Wednesday Wisdom

Thriller

WHO?

Joshua Foer is an American writer, journalist, and public speaker known for his work on memory, cognitive science, and culture. He was born on September 23, 1982, in Washington, D.C., USA and raised in a family with a strong literary and intellectual background. His younger brother, Jonathan Safran Foer, is a well-known for his novel Everything is Illuminated which was made into a major motion picture. Joshua attended Yale University, where he studied evolutionary biology and graduated in 2004. He started an organization called Atlas Obscura which is an online magazine and travel company with a goal to inspire curiosity of the world and cultures. His articles have been published in the NY Times, Slate and the New Yorker.

What he produced

In 2005 while attending the US Memory Championships as a reporter, Joshua Foer became fascinated with the idea of memory. After reporting on the event, he went on to gain widespread recognition and acclaim for his book "Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything," published in 2011. The book chronicled his journey into the world of memory championships, highlighting the many characters and friendships that were involved in the competition. Covering this strange competition, Josh expected that the contestants would all be savants only to find they all use methods that go back to ancient Greece.

Simonides of Ceos was an ancient Greek poet who lived from 556 to 468 BC and he is known for his lyrical poetry about victories, funerals and celebrations. He attended a banquet in an exquisite hall as the entertainment by reciting his poems from memory. After he finished, he walked out of the hall and tragedy stuck as the hall collapsed killing everyone while leaving the bodies unidentifiable. Through his acute memory, Simonides was able to identify where each guest had been only minutes before the collapse. This is called the method of loci also known as a memory palace where one uses visual and spatial senses to memorize. Cicero the great Roman statesman and philosopher was known as a great orator used this method when delivering his speeches. Rather than memorizing word for word, he would move through a known place visualizing each topic he would speak about. The word topic is derived from the Greek word topa which means place.

Inspired by the memory athletes he meets; Foer decides to delve deeper into the subject and learn the techniques they use to achieve remarkable feats of memory. He explored several of the memory techniques and eventually participated in the U.S. Memory Championship a year later (No spoiler alert here-read the book).

2023 Why you should care

Epistemology is concerned with the nature of knowledge and the processes by which we acquire knowledge. It is more concerned with questions related to belief, justification, and the assessment of what we can know. Memory is one way we acquire and build knowledge. Why is that we can remember the lyrics of a song from 30 years ago but forget what one had for breakfast? All the memorization techniques are a skill based on how we remember best. This comes from visualization where a memory gets dog-eared into our brain. A great example of this is the Baker/baker paradox. A person's name Baker can be forgettable while the visual of a baker in white hat with flour on his face is memorable.

Before we had phones, computers or the printing press, people believed in investing in memory. It was a known virtue to have a trained, disciplined and cultivated memory. While you could argue technology has made memory somewhat obsolete, because so much information is at our beckoning. However, memory is our self and as philosopher John Locke argued that a person's identity is based on their consciousness and memories and our lives are the sum of our memories.

Perhaps the ancient skill of memorization has merit. Scientists and philosophers who study the process of learning have found something quite interesting: the more factual knowledge people have about a topic, the better they can think about it critically and analytically.

And now you know...

Philosophy is the art of thinking, the building block of progress that shapes critical thinking across economics, ethics, religion, and science.

METAPHYSICS: Literally, the term metaphysics means ‘beyond the physical.’ Typically, this is the branch that most people think of when they picture philosophy. In metaphysics, the goal is to answer the what and how questions in life. Who are we, and what are time and space?

LOGIC: The study of reasoning. Much like metaphysics, understanding logic helps to understand and appreciate how we perceive the rest of our world. More than that, it provides a foundation for which to build and interpret arguments and analyses.

ETHICS: The study of morality, right and wrong, good and evil. Ethics tackles difficult conversations by adding weight to actions and decisions. Politics takes ethics to a larger scale, applying it to a group (or groups) of people. Political philosophers study political governments, laws, justice, authority, rights, liberty, ethics, and much more.

AESTHETICS: What is beautiful? Philosophers try to understand, qualify, and quantify what makes art what it is. Aesthetics also takes a deeper look at the artwork itself, trying to understand the meaning behind it, both art as a whole and art on an individual level. A question an aesthetics philosopher would seek to address is whether or not beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

EPISTEMOLOGY: This is the study and understanding of knowledge. The main question is how do we know? We can question the limitations of logic, how comprehension works, and the ability (or perception) to be certain.