Both Foer and his memory tutor, Ed Cooke, recommend utilizing images to make dry data more memorable To accomplish his seemingly astounding memorization of two decks of cards, Foer mentally associated each card with the name and face of a well-known person.
Some images adhere to memory better than others. Both Foer and his memory tutor, Ed Cooke, recommend sexual images as a means to a better memory. These images, they say, naturally tend to remain more prominent in our brains. In "Moonwalking," Foer writes, "The indecent acts my own grandmother had to commit in the service of my remembering the eight of hearts are truly unspeakable." However, suggests Cooke, who founded the online learning site Memrise, images that are too bizarre will distract the brain rather than provide a memory prompt.
Foer's book refers to a practice first developed to aid with memory in ancient Greece: the Memory Palace. Apparently, our brains, long accustomed to helping the body navigate through spatial relationships, can better retain information when it is placed in the context of a place. By creating an imaginary house, then placing your images within that building, the images acquire additional staying power.
The memory experts point out that we teach children the alphabet using a song. This same technique can work for adults seeking to commit new knowledge to memory. Anyone who has ever found an advertising jingle or bad song from the radio recurrently playing in their brain can attest to the staying power of rhythm and rhyme. As Foer explains, music and rhyme add "extra layers of pattern and structure to language."
Time spent specifically exercising and training the memory pays off. Foer views memory as an art which was more often cultivated in previous eras, whereas in this era, he says we have "outsourced our memories to external devices." He cites research by performance psychologists indicating that what separates top achievers from the rest of the world is "deliberate practice."