…education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can’t have higher-level learning- you can’t analyze-without retrieving information.’ And you can’t retrieve information without putting the information in there in...

When we first hear [a] word, we start putting these associational hooks into it that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date.

I Came away from the U.S. Memory Championship eager to find out how Ed and Lukas did it. Were these just extraordinary individuals, pridigies from the long tail of humanity’s bell curve, or was there...

A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers,...

Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can’t explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they’re happening.

learning texts is worth doing not because it’s easy but because it’s hard.

To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.

So why bother investing in one’s memory in an age of externalized memories? The best answer I can give is the one I received unwittingly from EP, whose memory had been so completely lost that...

Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by … not paying attention?

Over the last few millennial, we’ve invented a series of technologies … that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to outsource this fundamental human capacity.

Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.

What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence?

Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it’s about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.