We're All Just A Bundle Of Habits

Over The Last Few Millennia We've Invented A Series Of Technologies - From The Alphabet To The Scroll To The Codex, The Printing Press, Photography, The Computer, The Smartphone - That Have Made It Progressively Easier And Easier For Us To Externalize Our Memories, For Us To Essentially Outsource This Fundamental Human Capacity.

Monotony Collapses Time; Novelty Unfolds It. You Can Exercise Daily And Eat Healthily And Live A Long Life, While Experiencing A Short One. If You Spend Your Life Sitting In A Cubicle And Passing Papers, One Day Is Bound To Blend Unmemorably Into The Next - And Disappear.

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.

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.'

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.