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.

Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.

Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before the big Paris vacation. I was doing Y in the first summer after I learned to drive. Z happened the weekend after I landed my first job. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events.

When we first hear [a] word, we start putting these associational hooks into it that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date.

To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.

I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.

When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.