As Bad As We Are At Remembering

Life Seems To Speed Up As We Get Older Because Life Gets Less Memorable As We Get Older.

Truman Capote Famously Claimed To Have Nearly Absolute Recall Of Dialogue And Used His Prodigious Memory As An Excuse Never To Take Notes Or Use A Tape Recorder, But I Suspect His Memory Claims Were Just A Useful Cover To Invent Dialogue Whole Cloth.

If You Want To Live A Memorable Life, You Have To Be The Kind Of Person Who Remembers To Remember.

If You Were A Medieval Scholar Reading A Book, You Knew That There Was A Reasonable Likelihood You'd Never See That Particular Text Again, And So A High Premium Was Placed On Remembering What You Read. You Couldn't Just Pull A Book Off The Shelf To Consult It For A Quote Or An Idea.

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.