Much like Olympic games, there are memory games, where people pit their skills at memorizing and remembering things against each other.
The author stumbles across one such contest, and to understand better how the competitors do it, he sets himself a challenge to learn their techniques.
He engages some top mental athletes to tutor him and improve his memory. The book covers his year spent learning about mnemonics and memory palaces and all of the memorable characters he met along the way.
He covers the history of memorization – it goes back to the ancient Greeks, when Socrates famously complained that writing destroys memory, and how, as a culture, they placed much more emphasis on the oral tradition than written.
The last chapter and the epilogue cover the memory championships in which Foer competed, but the outcome of those events really doesn’t matter. By then, it was clear that the purpose of a good memory isn’t just for party tricks like memorizing a deck of cards; more importantly, it teaches you to become more mindful in your life.