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.

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.

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.

With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of always present, ever searchable, unforgetting external memories that only grows as one ages.

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.

Jonah Lehrer is one of the most talented explainers of science that we’ve got. What a pleasure it is to follow his investigation of creativity and its sources. Imagine is his best book yet.

One trick, known as the journey method or 'memory palace,' is to conjure up a familiar space in the mind's eye, and then populate it with images of whatever it is you want to remember.