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. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it's about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have became estrangedmemory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.

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.

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.

Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.

Kissing could have begun as a way of sniffing out who's who. From a whiff to a kiss was just a short trip across the face.

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

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.