How to Apply Moonwalking with Einstein: Remember More of What You Read

The Reporter Who Became the Record Holder

In 2005, Joshua Foer covered the USA Memory Championship as a freelance journalist. He expected to find savants, people born with strange brains. Instead he found ordinary people, most of them insisting they had unremarkable memories, who had trained a set of techniques.

One of the competitors, English grand master Ed Cooke, made Foer an offer: let me coach you, and in a year you could compete yourself. Foer treated it as a journalistic experiment. He trained roughly an hour a day. In 2006 he won the USA Memory Championship and set a US record in the "speed cards" event, memorizing the order of a shuffled 52-card deck in 1 minute and 40 seconds.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything came out in March 2011 and debuted at number three on the New York Times bestseller list. The title comes from a mnemonic image Foer used during training. The book braids three threads: the subculture of competitive memory, the neuroscience of how memory works, and Foer's own year of practice.

The reason it matters for anyone who reads seriously is simple. Foer proved that a normal person can dramatically improve recall with old, learnable methods. If you read books, papers, or watch long videos and feel like it all evaporates within a week, this book is the argument that it doesn't have to.

The Baker/baker Paradox: Why You Forget

Start with a puzzle the book uses to explain forgetting. Show two people the same photo of a face. Tell one person the man's name is Baker. Tell the other that the man is a baker by profession. A few days later, the person told the profession is far more likely to remember it than the person told the surname.

Same word. Same face. Wildly different recall. Why?

Because "a baker" connects to a web of things you already know: the smell of bread, a paper hat, a warm shop, flour on an apron. The name "Baker" connects to nothing except that one face. As Foer puts it, the profession is "tethered" to a whole network of ideas, while the name floats free. Memory isn't a warehouse where facts sit on shelves. It's a web, and a fact you can't connect to anything else is a fact with no handle to grab.

This reframes the whole problem. When you forget what you read, it's rarely because your storage filled up. It's because the idea never got tied to anything. The practical lesson runs through the entire book: the more hooks you attach to a new piece of information, the easier it is to find later. Every technique that follows is a machine for manufacturing hooks.

There's a second half to this. Foer describes how memory champions and chess masters don't have bigger memories, they have better chunks. An expert sees a chessboard and encodes it as a few meaningful patterns instead of thirty-two separate pieces. A doctor reads a chart as one clinical picture, not forty data points. Expertise is largely the skill of chunking raw information into units your existing knowledge already recognizes. This is why the more you know about a subject, the easier it gets to learn more of it.

The Memory Palace: Your Brain's Oldest Trick

The book's signature technique is the memory palace, known to the ancients as the method of loci ("loci" is Latin for places).

Foer tells its origin story. Around 500 BCE, the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos was reciting at a banquet when he stepped outside. Moments later the roof collapsed, crushing the guests beyond recognition. Simonides found he could name every victim by recalling exactly where each had been sitting. From that grim accident came the insight: our memory for places is extraordinary, and we can piggyback anything onto it.

The method works like this. Take a place you know cold, your childhood home, your commute, your office. Walk a fixed route through it in your mind. Then convert whatever you want to remember into vivid images and drop one at each stop along the route. To recall the list, you take the mental walk and collect the images in order.

The reason it works isn't magic. It's that human spatial memory is absurdly good, a leftover from ancestors who needed to know where the water and the predators were. We're terrible at holding abstract lists and phone numbers, and superb at remembering the layout of a house we lived in twenty years ago. The memory palace hijacks the strong system to carry the load the weak one can't.

Memory competitors take this to extremes, building dozens of palaces to store thousands of digits or hundreds of cards. But you don't need a competitor's discipline to use it. A single well-known route can hold the key points of an article, the steps of a process, or the argument of a chapter.

Elaborative Encoding: Why Weird Beats Boring

A memory palace is only as good as the images you put in it, which brings us to the deeper principle underneath every mnemonic: elaborative encoding.

Elaborative encoding is the act of taking dull, abstract information and converting it into images that are vivid, strange, funny, sometimes rude, and charged with feeling. The book's advice is blunt: bland images vanish, but bizarre and emotional ones stick. A grocery list of milk, eggs, and bread becomes a giant milk carton smashing through your front door, eggs frying on the hallway floor, a loaf of bread doing something it absolutely should not be doing on your kitchen counter. The weirder and more multi-sensory the picture, the more retrieval cues you create.

This is why the book is called Moonwalking with Einstein. It's an image Foer built to remember something, Einstein doing Michael Jackson's moonwalk, exactly the kind of absurd, motion-filled, celebrity-anchored picture that refuses to be forgotten.

For numbers and cards, competitors use structured systems. The Major System converts digits into consonant sounds, so numbers become words you can picture. The PAO (Person-Action-Object) system assigns every two-digit number from 00 to 99 its own person, action, and object. The number 34 might be Frank Sinatra (person) crooning (action) into a microphone (object). Then a six-digit number is compressed into one composite image: the person from the first pair, doing the action of the second, to the object of the third. It sounds like a lot of setup, and it is, but it turns memory from a matter of willpower into a matter of method.

The takeaway for readers who'll never memorize a deck of cards: the effort you spend making an idea concrete and connected is the effort that makes it stick. Passive re-reading creates no images and no hooks, which is exactly why it feels productive and does so little. This is the same lesson at the heart of how to remember what you read.

The OK Plateau: Why You Stopped Getting Better

Midway through his training, Foer stopped improving. His card times froze. He emailed the psychologist studying his progress, K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University, the researcher whose work on expertise later became the book Peak. Ericsson told him he'd hit the "OK plateau."

Here's the idea. When you learn any skill, you pass through three stages. First the cognitive stage, where you think hard about what you're doing. Then the associative stage, where you make fewer errors. Then the autonomous stage, where the skill goes on autopilot and you stop paying attention. That autopilot is the OK plateau: the point where you've decided you're good enough, and improvement quietly stops. It's why you've been driving for twenty years without becoming a better driver, and why you can type fast but not accurately.

Ericsson's research shows that experts escape the plateau through deliberate practice: they refuse to let the skill go automatic. Foer describes the three habits that define it:

• Stay out of the autonomous zone, focusing consciously on technique instead of coasting.
• Operate at the edge of your ability, practicing the things you're bad at rather than rehearsing what you've mastered.
• Get immediate feedback, so every error is visible and correctable right away.

Foer broke his plateau by studying where he failed. He'd deliberately try to memorize cards faster than he comfortably could, then analyze the wipeouts. His times dropped again.

For readers and learners, the OK plateau is the quiet killer. You read the way you read at nineteen and never upgrade the method. You highlight on autopilot. Deliberate practice as a reader means the uncomfortable stuff: closing the book and forcing yourself to recall the argument, writing a summary from memory and catching what you got wrong, tackling material slightly above your level. We go deeper on this in the guide to deliberate practice from the book Peak.

Google Remembers For You. Should You Bother?

The obvious objection to a whole book about memory: it's 2026, my phone remembers everything, why train a skill software does better?

Foer takes this seriously, and his answer is the most important idea in the book for how you should read. He isn't arguing you should memorize the encyclopedia. He's arguing that what you hold inside your own head changes how you think. You can't have an insight about facts you have to look up. Creativity, judgment, and the ability to connect two distant ideas all depend on those ideas being present in your mind at the same moment, not sitting in a browser tab.

"How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember," Foer writes. External memory, from the written word to your phone, is a genuine gift. But it has quietly convinced us that internal memory doesn't matter, and that trade is worse than it looks. A mind stuffed with connected knowledge is a mind that can think. A mind that outsourced everything is a mind that can only search.

This is exactly where a modern reading practice fits. You're not choosing between your brain and your tools. The best system uses external memory to feed internal memory. When you highlight what you read with Glasp, you're not just filing a quote to forget, you're making the deliberate choice about what deserves a hook. The highlight is the external record. The act of choosing it, and coming back to it, is what plants it inside your head. The two work together, which is the whole point.

A Reader's Memory Palace: Applying the Book

You don't need to compete to use these techniques. Here's how the book's core methods map onto everyday reading, studying, and watching.

Notice that none of this requires a competitor's memory palace with a thousand loci. The lightweight versions, one image per big idea, one connection per highlight, one recall attempt per chapter, capture most of the benefit for a fraction of the effort.

The connective tissue is the same across a web article, a PDF, a Kindle book, or a two-hour YouTube lecture. When you save Kindle highlights or generate YouTube video summaries, you're producing the raw material. The techniques above are what turn that material from a graveyard of saved quotes into knowledge you actually carry.

A 5-Step System to Remember What You Read

Here's a concrete workflow that combines Foer's methods with a modern highlighting practice. It adds maybe ten minutes to a reading session and changes what survives.

Step 1: Highlight the hooks, not the whole page. As you read, mark only the ideas that genuinely matter, three to five per chapter, not fifteen. The scarcity forces you to decide what's worth remembering, which is the first act of encoding. A page drowning in yellow is a page where you've decided nothing.

Step 2: Encode each highlight as an image or a connection. For each thing you kept, spend fifteen seconds either building a vivid mental picture of it or writing one line about what it connects to in your own knowledge. This is elaborative encoding and the Baker/baker principle, applied in real time.

Step 3: Build a mini palace for the argument. For a whole book or a long video, place its three to five load-bearing points along a familiar route in your mind. Now you can reconstruct the spine of the argument on a walk, with no notes.

Step 4: Recall before you review. A day later, close everything and try to reproduce the main points from memory. This is the deliberate-practice move, and it's uncomfortable on purpose. Only after you've struggled should you check your highlights to see what you missed. That gap between what you recalled and what you saved is where real learning happens, and it's the engine behind active recall.

Step 5: Space out the returns. Revisit your highlights a few days later, then a week, then a month. Memory strengthens with spaced retrieval, not cramming. You can let saved highlights resurface on a schedule, or ask Glasp's AI chat to quiz you on what you saved. The full case for timing your reviews is in spaced repetition for readers.

The system respects Foer's real lesson. Tools do the storing. You do the encoding, the connecting, and the recalling, because those are the parts that build a mind capable of thinking with what it read.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you really need a memory palace to remember what you read?

No, not for everyday reading. Full memory palaces shine when you need to recall long, ordered sequences perfectly, like a speech or an exam's worth of facts. For most reading, the lighter techniques carry the weight: turning a key idea into a vivid image, tying each highlight to something you already know, and recalling the argument before you check your notes. Use the full palace when the order matters and there's a lot to hold.

Is a good memory something you're born with?

Foer's whole book is an argument against that assumption. He had an ordinary memory and became a national champion in a year of practice. Barring specific medical conditions, memory performance is mostly technique and training, not a fixed gift. The people who seem to remember effortlessly are usually the ones who, knowingly or not, connect new information to what they already know.

What is the OK plateau, and how do I get past it as a reader?

The OK plateau is the point where a skill goes on autopilot and quietly stops improving, a concept from psychologist K. Anders Ericsson. You get past it with deliberate practice: doing the uncomfortable thing on purpose. For reading, that means closing the book and forcing recall, writing summaries from memory, reading material slightly above your level, and looking hard at what you got wrong instead of what you got right.

Does highlighting actually help memory, or is it passive?

Highlighting by itself is passive, and passive highlighting does little. What makes it work is what you do around it: choosing sparingly so each highlight is a real decision, encoding each one with an image or a connection, and returning to it through recall and spaced review. The highlight is the hook. Memory happens when you use the hook, not when you paint the page.

How is this different from spaced repetition and flashcards?

They're complementary. Foer's techniques are mostly about encoding, getting information into memory in a sticky form. Spaced repetition is about retrieval, pulling it back out at the right intervals so it lasts. The strongest system uses both: encode ideas vividly and connectedly first, then review them on a spacing schedule. Flashcards are just one way to run the retrieval half.

Conclusion

Moonwalking with Einstein isn't really a book about memorizing decks of cards. It's a book about how a normal person can reclaim a skill that culture told them they didn't have, using methods that predate the printing press.

The through line for readers is this: memory is about connection, not capacity. You forget what you read not because your head is full but because the ideas never got hooked to anything. Every technique Foer learned, the memory palace, elaborative encoding, deliberate practice past the OK plateau, is a way to manufacture those hooks on purpose.

Your tools and your brain aren't competitors. Use Glasp's web highlighter to capture the ideas worth keeping, save your Kindle highlights and YouTube summaries in one place, and let the community show you what other readers found worth remembering. Then do the part no tool can do for you: encode it, connect it, and recall it. That's how what you read stops evaporating and starts becoming something you can think with.