Just finished -

I just finished this today. It had caught my eye in Book World in Minocqua this summer and I jotted down the title to get it from the library when I got home.

The author starts investigating the US and World Memory Championships and is intrigued when several of the winners contend that anyone can learn the tools to remember like the champions do. So he ends up taking up the training for himself and as he describes that journey he takes a look and neuroscience, how the memory really works, the history of mnemonics and memory training, the "mental athletes" that undertake this sort of training now and how the education system uses (or doesn't) use memory.

It is pretty interesting and he does a good job of tempering some of the more hardcore neuroscience and history portions with humor and personal stories.

On a side note, the author - Joshua Foer - is the younger brother of Jonathan Safran Foer who wrote "Everything is Illuminated" and "Eating Animals" among others. Their humor is similar I think but their writing style is different.