Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Oral poetry was not simply a way of telling lovely or important stories, or of flexing the imagination. It was, argues the classicist Eric Havelock, “a massive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history, and technology which the effective citizen was required to learn as the core of his educational equipment

eventually it was no longer all that important to remember what the printed page could remember for you.

“Now, it’s very important to try to remember this image multisensorily.” The more associative hooks a new piece of information has, the more securely it gets embedded into the network of things you already know, and the more likely it is to remain in memory.

experts process the enormous amounts of information flowing through their senses in more sophisticated ways.

The Slavic bards weren’t being overconfident; they simply had no concept of verbatim recall.

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.

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

Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember.

“Funes the Memorious,”