What is Moonwalking with Einstein about?

Moonwalking with Einstein is Joshua Foer's account of spending a year training for and winning the United States Memory Championship, beginning as a journalist covering the event and ending as its champion. The book weaves together Foer's personal training story and a broader investigation into the history and science of memory — how it works, how it has been understood across cultures, and what the strange subculture of competitive memorization reveals about human cognition.

The central practical thread is the method of loci, also called the memory palace technique. Foer works with Ed Cooke, a British memory champion and coach, who teaches him to encode information as vivid, bizarre, spatial images placed along a familiar mental route. Names become substitute images, cards become characters, numbers become sounds. The technique is ancient — described by Cicero, attributed to the Greek poet Simonides — and modern competitive memory sport is largely an elaboration of the same system. Foer's training shows both the power of the method and how much practice is required to make it reliable.

The historical and scientific sections are at least as interesting as the training narrative. Foer covers the shift from oral to literate culture and what it meant for memory — before widespread literacy, the ability to internalize and carry large bodies of knowledge was a primary intellectual virtue. He profiles savants and people with extraordinary memory deficits, including patients like S.F., who trained his digit span to extraordinary lengths, and EP, who lost the ability to form new memories entirely. He also examines the research on expertise and deliberate practice, drawing on Ericsson's work to ask what memory training actually develops.

Foer is a thoughtful narrator of his own learning, and the book benefits from the fact that it was written by a novice who became competent rather than by an expert who has forgotten what it was like not to know. The result is one of the more accessible treatments of memory science available, anchored by a personal story that makes the techniques feel achievable rather than exotic.