The effects of memorizing a chapter from Moby Dick: how to challenge your heroes

I have my heroes, much like everyone, and I take a lot of cues from them. I read the books they recommend, I research the ideas they suggest and I take their mantras as my own for a while. I’m a huge ‘brain’ enthusiast, and so that includes memory techniques used and the people who use them. One of the people I happen to know about is  Joshua Foer. A little background is that he won the 2006 U.S. memory championships and wrote a book on memory called “Moonwalking with Einstein”. He tried a memory challenge whereby he memorised an entire chapter from Moby Dick. He approximated that it took him 3-4 hours a day for about 4 days to memorize and there is a video of him beginning the recall in the  youtube clip. So I thought “Let’s try this”.

Using his time as a goal to match or beat, I had my target. His lowest estimate was 12 hours and his highest was 16 hours. Thinking about this now, it seems a little long, but who knows until you are there. It was a slow process in the beginning, taking an hour to encode all the images and sentences in my head. This can be tricky, an image for a word like “gold” is easy but “this” is a little trickier. The first time recalling the entirety of the chapter, I made 23 small mistakes and left out a full sentence. Things quickly accelerated.

If you think about memorizing something, is it enough to just be able to recite it or should you be able to pull the memory out as fast and correct as possible? I went with the latter. Asking a colleague to read the chapter as fast as possible, skipping all intonation and, I suppose, ‘humanistic’ sounds, he managed it in 2 minutes 37 seconds. I cut that down, my reading speed was 2:21.

In total, I finished my practice at 25 repetitions, 2 hours and 20 minutes. And the results? I recalled it equal to reading speed. The methodology for training the memory is so fascinating and if done in a lazy way, you can spread your learning out over a week, like I did, and still get the result.

But apart from the result, what else is there? People look at you funny when you tell them that you are memorizing a chapter from Moby Dick. “What for?” is the most common response. I think it’s important to push our boundaries and see what our limitations are. After this, I definitely think I can do much more and you’ll probably be surprised what you can do.

Full disclosure? I feel like a pariah in my own thoughts when I think of ‘cultured’. Classic literature is something I have barely touched. I want to know more of the works which have shaped my world. Perhaps it isn’t important, yet I find its exploration important to me. As my friend,  Robby Kojetin, has previously said “People are happiest, healthiest and most productive doing what matter most to them”. Plus, I have such a cool tattoo coming from this story (there are many well-written, amazing lines). But when all's said and done, it’s the deepening understanding of the story itself. Classic revenge story of man hunting down adversary who wronged him, in this case, a white whale. Boring. However, becoming familiar with his words, seeing his rationale, getting a sense of his emotions so intimately, it’s hard not to empathize.

I highly recommend that everyone try this challenge to better know the literature that inspires them.

First is my speed video, what follows is the performance.