Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

it is not true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing.

even if facts don’t by themselves lead to understanding, you can’t have understanding without facts.

They concluded that the ancillary benefits of “mental discipline” were “mythological” and that general skills, like memorization, were not nearly as transferable as had once been thought. “Pedagogues quickly realized that Thorndike’s experiments had undermined the rationale for the traditional curriculum,” writes the historian of education Diane Ra

The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized.

life, for better or worse, only occasionally resembles high school.

It is hard not to feel as though a tremendous devolution has taken place between that Golden Age and our own comparatively leaden one. People used to labor to furnish their minds. They invested in the acquisition of memories the same way we invest in the acquisition of things. But today, beyond the Oxford examination hall’s oaken doors, the vast ma

Oral poetry was not simply a way of telling lovely or important stories, or of flexing the imagination. It was, argues the classicist Eric Havelock, “a massive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history, and technology which the effective citizen was required to learn as the core of his educational equipment

What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I was learning, is the ability to create these sorts of lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any that has been seen before that it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly.

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