It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.
In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality.
If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.
The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.
Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory.
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.
Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.
What makes things memorable is that they are meaningful, significant, colorful.
Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it’s about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.
The way to get better at a skill is to force yourself to practice just beyond your limits.
How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we’re not willing to process deeply?
I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn’t, and what its potential might be.
Once I’d reached the point where I could squirrel away more than 30 digits a minute in memory palaces, I still only sporadically used the techniques to memorize the phone numbers of people I actually wanted to call. I found it was just too simple to punch them into my cell phone.
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, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next – and disappear.
Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like ‘knight.’