What Makes Things Memorable Is That They

The Fact That Books Today Are Mostly A String Of Words Makes It Easier To Forget The Text. With The Impact Of The Ipad And The Future Of The Book Being Up For Re-imagination, I Wonder Whether We'll Rediscover The Importance Of Making Texts Richer Visually.

Over The Last Few Millennia We've Invented A Series Of Technologies - From The Alphabet To The Scroll To The Codex, The Printing Press, Photography, The Computer, The Smartphone - That Have Made It Progressively Easier And Easier For Us To Externalize Our Memories, For Us To Essentially Outsource This Fundamental Human Capacity.

Many Memory Techniques Involve Creating Unforgettable Imagery, In Your Minds Eye. Thats An Act Of Imagination. Creating Really Weird Imagery Really Quickly Was The Most Fun Part Of My Training To Compete In The U.s. Memory Competition.

One Of The Great Challenges Of Our Age, In Which The Tools Of Our Productivity Are Also The Tools Of Our Leisure, Is To Figure Out How To Make More Useful Those Moments Of Procrastination When We're Idling In Front Of Our Computer Screens.

Truman Capote Famously Claimed To Have Nearly Absolute Recall Of Dialogue And Used His Prodigious Memory As An Excuse Never To Take Notes Or Use A Tape Recorder, But I Suspect His Memory Claims Were Just A Useful Cover To Invent Dialogue Whole Cloth.