What did I read? June Edition

After spending the last few months reading about behavioral economics, I was eager to kick off June with a book about the study of achievement. The book was authored by a blogger that I really enjoy and promised to unpack the surprising statistics, science, stories, and myths about what makes people successful in any number of endeavors. After months of reading about our generally poor decision-making—or at least irrational and inconsistent decision-making—I was excited to read about some good ones.

Then a peculiar thing happened. The introductory chapter kicked off with the story of a dominant endurance cyclist on an annual cross-country race that essentially allowed himself to go insane as a competitive advantage that consistently kept him ahead of other competitors. I’d read about him before but it’s a remarkable story so I waded in again. Besides, the behavioral economics books I was devouring collectively referenced many of the same studies, papers, and findings; maybe books about achievement draw from a similarly narrow pool. I was about six pages in when I noticed that some of the pages were dog-eared and made a startling realization.

I’ve read this book already.

It’s not that it wasn’t an interesting book—and no offense to the author—but the experience of reading it had just fallen out of my head. Even scanning the contents, I couldn’t tell you a single thing I took away from it. And I probably only read it maybe two years ago.

This embarrassing little blunder made me reflect back on what I’ve been reading this year. I realized that in most cases—whether fiction or non-fiction—I was recalling “vignettes” of powerful moments or compelling facts, rather than the overarching narrative. I remembered feeling intrigued or bored or inspired or skeptical while reading—but not exactly which passages that made me feel that way.

What’s the point of me taking hours each month to work through my unread books if I’m forgetting most of them? Is it enough to take away a few fleeting “moments” from the author’s comprehensive work if I can apply and connect with those moments? If I’m interested in the subject matter but not hanging on every word, am I reading the right books? Am I too distracted by other things when I’m trying to get lost in reading? Am I somehow doing it wrong?

Thankfully, I knew just where to turn, pulling my first book—well, first book that I hadn’t read already—for June…

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer

Much to my surprise, this book turned out to be one of my favorites of the year. Foer recalls a year of his life in which he went from a freelance journalist covering the bizarre world of competitive memory championships—which are a thing, apparently—to actually training and participating himself on the national stage. While these events feel more like party tricks than intellectual feats—memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of cards, pairing names and faces of strangers, recalling random phone numbers, memorizing original poetry down to the punctuation—the speed, accuracy, and volume at which these competitors are able to perform them is undeniably impressive. (Spoiler alert: the author ends up setting a US record by correctly memorizing a shuffled deck of cards in one minute and forty seconds.) Although the majority of the book is an autobiographical account of the author’s journey on the competitive memory circuit, it’s peppered throughout with medical research, psychology studies, expert interviews, and historical anecdotes exploring our complicated relationship with our brains.

Core to the secrets of the pros is the idea that years of evolution have made our spatial memory of physical places better than our declarative memory of facts and events. If you close your eyes right now and think about the home you grew up in, chances are you can remember every room in surprising detail—even if you’ve forgotten half the things that happened in them. Competitive memory contestants exploit this quirk by turning facts (or cards or names or numbers) into vivid mental objects. These objects are “placed” in familiar rooms, buildings, even villages that the contestant has memorized—called loci. When they want to remember a fact, they simply “walk” the loci in their minds and look at the corresponding objects. Apparently, the brain is particularly good at remembering things that are strange, famous, or even crude, so many competitors will assign a fact or a set of facts to a celebrity doing something outlandish. Hence the title of the book: Einstein moonwalking is a mnemonic that Foer assigned to a set of three specific cards, which he “found” in his best-known loci: his parents’ bedroom in their childhood home. 

What I appreciated about Moonwalking with Einstein was that I had never really thought about the history of knowledge. Memory is something I’ve taken for granted because it’s always been there. Everyone remembers from high school that Guttenberg’s printing press revolutionized the spread of information, but I never realized that it kicked off a wave of knowing more and remembering less—culminating in the Google alerts I get constantly reminding me to dial-in for a call, pay a bill, take dinner out of the oven, or just take a deep breath. Before the printing press, Foer argued, memory was the height of wisdom. In ancient Rome, poetry, song, philosophy, law, geography--they had nowhere to be stored except memory, and those who could reliably recall it from their loci were revered as keepers of treasure. (Foer goes on to talk about the sharing of memories as an act of co-creation, which is equally fascinating but too long to include here.)

One thing I struggled with throughout the book was the difference between memory and knowledge. Just because I can recall something, does that mean I understand it? Foer addressed this at several points, most notably in interviews with South Bronx teacher Raemon Matthews who applies professional memorization techniques in his high-potential classes, which he refers to as the Talented Tenth. While Matthews concedes that memorization is not necessarily knowledge, he argues that all knowledge begins as memory.

Last but not least may be the secret to life. Over the course of profiling a number of extraordinary people—memory savants and memory-impaired persons alike—Foer casually notes that the brain is quick to forget routine and monotony. The secret to a long and fulfilling life, he suggests, may be in creating a wide range of unique memories to reflect back on.

(Foer is also the co-founder of the exceptional Atlas Obscura, a user-generated community of unusual food, history, tourism, and science from around the world.)

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Having been pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed learning about something I largely take for granted in Moonwalking with Einstein, I decided to continue the trend with Traffic, much to the chagrin of my wife, who did a double-take the first time she noticed me reading it. “Why are you reading a book about traffic? No—why do you own a book about traffic?”

In this case, I know exactly why: years ago, while doing research into a design for a park, I came across an interesting case study from the UK. Like many neighborhoods around the world, a community was struggling with speeding cars in close proximity to a playground. Despite investing in posted speed limit signs, then flashing posted speed limit signs, and finally speed bumps, cars continued to speed past the park as a shortcut to another part of town. Finally, one of the planners suggested something controversial: removing the fence between the road and the playground. Parents were understandably outraged that the planner’s solution was to seemingly make the playground more dangerous by removing the only thing standing between their kids and a speeding car. But it worked. The average speed dropped significantly, and overall traffic volume started to drop as more cars avoided the route altogether. The logic, the case explained, was that fear is the most effective way to slow traffic. It’s one thing for an impatient driver to see a sign that says “Warning: children playing” and quite another for him to see a ball rolling into the road. At the time, this was my first exposure to environmental design’s sometimes counter-intuitive impact on behavior and I thought it was fascinating. I bought Vanderbilt’s book, a national bestseller on the psychology of driving.

Traffic is about more than just congestion; Vanderbilt uses the act of driving to explore cognition, sociology, technology, persuasion, safety, and culture. Like Foer, Vanderbilt is a journalist and his study of the topic is exhaustively researched. If the book suffered from anything, it’s my own lateness to the party. It was first published in 2008 so at least in this edition, there’s no mention of the impact of ridesharing, electric charging stations, Millennials’ growing preference for urban centers, or Gen Z’s aversion to getting their driver's licenses. Early autonomous vehicles are mentioned but in the context of an IBM-sponsored innovation challenge, not as something being piloted around the country right now.

But what Vanderbilt does cover is far more timeless: how driving changes us into being that think and behave differently than we do outside the car. One of the earliest chapters mentioned the importance of eye contact in communication. It’s theorized that our inability to make eye contact (except in rear-view mirrors, or in the case of pedestrians and cyclists, at close contact) contributes to our sense of isolation. Our vehicles become an extension of our identity, and our right of way becomes our sense of property. Think about the last time something happened to you in traffic; chances are you said something like “that guy cut me off,” not “that guy’s car cut my car off.” When our identity is “threatened” by another driver, we react with more aggression and frustration than we might outside the vehicle. (Remember, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman noted that we feel losses twice as strongly as we feel gains.)

One other consistent thread from behavioral science is the importance of feedback. In Thinking, Fast and Slow and Thaler’s Nudge, the behavioral scientists noted that we need to get immediate and specific feedback in order to refine our behavior. Driving is no different. In fact, the lack of a feedback loop contributes to a sense that everyone’s a better driver than they really are—we don’t feel like we have a reason to think otherwise. We become confident enough to send that text, to eat that sandwich, to make the short drive home from the bar—because for most of us, we’ve gotten away with it before without any repercussions. But that’s why 80% of accidents are caused by distracted drivers. When we do get feedback, it’s immediate and maybe even deadly. This is why traffic engineers install “rumble strips” or manufacturers equip cars with blind-spot indicators and lane alert systems: to build more feedback into our driving.

Vanderbilt explores everything from the co-operative movement patterns of ants and locusts to how Los Angeles traffic managers coordinate limos for Oscar night. He remarked on the steely focus of racecar drivers and the controlled chaos of New Delhi streets. It’s a strange book to be reading during a worldwide pandemic, when I am barely even glancing at my car let alone commuting with it. (I last got my oil changed on January 2nd. I noticed recently that I still have about 4k miles before I’m due to change it again.) But when I have driven, Vanderbilt’s book has made me infinitely more conscious of the identity I defend and the decisions I make when I am on the road.

What are you like behind the wheel? If you can remember? Let me know in the reactions below.