Monotony Collapses Time. Novelty Unfolds It.

The Art And Science Of Memory Is About Developing The Capacity To Quickly Create Images That Link Disparate Ideas. Creativity Is The Ability To Form Similar Connections Between Disparate Images And To Create Something New And Hurl It Into The Future So It Becomes A Poem, Or A Building, Or A Dance, Or A Novel. Creativity Is, In A Sense, Future Memory.

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.

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.

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.

Some Memorizers Arbitrarily Associate Each Playing Card With A Familiar Person Or Object, So That The King Of Clubs Is Represented By, Say, Tony Danza. The Grand Masters Associate Each Card With A Person, An Action, Or An Object So That Every Group Of Three Cards Can Be Converted Into A Sentence.