Evolution Has Programmed Our Brains To Find

Over The Last Few Millennia We've Invented A Series Of Technologies - From The Alphabet To The Scroll To The Codex, The Printing Press, Photography, The Computer, The Smartphone - That Have Made It Progressively Easier And Easier For Us To Externalize Our Memories, For Us To Essentially Outsource This Fundamental Human Capacity.

One Of The Great Challenges Of Our Age, In Which The Tools Of Our Productivity Are Also The Tools Of Our Leisure, Is To Figure Out How To Make More Useful Those Moments Of Procrastination When We're Idling In Front Of Our Computer Screens.

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.

The Fact That Books Today Are Mostly A String Of Words Makes It Easier To Forget The Text. With The Impact Of The Ipad And The Future Of The Book Being Up For Re-imagination, I Wonder Whether We'll Rediscover The Importance Of Making Texts Richer Visually.