Learning - Go 4 Wisdom

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

Posted on June 20, 2026 by Nelson D'Souza

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything was published in 2011 by Penguin Press and became an immediate bestseller, winning the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award and spending months on the New York Times bestseller list. Joshua Foer was a science journalist, not a memory expert, when he attended the 2005 USA Memory Championship as a reporter covering the peculiar subculture of competitive memorisers. He found himself so intrigued by what the competitors could do, and by the competitors’ consistent claim that their abilities were not innate gifts but trained skills available to anyone, that he decided to put that claim to the test. He spent a year training under the guidance of several world-class memory competitors, and at the following year’s championship, he won it.

The book is simultaneously a memoir of that training year, a history of memory and its cultural significance, a neuroscience primer on how human memory works, and a practical guide to the classical memory techniques that competitive memorisers use. The narrative method is immersive journalism: Foer places himself inside the world he is investigating, so that the reader experiences the techniques being learned rather than merely being described. This approach is what distinguishes Moonwalking with Einstein from more didactic memory guides. The techniques are embedded in vivid characters, strange subcultures, and genuinely unexpected intellectual territory.

Mindset by Carol Dweck

Posted on June 7, 2026 by Nelson D'Souza

The central premise of Mindset is that people hold one of two fundamental beliefs about the nature of their own qualities: intelligence, talent, personality, and character. The first belief, which Dweck calls the fixed mindset, is that these qualities are essentially innate. You are born with a certain amount of intelligence, a certain level of talent, a certain character. Life reveals what you have; it does not fundamentally change it. The second belief, the growth mindset, is that these qualities are starting points rather than ceilings. They can be developed through effort, good strategy, and openness to feedback.

This seems like a mild philosophical difference in how people think about themselves. Dweck’s research demonstrates that it is anything but. The belief a person holds about the nature of their abilities has cascading effects on almost every aspect of how they engage with challenge, failure, criticism, and other people. In a fixed mindset, every challenge is a potential exposure of your limits, every failure is a verdict on your worth, every criticism is an attack on your fundamental nature, and every person who succeeds where you struggled is a threat. The dominant motivation is to look smart, competent, and talented, which means avoiding anything that might prove you are not.

In a growth mindset, the logic inverts entirely. Challenge is where development happens. Failure is information: what did not work, what needs to change, what to try next. Criticism is feedback about performance, not about identity. Other people’s success is interesting evidence about what is possible, not a threat. The dominant motivation is to learn and improve, which means seeking out precisely the situations that feel difficult and uncomfortable.

Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger & McDaniel

Posted on June 7, 2026 by Nelson D'Souza

The central claim of Make It Stick is that the most effective learning strategies are the ones that feel least effective in the moment, and the most popular learning strategies are the ones that feel most effective but produce the least durable retention. This double inversion, effective feels bad and ineffective feels good, is the cognitive trap that the book exists to name and dismantle.

The mechanism behind the trap is what the authors call the fluency illusion: when you re-read a chapter, the text becomes familiar, and familiarity feels like knowledge. But familiarity is not the same as the ability to retrieve and use knowledge in a different context. Re-reading creates the subjective experience of having learned while producing relatively little actual encoding. Retrieval practice, being tested on material before you feel ready, generating answers rather than recognising them, is uncomfortable, error-prone, and slow. It also produces encoding that is three to four times more durable than re-reading, according to the research.