Memory and Writing: Foer's Moonwalking Meets King's On Writing

Introduction

This paper assesses Stephen King's memoir On Writing through the conceptual lens of Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein. Foer's book — subtitled The Art and Science of Remembering Everything — serves as the primary prism through which King's reflections on craft and creative development will be examined. Foer's ideas will first be recounted through summary and quotation, and those ideas will then be applied to the autobiographical moments King records in his memoir. The central argument is straightforward: while the human brain has real limitations, it is also capable of remarkable things — changing, adapting, and enabling the creation of works of art that most minds could never attempt. The relationship between memory and creative output, as illustrated by both authors, makes that case compellingly.

Neuroplasticity and Mental Athletes in Foer's Framework

Many people assume that their mental capacity is fixed — either from birth or at some point in early life. However, Foer and other researchers who study the brain argue that this assumption is simply incorrect. As Foer writes in Moonwalking with Einstein, the brain is a "mutable organ, capable — within limits — of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity" (Foer, 2011). This capacity for reorganization has direct implications for what people can train themselves to do.

Beyond neuroplasticity, Foer introduces the concept of "mental athletes" — a designation that is by no means a stretch. Just as conventional athletes use their bodies to exercise and execute their craft, mental athletes deploy the full power of their minds. Foer cites a study in which the brain activity of mental athletes competing in a memory contest was measured by MRI and compared to that of control subjects who were not engaged in such tasks. The results were striking: areas of the brain that were relatively dormant in the control group were firing intensely in the mental athletes. As Foer puts it, "regions of the brain that were less active in the control subjects seemed to be working in overdrive for the mental athletes" (Foer, 2011). The evidence suggests that sustained mental practice produces measurable neurological change.

Foer's Personal Journey into Memory Science

Foer did not arrive at the study of memory through a formal academic path. He stumbled upon a memory competition being held in an auditorium and found himself captivated — both by the competitors and by his own ignorance of how memory worked. This encounter prompted genuine self-reflection. In a lighter moment, he marveled at why he could not get an "unbearable" Britney Spears song out of his head and how he resorted to "humming Hanukkah jingles as an attempt to dislodge it" (Foer, 2011). More seriously, he puzzled over why he could not recall what he had eaten for breakfast the previous day, yet could remember with complete clarity what he had eaten on the morning of the September 11 attacks (Foer, 2011).

That observation led Foer to ask whether anyone — himself included — could train their memory sufficiently to compete among dedicated mental athletes. His investigation revealed that the subject was far from new. The German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus had been conducting systematic memory research as far back as the 1870s. Foer also notes that, biologically, modern humans are "virtually identical to our ancestors who painted images of bison on the walls of the Lascaux cave in France." The puzzle, then, is why contemporary people have achieved so vastly more than those ancestors — and what role memory and its cultivation play in that achievement (Foer, 2011).

Memory, Milestones, and King's Earliest Writing

Foer's observation about the 9/11 breakfast memory — the way emotionally charged moments are retained while ordinary ones dissolve — resonates throughout King's memoir. One of the earliest and most telling examples involves King's childhood writing. As a boy, he produced a story that was largely copied and modeled after a comic book called Combat Casey. When he showed the work to his mother, she asked whether he had made it all up himself. He was honest: it was mostly a copy. His mother gently encouraged him to write something using entirely his own material. King vividly describes the excitement generated by that assignment — the sense of "possibility" it created. When he returned with an original story and his mother asked again if the work was his own, he could truthfully say yes. She told him it was "good enough to be in a book," and King recalls that "nothing anyone has said since to me has made me feel any happier" (King, 2010). He sold four copies of the story to his mother's four sisters and remembers it as the "first book I made in the business" (King, 2010). The memory is not just sentimental; it is the kind of milestone moment that Foer's framework predicts will be retained with exceptional fidelity.

Conclusion

Memory can be a curious and unpredictable faculty, and how it manifests differs from person to person. There is the general assumption that all memories reside somewhere in the mind, yet certain memories persevere far more vividly than others. Some appear to be suppressed or effectively forgotten. As with many complex systems, there are surely reasons why some memories surface easily while others resist retrieval — whether because of the passage of time, emotional salience, or factors still poorly understood. Memory remains one of the most fascinating and least fully understood dimensions of human cognition, and the works of both Foer and King, read together, illuminate just how much our recollections shape who we are and what we create.

Works Cited

Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. Print.

King, Stephen. On Writing. New York, NY: Scribner, 2010. Print.