When information goes ‘in one ear and out the other,’ it’s often because it doesn’t have anything to stick to.

— Joshua Foer

How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. . . . Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: all these essentially human acts depend on memory. 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. Our memories make us who we are.

— Joshua Foer

• in service of the moment

• “Masters showed a remarkable ability to reconstruct a chess position almost perfectly after viewing it for only five seconds. There was a sharp drop-off in this ability for players below the master level. This result could not be attributed to the masters’ generally superior memory ability, for when chess positions were constructed by placing the same number of pieces randomly on the board, the masters could then do no better in reconstructing them than weaker players. Hence, the masters appear to be constrained by the same severe short-term memory limits as everyone else, and their superior performance with meaningful positions must lie in their ability to perceive structure in such positions and encode them in chunks.”

Lookup

• Memory Palace