Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

normal is not necessarily natural.

the World Memory Championship is less a test of memory than of creativity.

The ancient and medieval way of reading was very different from how we read today. One didn’t just memorize texts; one ruminated on them—chewed them up and regurgitated them like cud—and in the process, became intimate with them in a way that made them one’s own.

our brains, in the most reductive sense, are fundamentally prediction and planning machines.

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. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to e

Once upon a time, there was nothing to do with thoughts except remember them.

we’ve supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of technological crutches—from

It was probably not until about the ninth century, around the same time that spacing became common and the catalog of punctuation marks grew richer, that the page provided enough information for silent reading to become common.

Buzan believes schools go about teaching all wrong. They pour vast amounts of information into students’ heads, but don’t teach them how to retain it.

it’s not memorization that’s evil, he says; it’s the tradition of boring rote learning that he believes has corrupted Western education.