventures. There was the time he threw his shoeless self through the window of a bar in New Zealand in order to circumvent a bouncer. The time he crashed a supermodel’s party in London. (“It was easier then, I was in a wheelchair, and I could do a superior wheelie.”) The time he crashed a party at the British embassy in Paris. (“I noticed the ambassador following my dirty shoes all the way across the room.”) And how could he forget the twelve hours he spent panhandling for bus fare in downtown Los Angeles?

At the time, I may have sounded a note of skepticism about these self-mythologizing stories, but that was only because I didn’t yet know Ed well enough to recognize that he very well could have been understating their outrageousness. A few more drinks into the evening, it dawned on me that I’d spent the better part of the day with Ed and Lukas and neither of them had once called me by my name, though I was sure I’d told it to them when I first introduced myself. Ed had referred to me in front of the waitress as “our journalist friend,” and Lukas just hadn’t referred to me. These were evasions I knew well. But Ed had assured me earlier in the day that he could memorize the name and phone number of every girl he ever met. I thought that sounded like the kind of impressive skill that was bound to take one far in life. Bill Clinton is supposed to never forget a name and, well, look where that got him. But it occurred to me now that Ed’s “could” was a bit ambiguous, and might have been of the same nature as “He could count backward from a million”—as in, yeah, if he really wanted to. I asked Ed if he remembered my name.

“Of course. It’s Josh.”

“My last name?”

“Shit. Did you tell it to me?”

“Yes, Foer. Josh Foer. You’re human after all.”

“Ah, well—”

“I thought you were supposed to have a fancy technique for remembering people’s names.”

“In theory, I do. But its utility is inversely proportional to the amount of alcohol I’ve imbibed.”

Ed then explained to me his procedure for making a name memorable, which he had used in the competition to memorize the first and last names associated with ninety-nine different photographic head shots in the names-and-faces event. It was a technique he promised I could use to remember people’s names at parties and meetings. “The trick is actually deceptively simple,” he said. “It is always to associate the sound of a person’s name with something you can clearly imagine. It’s all about creating a vivid image in your mind that anchors your visual memory of the person’s face to a visual memory connected to the person’s name. When you need to reach back and remember the person’s name at some later date, the image you created will simply pop back into your mind ... So, hmm, you said your name was Josh Foer, eh?” He raised an eyebrow and gave his chin a melodramatic stroke. “Well, I’d imagine you joshing me where we first met, outside the competition hall, and I’d imagine myself breaking into four pieces in response. Four/Foer, get it? That little image is more entertaining—to me, at least—than your mere name, and should stick nicely in the mind.” It occurred to me that this was a kind of manufactured synesthesia.

To understand why this sort of mnemonic trick works, you need to know something about a strange kind of forgetfulness that psychologists have dubbed the “Baker/baker paradox.” The paradox goes like this: A researcher shows two people the same photograph of a face and tells one of them that the guy is a baker and the other that his last name is Baker. A couple days later, the researcher shows the same two guys the same photograph and asks for the accompanying word. The person who was told the man’s profession is much more likely to remember it than the person who was given his surname. Why should that be? Same photograph. Same word. Different amount of remembering.

When you hear that the man in the photo is a baker, that fact gets embedded in a whole network of ideas about what it means to be a baker: He cooks bread, he wears a big white hat, he smells good when he comes home from work. The name Baker, on the other hand, is tethered only to a memory of the person’s face. That link is tenuous, and should it dissolve, the name will float off irretrievably into the netherworld of lost memories. (When a word feels like it’s stuck on the tip of the tongue, it’s likely because we’re accessing only part of the neural network that “contains” the idea, but not all of it.) But when it comes to the man’s profession, there are multiple strings to reel the memory back in. Even if you don’t at first remember that the man is a baker, perhaps you get some vague sense of breadiness about him, or see some association between his face and a big white hat, or maybe you conjure up a memory of your own neighborhood bakery. There are any number of knots in that tangle of associations that can be traced back to his profession. The secret to success in the names-and-faces event—and to remembering people’s names in the real world—is simply to turn Bakers into bakers—or Foers into fours. Or Reagans into ray guns. It’s a simple trick, but highly effective.

I tried using the technique myself to remember the name of the documentary filmmaker who had been trailing Ed and Lukas around town all week. He introduced himself as Jonny Lowndes. “We call him Pounds Lowndes,” Ed interjected. “He used to be heavyset in high school.” Since my older brother’s childhood nickname was Jonny, I closed my eyes and pictured the two of them together, arm in arm, gobbling up a pound cake.

“You know we could teach you more tricks like that,” Ed said. He turned to Lukas ebulliently. “I’m trying to think if by the end of the night we could have him winning the American championship?”

“I get the sense that you hold the Americans in rather low esteem,” I said.

“On the contrary, they just haven’t had the right coach,” he said, turning back to me. “I reckon you could win the championship next year with an hour’s practice a day.” He looked to Lukas. “Don’t you think that’s right?”

Lukas nodded.

“You and Tony Buzan both,” I said.

“Ah, yes, the estimable Tony Buzan,” Ed scoffed. “Did he try to sell you that nonsense about the brain being a muscle?”

“Um, yes, he did.”

“Anyone who knows the first thing about the respective characteristics of brains and muscles knows how risible that analogy is.” It was my first hint of Ed’s tortured relationship with Buzan. “Look, what you really need to do is bring me on as your coach, trainer, and manager—and, um, spiritual yogi.”

“And what would you get out of this relationship?” I asked.

“I’d get pleasure,” he responded with a smile. “Also, you being a journalist, I wouldn’t mind if, in the course of your writing about this experience, you managed to give the impression that I would be an excellent person to have tutoring your daughter in the Hamptons at, like, a squillion quid an hour.”

I laughed and told Ed that I’d give it some thought. I honestly wasn’t that interested in spending an hour a day pawing through playing cards, or memorizing pages of random numbers, or doing any of the other mental calisthenics that seemed to be involved in becoming a “mental athlete.” I have always embraced my own nerdiness—I was captain of my high school quiz bowl team and have long worn a watch with calculator functions—but this was a bit much even for me. And yet I was curious enough about learning where the limits of my memory lay, and intrigued enough by Ed, to consider this exercise. All the mental athletes I’d met had insisted that anyone was capable of improving his or her memory—that the untapped powers of S are inside all of us. I decided I was going to try to find out if that was really true. That night, when I got home, there was a short e-mail from Ed waiting in my in-box: “So, anyway, can I be your coach?”

THREE

THE EXPERT EXPERT

T
hough it’s best not to be born a chicken at all, it is especially bad luck to be born a cockerel.

From the perspective of the poultry farmer, male chickens are useless. They can’t lay eggs, their meat is stringy, and they’re ornery to the hens that do all the hard work of putting food on our tables. Commercial hatcheries tend to treat male chicks like fabric cutoffs or scrap metal: the wasteful but necessary by-product of an industrial process. The sooner they can be disposed of—often they’re ground into animal feed—the better. But a costly problem has vexed egg farmers for millennia: It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between male and female chickens until they’re four to six weeks old, when they begin to grow distinctive feathers and secondary sex characteristics like the rooster’s comb. Until then, they’re all just indistinguishable fluff balls that have to be housed and fed—at considerable expense.

Somehow it took until the 1920s before anyone figured out a solution to this costly dilemma. The momentous discovery was made by a group of Japanese veterinary scientists, who realized that just inside the chick’s rear end there is a constellation of folds, marks, spots, and bumps that to the untrained eye appear arbitrary, but when properly read, can divulge the sex of a day-old bird. When this discovery was unveiled at the 1927 World Poultry Congress in Ottawa, it revolutionized the global hatchery industry and eventually lowered the price of eggs worldwide. The professional chicken sexer, equipped with a skill that took years to master, became one of the most valuable workers in agriculture. The best of the best were graduates of the two-year Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School, whose standards were so rigorous that only 5 to 10 percent of students received accreditation. But those who did graduate earned as much as five hundred dollars a day and were shuttled around the world from hatchery to hatchery like top-flight business consultants. A diaspora of Japanese chicken sexers spilled across the globe.

Chicken sexing is a delicate art, requiring Zen-like concentration and a brain surgeon’s dexterity. The bird is cradled in the left hand and given a gentle squeeze that causes it to evacuate its intestines (too tight and the intestines will turn inside out, killing the bird and rendering its gender irrelevant). With his thumb and forefinger, the sexer flips the bird over and parts a small flap on its hindquarters to expose the cloaca, a tiny vent where both the genitals and anus are situated, and peers deep inside. To do this properly, his fingernails have to be precisely trimmed. In the simple cases—the ones that the sexer can actually explain—he’s looking for a barely perceptible protuberance called the “bead,” about the size of a pinhead. If the bead is convex, the bird is a boy, and gets thrown to the left; concave or flat and it’s a girl, sent down a chute to the right. Those cases are easy enough. In fact, a study has shown that amateurs can be taught to identify the bead with only a few minutes of training. But in roughly 80 percent of the chicks, the bead is not obvious and there is no single distinguishing trait the sexer can point to.

By some estimates there are as many as a thousand different vent configurations that a sexer has to learn to become competent. The job is made even more difficult by the fact that the sexer has to diagnose the bird with just a glance. There is no time for conscious reasoning. If he hesitates for even a couple seconds, his grip on the bird can cause a pullet’s vent to swell to look unquestionably like a cockerel’s. Mistakes are costly. In the 1960s, one hatchery paid its sexers a penny for each correctly sexed chick and deducted 35 cents for each one they got wrong. The best in the business can sex 1,200 chicks an hour with 98 to 99 percent accuracy. In Japan, a few superheroes of the industry have learned how to double clutch the chicks and sex them two at a time, at the rate of 1,700 per hour.

What makes chicken sexing such a captivating subject—the reason that academic philosophers and cognitive psychologists have authored dissertations about it, and the reason that my own research into memory had brought me to this arcane skill—is that even the best professional sexers can’t describe how they determine gender in the toughest, most ambiguous cases. Their art is inexplicable. They say that within three seconds they just “know” whether a bird is a boy or a girl, but they can’t say how they know. Even when carefully cross-examined by researchers, they can’t give reasons why one bird is a male and another is female. What they have, they say, is intuition. In some fundamental sense, the expert chicken sexer perceives the world—at least the world of chicken privates—in a way that is completely different from you or me. When they look at a chick’s bottom, they see things that a normal person simply does not see. What does chicken sexing have to do with my memory? Everything.

I decided it would
be a good idea to dive (bellyflop, really) into the scientific literature. I was looking for some hard evidence that our memories might really be improvable in the dramatic way that Buzan and the mental athletes had promised. I didn’t have to search very hard. As I was combing the scientific literature, one name kept popping up in my research about memory improvement: K. Anders Ericsson. He was a psychology professor at Florida State University and the author of an article titled “Exceptional Memorizers: Made, Not Born.”

Before Tony Buzan mass-marketed the idea of “using your perfect memory,” Ericsson was laying the scientific groundwork for what’s known as “Skilled Memory Theory,” which explains how and why our memory is improvable. In 1981, he and fellow psychologist Bill Chase conducted a now-classic experiment on a Carnegie Mellon undergraduate, who has been immortalized in the literature by his initials, SF. Chase and Ericsson paid SF to spend several hours a week in their lab taking a simple memory test over and over and over again. It was similar to the test that Luria had given to S when he first walked into his office. SF sat in a chair and tried to remember as many numbers as possible as they were read off at the rate of one per second. At the outset, he could only hold about seven digits in his head at a time. By the time the experiment wrapped up—two years and 250 mind-numbing hours later—SF had expanded his ability to remember numbers by a factor of ten. The experiment shattered the old notions that our memory capacities are fixed. How SF did it, Ericsson believes, holds a key to understanding the basic cognitive processes underlying all forms of expertise—from mental athlete memorizers to chess grand masters to chicken sexers.

Everyone has a great memory for something. We’ve already seen the mnemonic gifts of London cabbies, and the scientific literature is filled with papers about the “superior memories” of waiters, the vast capacities of actors to remember lines, and the memory skills possessed by experts in a wide variety of other fields. Researchers have studied the exceptional memories of doctors, baseball fans, violinists, soccer players, snooker players, ballet dancers, abacus wranglers, crossword puzzlers, and volleyball defenders. Pick any human endeavor in which people excel, and I’ll give you even odds that some psychologist somewhere has written a paper about the exceptional memories possessed by experts in that field.

Why is it that veteran waiters don’t have to write down orders? Why are the best violinists in the world so good at memorizing new musical scores? How come, as one study proved, elite soccer players can glance at a soccer match on TV and reconstruct almost exactly what was happening in the game? One possible explanation might be that people with good memories for dinner orders get channeled into the food-service industry, or that the soccer players with the best memory for arrangements of players have a knack for clawing their way up to the premier league, or that people with a great eye for chicken ass naturally gravitate to the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School. But that seems unlikely. It makes much more sense to believe the causality works in the opposite direction. There is something about mastering a specific field that breeds a better memory for the details of that field. But what is that something? And can that something somehow be generalized, so that anyone can acquire it?

The Human Performance Lab, which Ericsson runs with a group of other FSU researchers, is where experts come to have their memories—and much else—tested. Ericsson is probably the world’s leading expert on experts. Indeed, he has achieved a degree of popular fame in recent years thanks to his research showing that experts tend to require at least ten thousand hours of training to achieve their world-class status. When I called him up and told him that I had been thinking about trying to train my own memory, he wanted to know whether I had started yet. I said I hadn’t really begun. He was thrilled; he told me he almost never gets the chance to study a novice in the process of becoming an expert. If I was serious, he said, he wanted to make me his research subject. He invited me down to Florida for a couple days to take a few tests. He wanted to get some baseline measurements of my memory before I started trying to improve it.

The Human Performance Lab
occupies a plush office complex on the outskirts of Tallahassee. The bookshelves that line the walls overflow with an eclectic catalog of titles that have been relevant to Ericsson’s research:
The Musical Temperament
,
Surgery of the Foot
,
How to Be a Star at Work
,
Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy
,
Lore of Running, The Specialist Chick Sexer
.

David Rodrick, a young research associate in the lab, gleefully described the place as “our toy palace.” When I arrived a couple weeks after my initial phone call with Ericsson, there was a floor-to-ceiling nine-by-fourteen-foot screen set up in the middle of one of the rooms displaying life-size video footage of a traffic stop. It was shot from the perspective of a police officer walking up to a stopped car.

For the previous few weeks, Ericsson and his colleagues had been bringing members of the Tallahassee SWAT team and recent graduates of the police academy into his lab and placing them in front of the big screen with a Beretta handgun loaded with blanks holstered to their belt. They bombarded the officers with one hair-raising scenario after another and watched how they responded. In one scenario, the officer saw a man walk toward the front door of a school with a suspicious bulge that looked like a bomb strapped to his chest. The researchers wanted to know how officers with different levels of experience would react.

The results were striking. Experienced SWAT officers immediately pulled their guns and yelled repeatedly for the suspect to stop. When he didn’t, they almost always shot him before he made it into the school. But recent graduates of the academy were more likely to let the man with the bomb stroll right up the steps and into the building. They simply lacked the experience to diagnose the situation and react properly. At least that would be the superficial explanation. But what exactly does experience mean? What exactly did the more senior officers see that the younger recruits didn’t? What were they doing with their eyes, what was going through their minds, how were they processing the situation differently? What were they pulling from their memories? Like the professional chicken sexers, the senior SWAT officers had a skill that was difficult to put into words. Ericsson’s research program can be summarized as an attempt to isolate the thing we call expertise, so that he can dissect it and identify its cognitive basis.

In order to do that, Ericsson and his colleagues asked the officers to talk aloud about what was going through their minds as the scenario unfolded. What Ericsson expected to learn from these accounts was the same thing he’s found in every other field of expertise that he’s studied: Experts see the world differently. They notice things that nonexperts don’t see. They home in on the information that matters most, and have an almost automatic sense of what to do with it. And most important, experts process the enormous amounts of information flowing through their senses in more sophisticated ways. They can overcome one of the brain’s most fundamental constraints: the magical number seven.