Our fascination with memory artists can also be explained by this tradition. There is nothing interesting about the capability of a normal person to remember thousands of words, countless facts, numerous subjects, the names of celebrities, friends, family members and colleagues over a long period of time. But when someone is able to remember a seri

If you want to learn something for the long run, you have to write it down. If you want to really understand something, you have to translate it into your own words.

Steven Johnson, who wrote an insightful book about how people in science and in general come up with genuine new ideas, calls it the “slow hunch.”