Part Of Being Creative Is Not Being

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.

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.

We've Outsourced Our Memories To Digital Devices, And The Result Is That We No Longer Trust Our Memories. We See Every Small Forgotten Thing As Evidence That They're Failing Us.

Monotony Collapses Time. Novelty Unfolds It.

It Is Forgetting, Not Remembering, That Is The Essence Of What Makes Us Human. To Make Sense Of The World, We Must Filter It. "to Think," Borges Writes, "is To Forget.