Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Attention, of course, is a prerequisite to remembering.

I felt acutely aware of how odd it was that we’ve come to this: that the only place left where the ancient art of memory is being practiced, or at least celebrated, is in this rarefied competition, and among this quirky subculture.

A valid criticism of these sorts of mnemonics is that they are a form of decontextualized knowledge. They are superficial, the epitome of learning without understanding.

“We could have done this with ten thousand slides, and you would have performed almost equally well. Your memory for images is that good.”

He had taken his past experiences and used them to shape how he perceived the present.

Schools have deemphasized raw knowledge (most of which gets forgotten anyway), and instead stressed their role in fostering reasoning ability, creativity, and independent thinking.

Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria and Cicero’s De Oratore

when it comes to chunking—and to our memory more broadly—what we already know determines what we’re able to learn.

the goal of education is not merely to cram a bunch of facts into students’ heads; it’s to lead them to understand those facts.

“They will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.