Dr. Joseph Mayer Rice toured public schools in thirty-six cities, he came away appalled at what he saw, calling one New York City school “the most dehumanizing institution that I have ever laid eyes upon, each child being treated as if he possessed a memory and the faculty of speech, but no individuality, no sensibilities, no soul.”

who we are and what we do is fundamentally a function of what we remember.

“The realization that composing depended on a well-furnished and securely available memory formed the basis of rhetorical education in antiquity,” writes Mary Carruthers.

While the trained mnemonists toiled away in geeky obscurity, Daniel’s medicalized condition had generated enormous popular interest.

“What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly,”

They concluded that the ancillary benefits of “mental discipline” were “mythological” and that general skills, like memorization, were not nearly as transferable as had once been thought. “Pedagogues quickly realized that Thorndike’s experiments had undermined the rationale for the traditional curriculum,” writes the historian of education Diane Ra

followed by a collection of medieval writings on memory by Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor, and Peter of Ravenna.

How strange that during the period when a person is learning more rapidly than at any other point in his life—when one is learning to walk and talk and make sense of the world—so little of that learning is of the kind that is explicitly memorable.

The point of memory techniques is to do what the synasthete S did instinctually: to take the kinds of memories our brains aren’t good at holding on to and transform them into the kinds of memories our brains were built for.