Compare and Contrast of Foer and Stephen King Essay

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Foer vs. King

The author of this report has been asked to assess one body of work thorugh the lens of someone else's perspective. The work that will ultimately be assessed will be On Writing as written by Stephen King. The person whose lens will be used to assess Mr. King's treatise will be Joshua Foer. Specifically, the work Moonwalking with Einstein will be the prism and lens that will be used to assess and describe what is being manifested in King's work. Of course, the main premise of Foer's work was the "art and science of remember everything," as clearly stated by the subtitle of the book. The work of Foer will be described through some recitation and summary of his work and those quote and ideas will then be applied to the work of King when he wrote his memoir. While the human brain absolutely has limitations, it is also capable of wondrous and expansive things such as changing, adapting and assisting in the creation of works of art that many minds could never endeavor to pull off.

Analysis

Many people may think that their "lot in life" from a mental and brain-capacity standpoint is fixed, either at birth or at a certain point in life. However, Foer and other professionals in the fields that pertain to the brain are more than willing to assert that this is simply not true. As noted by Foer in his Einstein book, 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). Beyond that, there are many people that have become known as what Foer calls "mental athletes." To call these people mental athletes is by no means a stretch. Just as conventional physical athletes use parts of their body to exercise and execute their craft, mental athletes do the same thing. The difference is that physical athletes are working things like their arms, legs and abdominals. Mental athletes are unleashing the power of their brain. Foer says this emphatically and he notes that there is proof of this. There was a study done that compared "mental athletes" and how their brain "fires" when they are actively competing.

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These brain patterns, as measured by an MRI machine, were compared to people that were not engaging in such behavior. Of course, those were the control subjects and were there to serve as a comparison between the mental athletes and the regular people. It was clearly seen that parts left dormant or at least less active in the control subjects minds were firing on all cylinders with the mental athletes. As stated by Foer, "regions of the brain that were less active in the control subjects seemed to be working in overdrive for the mental athletes" (Foer, 2011).

As it relates to the study of the brain, Foer himself admits that he was not born into the study of the brain. He stumbled across a memory competition that was being held in an auditorium. Between the random observations of people talking about the competition and watching the competition itself, something dawned on Mr. Foer. He had no idea how his memory worked or did not work. He had not a clue. After considering the basics, he even wandered into the funnier realms of the general concept when he was wondering why he could not a "unbearable" Britney Spears song out of his head and how he would he started "humming Hanukah jingles as an attempt to dislodge it" (Foer, 2011). He also noted that he could not for the life of him remember what he had for breakfast the day before but he could remember what he ate the morning of the 9/11 attacks (Foer, 2011).

After some introspection and thought, Foer wondered out loud if "anyone" could improve their memory to the extent that they could compete and "belong" among a group of mental athletes that had made memorization their special forte. He found quickly that many self-help people out there that worked with the subject were just hucksters, at least to a degree. What Foer was wondering out loud about was nothing new. Indeed, there was the work of people like Hermann Ebbinghaus dating back to the 1870's. Foer also notes that we are "virtually identical….....

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