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.

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.

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

If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.

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.

If you want to make information stick, it's best to learn it, go away from it for a while, come back to it later, leave it behind again, and once again return to it - to engage with it deeply across time. Our memories naturally degrade, but each time you return to a memory, you reactivate its neural network and help to lock it in.

Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.