Monotony collapses time. Novelty unfolds it.

Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by … not paying attention?

Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex - and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear.

The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.

To attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes. There are 36 grand masters of memory in the world.

...who we are and what we do it is fundamentally a function of what we remember.