Free Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer Page A

long-term stores is such a savvy way of managing information that most computers are built around the same model. They have long-term memories in the form of hard drives as well as a working memory cache in the CPU that stores whatever the processor is computing at the moment.
    Like a computer, our ability to operate in the world, is limited by the amount of information we can juggle at one time. Unless we repeat things over and over, they tend to slip from our grasp. Everyone knows our working memory stinks. Miller’s paper explained that it stinks within very specific parameters. Some people can hold as few as five things in their head at any given time, a few people can hold as many as nine, but the “magical number seven” seems to be the universal carrying capacity of our short-term working memory. To make matters worse, those seven things only stick around for a few seconds, and often not at all if we’re distracted. This fundamental limitation, which we all share, is what makes us find the feats of memory gurus so amazing.

    My own memory test did not occur in front of the Human Performance Lab’s floor-to-ceiling projection screen. There were no guns holstered to my belt, no eye-tracking devices attached to my head. My humble contribution to human knowledge was extracted in Room 218 of the FSU psychology department, a small windowless office with a stained carpet and old IQ tests strewn across the floor. Ungenerously, it might be described as a storage closet.
    The man administering my tests was a third-year PhD student in Ericsson’s lab named Tres Roring. Though his flip-flops and blond surfer mop might not suggest it, Tres grew up in a small town in southern Oklahoma, where his father is an oil man. At age sixteen, he was the Oklahoma State Junior Chess Champion. His full name is Roy Roring III—hence “Tres.”
    Tres and I spent three full days in Room 218 taking memory test after memory test—me wearing a clunky microphone headset attached to an old tape recorder, Tres sitting behind me, legs crossed, with a stopwatch in his lap, taking notes.
There were tests of my memory for numbers (forward and backward), tests of my memory for words, tests of my memory for people’s faces, and tests of all sorts of things that seemed unlikely to have anything to do with my memory—like whether I could visualize rotating cubes in my mind’s eye, and whether I knew the definitions of “jocose,” “lissome,” and “querulous.” Another multiple-choice exam called the Multidimensional Aptitude Battery Information Test gauged my Trivial Pursuit skills with questions like:
    When did Confucius live?
a. 1650 A.D.
b. 1200 A.D.
c. 500 A.D.
d. 500 B.C.
e. 40 B.C.
and:
In a gasoline engine, the main purpose of the carburetor is to
a. mix gasoline and air
b. keep the battery charged
c. ignite the fuel
d. contain the pistons
e. pump the fuel into the engine
    Many of the tests Tres administered were lifted directly from U.S. Memory Championship events, like the fifteen-minute poem, names and faces, random words, speed numbers, and speed cards. He wanted to see how I’d do on them before I’d ever tried to improve my memory. He also wanted to test me on a few of the events that are only used in international memory competitions, like binary digits, historical dates, and spoken numbers. By the end of my three days in Tallahassee, Tres had collected seven hours of audiotaped data for Ericsson and his grad students to analyze later. Lucky them.
    And then there were the extensive interviews conducted by another graduate student, Katy Nandagopal. Do you think you have a good natural memory? (Pretty good, but nothing special.) Did you ever play memory games growing up? (Not that I can think of.) Board games? (Only with my grandmother.) Do you enjoy riddles? (Who doesn’t?) Can you solve a Rubik’s cube? (No.) Do you sing? (Only in the shower.) Dance? (Ditto.) Do you work out? (Sore subject.) Do you use workout tapes? (You need