Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.

Part of being creative is not being super-duper focused.

What makes things memorable is that they are meaningful, significant, colorful.

Experts step outside their comfort zone and study themselves failing.

To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.

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 attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes. There are 36 grand masters of memory in the world.