Someday in the distant cyborg future, when our internal and external memories fully merge, we may come to possess infinite knowledge. But that's not the same thing as wisdom.

Growing up in the days when you still had to punch buttons to make a telephone call, I could recall the numbers of all my close friends and family. Today, I'm not sure if I know more than four phone numbers by heart. And that's probably more than most.

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

Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.

The best memorizers in the world - who almost all hail from Europe - can memorize a pack of cards in less than a minute. A few have begun to approach the 30-second mark, considered the 'four-minute mile of memory.'

One of the great challenges of our age, in which the tools of our productivity are also the tools of our leisure, is to figure out how to make more useful those moments of procrastination when we're idling in front of our computer screens.

Monotony collapses time. Novelty unfolds it.