About three years ago, I memorized the first one hundred digits of pi. I did it on a lark, after reading Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein . The book’s central claim is that nearly anyone can achieve seemingly super-human feats of memory with proper technique and deliberate practice. Intrigued, I put the some of the techniques to the test and found that they worked surprisingly well. But they did not just work. They converted the hard and shapeless problem of how to remember into a problem of discipline and methodology. Remembering became engineering. The central insight behind most memory techniques is an observation: the human brain is not bad at memorization per se; it is only bad at memorizing specific kinds of information. For example, you can probably only hold 5-9 objects in short-term memory, but you can visualize your childhood home with relative clarity. And most adults have well-developed memories for certain topics, such as a car mechanic for car engines.…