Moonwalking with Einstein

Last week, I finished Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer.  This book is about memory - how it works, how people train their memories, and what happens when our memories don't work quite right. Foer started it as a "creature feature" on people who compete in memory challenges. Assuming that they were some sort of freaks with photographic memories, he was surprised to discover that they were pretty much ordinary folks who had trained their memories for these specific tasks. As a challenge, Foer decided to dedicate a year of his life to training, and ended up winning the national competition (not a spoiler, as it is on the dust jacket).

Overall, this is a good look at one of the most interesting things we take almost entirely for granted.  The structure of training for the competition is a good frame for a bunch of different aspects of investigating memory.  He describes the memory palace technique that Pastor Oien used to memorize his sermons... As it turns out, that was one of the first recorded techniques for memorizing complex sequences of things, pioneered after a banquet hall collapse in Greece in the 5th century BC.

(As a heads up:  this is an interesting book, but it's not a how-to on improving your memory.)