Moonwalking with Einstein
Money and Finance

Moonwalking with Einstein


Chris over at The View from the Blue Ridge posted a great excerpt from the book Moonwalking with Einstein, which is pasted below. That book may have been the most useful one I've read over the past couple of years from an investing standpoint, as I've used what I learned from it to help me improve my filtering process when it comes to looking at investment ideas….a process that continues to evolve and (hopefully) improve.
In our gross misunderstanding of the function of memory, we thought that memory was operated primarily by rote. In other words, you rammed it in until your head was stuffed with facts. What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus. The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future. Creativity, is in a sense, future memory. 
If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you’ll be at coming up with new ideas. 
The notion that memory and creativity are two sides of the same coin sounds counterintuitive.  Remembering and creativity seem like opposite, not complementary, processes. But the idea that they are one and the same is actually quite old, and was once even taken for granted. The Latin root inventio is the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention. And to a mind trained in the art of memory, those two ideas were closely linked. Invention was a product of inventorying. In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on. Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory. 
This is what the art of memory was ultimately most useful for. It was not merely a tool for recording but also a tool of invention and composition. The realization that composing depended on a well-furnished and securely available memory formed the basis of rhetorical education in antiquity. Brains were as organized as modern filing cabinets, with important facts, quotations and ideas stuffed into neat mnemonic cubbyholes, where they would never go missing, and where they could be recombined and strung together on the fly. The goal of training one’s memory was to develop the capacity to leap from topic to topic and make new connections between old ideas.
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Book: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Related previous posts:

TED Talk - Joshua Foer: Feats of memory anyone can do

Joshua Foer: Moonwalking with Einstein

The Secret of Memory





- Memortation, Or One Way To Put What You Learn To Practical Use
This is a post I’ve been meaning to do for a while. After seeing that my friend Miguel is bringing back Simoleon Sense and listening to an interviewmy friend Shane over at Farnam Street recently did, I was inspired to quit procrastinating and put up...

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- Ted Talk - Joshua Foer: Feats Of Memory Anyone Can Do
Link ……………….. Related book: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything Related previous posts: Joshua Foer: Moonwalking with Einstein The Secret of Memory ...

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Eric Kandel is a titan of modern neuroscience. He won the Nobel Prize in 2000 not simply for discovering a new set of scientific facts (although he has discovered plenty of those), but for pioneering a new scientific approach. As he recounts in his memoir...

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Thanks to Will for passing this along. Nelson Dellis might be able to memorize the order of a full deck of shuffled cards faster than you can thumb through and read it, let alone burn it in your mind. In the five minutes it might take you to leave bed...



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