Moonwalking with Einstein: What Memory Champions Teach Us About Language Learning

Book Summary and Key Insights

Published in 2011, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything follows Joshua Foer through a single year of memory training that ends with him winning the USA Memory Championship. The title itself is a memory device: Foer encodes Albert Einstein doing the moonwalk at a specific location in his memory palace as a demonstration of the technique he is describing.

The book interweaves three threads. The first is memoir — Foer's account of training under Grand Master of Memory Ed Cooke, building palaces in his Washington DC neighbourhood, and competing. The second is science journalism — the neuroscience of memory, the history of the art of memory from ancient Greece to medieval Europe to the competitive circuit today. The third is cultural history — how human societies stored and transmitted knowledge before writing, and what was lost when the printed page replaced the trained mind.

“The title of World Memory Champion is held not by some digital-brained super-nerd but by a guy who describes himself as ‘a sheep farmer from Wales.’”

The five key insights the book delivers, in order of their importance to anyone trying to learn a language:

None of these insights were invented by Foer. The method of loci was first described by Cicero in De Oratore around 55 BC, attributed to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos a few centuries earlier. What Foer did was make the technique accessible to a modern audience by demonstrating that an ordinary journalist could master it in a year and win a national championship. That demonstration is what makes the book useful.

What Memory Champions Actually Do

Before Foer visited the USA Memory Championship, he assumed the competitors had some physiological advantage — a larger hippocampus, a faster processing speed, a rare neurological trait. He was wrong about all of it. When German neuroscientist Martin Dresler and colleagues scanned the brains of memory champions and age-matched controls, they found no structural differences whatsoever. Same grey matter volume, same white matter integrity, same overall architecture.

What the functional MRI showed during a memory task was a different story entirely. Untrained participants activated regions associated with verbal rehearsal — the left hemisphere language areas, the phonological loop of working memory. Champions activated something completely different: the hippocampus, the retrosplenial cortex, and the medial parietal areas — the regions that together constitute the brain's navigation and spatial memory system.

They were not memorizing harder. They were memorizing differently — using the brain's most ancient and robust memory system rather than the thin, fragile verbal loop that most people rely on. The spatial navigation system in the hippocampus is not a memorization shortcut. It is the brain's primary long-term storage mechanism, refined over hundreds of thousands of years of spatial survival. When memory champions exploit it for cards and digits, they are using hardware that was built for exactly this purpose.

The PAO System Explained

One of the most powerful tools described in Moonwalking with Einstein is the PAO system — Person, Action, Object. It is the standard architecture that competitive memorists use to encode playing cards and large numbers, and understanding it reveals something important about how to encode any abstract information.

The basic problem PAO solves: a playing card or a two-digit number is meaningless. It has no sensory content, no narrative, no imagery. You cannot “place” the eight of diamonds at a location in a memory palace because the eight of diamonds is not a thing your brain can vividly picture. PAO converts every piece of abstract information into a concrete entity your brain can work with.

Why PAO matters for language learning

You do not need the full PAO architecture to learn vocabulary — it is optimized for compressing arbitrary sequences at speed, which is not the vocabulary acquisition problem. But PAO encodes the most important principle: every piece of abstract information should be converted into a vivid, specific, multi-sensory scene involving a person doing something with an object at a location.

This is precisely the structure of a good vocabulary mnemonic. The Portuguese word cachorro (dog) is encoded not as “cachorro = dog” but as a dog (Person equivalent) operating a cash register (Action-Object, sounds like “cachorro”) at the market stall (Location). That is a PAO-structured scene, and it will survive in memory long after the flashcard version has evaporated.

How These Techniques Apply to Language Learning

Moonwalking with Einstein is not a language learning book. Foer never applies his technique to foreign vocabulary, never discusses pronunciation encoding, and never addresses how you would manage a spaced review schedule across thousands of words. These are real gaps. But the principles transfer almost without modification.

The vocabulary problem is structurally identical to the problem Foer was solving. A foreign word is as meaningless to your brain as the six of hearts — an arbitrary symbol with no pre-existing associations, no sensory content, nothing to grip. The Baker/baker paradox is the vocabulary problem in miniature: “peixe” presented on a flashcard is Mr. Baker; “peixe” encoded as a swordfish in a business suit demanding a paycheck is a baker.

The table Foer draws from deliberate practice theory is also directly applicable. Language learning plateaus — years of Duolingo without conversational progress — follow exactly the pattern Ericsson identifies in pianists and chess players. You practise in the comfort zone, receive no meaningful feedback, and stop improving. Switching to deliberate memory palace construction — spending two minutes building a vivid, spatially anchored scene for each new word — is the shift from rote repetition to deliberate practice in vocabulary acquisition.

For a practical step-by-step guide to applying this to a specific language, see our post on using a memory palace for Portuguese.

Building Mental Images for Vocabulary

The skill Foer had to develop most intensively in his year of training was not memory — it was imagination. Specifically, the ability to generate, on demand, a fast, vivid, multi-sensory image from an arbitrary prompt. A card, a number, a name: give it thirty seconds and make it into something the brain cannot ignore. This skill transfers directly to vocabulary.

Ed Cooke taught Foer a set of rules for generating effective images, and they have remained the standard framework for competitive memorists ever since. For language learning, they translate as follows.

A worked example: the word saudade

Saudade is one of the most famous Portuguese words — a deep, melancholic longing for something or someone absent. It has no direct English translation. On a flashcard, “saudade = nostalgic longing” is another Mr. Baker: a symbol pointing to a concept. Here is how to encode it as a baker.

Notice the structure: keyword hook embedded in an emotionally charged scene, placed at a location that reinforces the meaning, with the sound inseparable from the image. This is elaborative encoding as Foer describes it — the word transformed from an arbitrary symbol into something the brain was designed to hold. For more techniques like this, see our complete guide to how to remember vocabulary.

How Loci Brings These Techniques to Your Phone

Foer ends Moonwalking with Einstein with a confession: he forgot how to use most of the competitive techniques within months of winning the championship. The reason is clear in retrospect — competitive memory training is context-free. You memorize shuffled cards because the championship tests shuffled cards, not because you care about shuffled cards. When the championship is over, the motivation evaporates and the technique follows.

Language learning is structurally different. Every word you encode in a memory palace is a word you will use in a real conversation, a real book, a real film. The palace is not an end in itself — it is the fastest path to fluency. But there is still the setup problem: building memory palaces from scratch, generating vivid mnemonic scenes for every vocabulary item, and managing a spaced review schedule by hand is feasible but slow. For a target of 2,000 words, doing this manually represents many hours of architectural work before the technique becomes useful.

Loci was built to eliminate that setup cost. Every word in the curriculum already has a pre-built mnemonic scene that encodes both pronunciation and meaning, placed at a specific location in a themed memory palace, and surfaced for active recall review at the algorithmically optimal moment before you would forget it.

The result is that a learner can open the app on day one and immediately experience what Foer needed twelve months of manual construction to achieve. The palace architecture is already built. The scenes are already vivid. The review schedule is already running. The learner's job is to walk the palace, encounter the scenes, and retrieve the words — exactly what Foer was doing in his basement in 2005, but without the year of setup.

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