Monotony Collapses Time. Novelty Unfolds It.

Back When I Lived In Brooklyn, I'd Sometimes Take The Q Train All The Way Out To Coney Island And Back, And Work On My Laptop. There's Something About Pushy New Yorkers Looking Over Your Shoulder That Really Makes You Produce Sentences.

With Our Blogs And Tweets, Digital Cameras, And Unlimited-gigabyte E-mail Archives, Participation In The Online Culture Now Means Creating A Trail Of Always Present, Ever Searchable, Unforgetting External Memories That Only Grows As One Ages.

We're All Just A Bundle Of Habits Shaped By Our Memories. And To The Extent That We Control Our Lives, We Do So By Gradually Altering Those Habits, Which Is To Say The Networks Of Our Memory. No Lasting Joke, Or Invention, Or Insight, Or Work Of Art Was Ever Produced By An External Memory. Not Yet, At Least.

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.

Some Memorizers Arbitrarily Associate Each Playing Card With A Familiar Person Or Object, So That The King Of Clubs Is Represented By, Say, Tony Danza. The Grand Masters Associate Each Card With A Person, An Action, Or An Object So That Every Group Of Three Cards Can Be Converted Into A Sentence.