When You Want To Get Good At

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.

Our Ability To Find Humor In The World, To Make Connections Between Previously Unconnected Notions, To Create New Ideas, To Share In A Common Culture: All These Essentially Human Acts Depend On Memory.

To Attain The Rank Of Grand Master Of Memory, You Must Be Able To Perform Three Seemingly Superhuman Feats. You Have To Memorize 1,000 Digits In Under An Hour, The Precise Order Of 10 Shuffled Decks Of Playing Cards In The Same Amount Of Time, And One Shuffled Deck In Less Than Two Minutes. There Are 36 Grand Masters Of Memory In The World.

When We First Hear [a] Word, We Start Putting These Associational Hooks Into It That Make It Easier To Fish It Back Out At Some Later Date.

Now More Than Ever, As The Role Of Memory In Our Culture Erodes At A Faster Pace Than Ever Before, We Need To Cultivate Our Ability To Remember. Our Memories Make Us Who We Are. They Are The Seat Of Our Values And Source Of Our Character. Competing To See Who Can Memorize More Pages Of Poetry Might Seem Beside The Point, But It's About Taking A Stand Against Forgetfulness, And Embracing Primal Capacities From Which Too Many Of Us Have Became Estrangedmemory Training Is Not Just For The Sake Of Performing Party Tricks; It's About Nurturing Something Profoundly And Essentially Human.