Our Culture Is An Edifice Built Of

...who We Are And What We Do It Is Fundamentally A Function Of What We Remember.

Our Lives Are Structured By Our Memories Of Events. Event X Happened Just Before The Big Paris Vacation. I Was Doing Y In The First Summer After I Learned To Drive. Z Happened The Weekend After I Landed My First Job. We Remember Events By Positioning Them In Time Relative To Other Events.

With Our Blogs And Tweets, Digital Cameras, And Unlimited-gigabyte E-mail Archives, Participation In The Online Culture Now Means Creating A Trail Of Always Present, Ever Searchable, Unforgetting External Memories That Only Grows As One Ages.

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.

Now More Than Ever, As The Role Of Memory In Our Culture Erodes At A Faster Pace Than Ever Before, We Need To Cultivate Our Ability To Remember. Our Memories Make Us Who We Are. They Are The Seat Of Our Values And Source Of Our Character. Competing To See Who Can Memorize More Pages Of Poetry Might Seem Beside The Point, But It's About Taking A Stand Against Forgetfulness, And Embracing Primal Capacities From Which Too Many Of Us Have Became Estrangedmemory Training Is Not Just For The Sake Of Performing Party Tricks; It's About Nurturing Something Profoundly And Essentially Human.