To Improve, We Must Watch Ourselves Fail,

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.

I Met With Amnesiacs And Savants, Educators And Scientists, To Try To Understand What Memory Is, Why It Works, Why It Sometimes Doesn't, And What Its Potential Might Be.

As Bad As We Are At Remembering Names And Phone Numbers And Word-for-word Instructions From Our Colleagues, We Have Really Exceptional Visual And Spatial Memories.

Growing Up In The Days When You Still Had To Punch Buttons To Make A Telephone Call, I Could Recall The Numbers Of All My Close Friends And Family. Today, I'm Not Sure If I Know More Than Four Phone Numbers By Heart. And That's Probably More Than Most.

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.