Smarter Than You Think

His answer was the memex, a high-tech desk. “A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory,” he wrote. Seated at their memex, users could peruse thousands of bo

“I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind,” Cecil Day-Lewis wrote of his poetic compositions. “If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. . . . We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”

At their best, today’s digital tools help us see more, retain more, communicate more. At their worst, they leave us prey to the manipulation of the toolmakers.

There are terrible parts of my life I’d rather not have documented (a divorce, the sudden death of my best friend at age forty); or at least, when I recall them, I might prefer my inaccurate but self-serving human memories.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,

When informatics professor Gloria Mark studied office employees for one thousand hours, she found that they could concentrate for only eleven minutes at a time on a project before being interrupted or switching to another task—and once they’d been interrupted, it took an average of twenty-five minutes to return to their original work.

Failed networks kill ideas, but successful ones trigger them.

Games evoke modes of thinking that can be enormously valuable in education. They teach you that complex things are interesting because of their complexity. The trick is to learn how to use them in the right way.

When I turn my audio recorder off during an interview, people become more open and candid, even if they’re still on the record. People want their memories to be cued, not fully replaced; we reserve the existential pleasures of gently rewriting our history.