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Joshua Foer
New Haven resident Joshua Foer, author of the bestselling book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, will engage the community’s curiosity on Saturday, April 9 — “Obscura Day 2011” — by presenting a tour of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library’s brain collection.
“Obscura Day” takes place (at press time) in 86 cities around the world. It is presented by Atlas Obscura, a website launched in 2009 by Foer and Dylan Thuras as a “resource” through which to find “anything that inspires one’s sense of wonder, curiosity,” Foer said.
Foer and Thuras, for example, spent the month of November traveling in South America in search of such location-specific curiosities and writing about them for Slate magazine. In Venezuela, they marveled at “an everlasting lightning storm.” In Peru, they admired “the last Incan grass bridge.”
“It’s hard to find this sort of stuff because you need a recommendation,” Foer said. “We started the website as a resource.”
Foer, a 2004 graduate of Yale University, has made curiosity his calling. His recently published book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, tells the “strange story” of how Foer came to compete in — and win — the 2006 USA Memory Championship.
Foer later represented the United States — “and got my ass kicked” — at the World Memory Championships.
In 2005, Foer wrote an essay for Slate titled “Forget Me Not: How to win the U.S. memory championship,” a piece he thought would chronicle a sort of “Super Bowl of savants.” What he found instead was a competition among average folks who’d trained their memories. And he met a man who told him, “I can teach you how to do this.”
“I didn’t believe him,” Foer said.
Still, Foer’s curiosity was piqued.
“Memory is the essence of who we are,” he said.
Foer thought, “A good way to try and get inside the heads of these people … was to … do it myself.”
Foer will appear on April 21 at R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, where, in addition to reading from his book, he’ll be conducting a memory experiment.
“One fun thing I’ve been trying to do at the readings … (is to) have everybody in the audience actually compete in one of the events from the U.S. Memory Championship,” he said.
On April 9, Foer said he’ll be flying the Atlas Obscura flag at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library.