Sublime

through at least the late Middle Ages, books were thought of not merely as replacements for memory, but also as memory aids.

human-scale

That has always been the rap against memory techniques: They’re impressive but ultimately useless.

Questlove is a polymath—an

the World Memory Championship is less a test of memory than of creativity.

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.”

our ability to process information and make decisions in the world is limited by a fundamental constraint: We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.