When You Want To Get Good At

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.

The Art And Science Of Memory Is About Developing The Capacity To Quickly Create Images That Link Disparate Ideas. Creativity Is The Ability To Form Similar Connections Between Disparate Images And To Create Something New And Hurl It Into The Future So It Becomes A Poem, Or A Building, Or A Dance, Or A Novel. Creativity Is, In A Sense, Future Memory.

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.

...who We Are And What We Do It Is Fundamentally A Function Of What We Remember.

If You Were A Medieval Scholar Reading A Book, You Knew That There Was A Reasonable Likelihood You'd Never See That Particular Text Again, And So A High Premium Was Placed On Remembering What You Read. You Couldn't Just Pull A Book Off The Shelf To Consult It For A Quote Or An Idea.