A hundred years of progressive education reform have discredited memorization as oppressive and stultifying—not only a waste of time, but positively harmful to the developing brain.

We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.

Dewey declared, “I would have a child say not, ‘I know,’ but ‘I have experienced.’”

The chess experiments reveal a telling fact about memory, and about expertise in general: We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.

Episodic memories are located in time and space: They have a where and a when attached to them. Semantic memories are located outside of time and space, as free-floating pieces of knowledge.

Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.

This process of transforming words into images involves a kind of remembering by forgetting: In order to memorize a word by its sound, its meaning has to be completely dismissed.

Everyone has a great memory for something.

The more abstract the word, the less memorable it is. We need to make e-mail concrete somehow.”