Our Culture Is An Edifice Built Of

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

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.

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.

Since At Least The Middle Ages, Philosophers And Philologists Have Dreamed Of Curing Natural Languages Of Their Flaws By Constructing Entirely New Idioms According To Orderly, Logical Principles.

'moonwalking With Einstein' Refers To A Memory Device I Used When I Memorized A Deck Of Playing Cards At The U.s. Memory Championship. When I Competed In 2006, I Set A New U.s. Record By Memorizing A Deck Of Cards In One Minute And 40 Seconds. That Record Has Since Fallen.