Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I was learning, is the ability to create these sorts of lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any that has been seen before that it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly.

Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.”

memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus,” says Buzan. “The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas.

My experience had validated the old saw that practice makes perfect. But only if it’s the right kind of concentrated, self-conscious, deliberate practice. I’d learned firsthand that with focus, motivation, and, above all, time, the mind can be trained to do extraordinary things. This was a tremendously empowering discovery. It made me ask myself: W

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

Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.

When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.

Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language.

an engineer by nature, which means he sees problems and tries to build solutions.