To Improve, We Must Watch Ourselves Fail,

The Best Memorizers In The World - Who Almost All Hail From Europe - Can Memorize A Pack Of Cards In Less Than A Minute. A Few Have Begun To Approach The 30-second Mark, Considered The 'four-minute Mile Of Memory.'

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.

Back When I Lived In Brooklyn, I'd Sometimes Take The Q Train All The Way Out To Coney Island And Back, And Work On My Laptop. There's Something About Pushy New Yorkers Looking Over Your Shoulder That Really Makes You Produce Sentences.

Invented Languages Have Often Been Created In Tandem With Entire Invented Universes, And Most Conlangers Come To Their Craft By Way Of Fantasy And Science Fiction.

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.