When You Want To Get Good At

Memory Training Is Not Just For The Sake Of Performing Party Tricks; It's About Nurturing Something Profoundly And Essentially Human.

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.

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.

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.

Sequencing - The Careful Striptease By Which You Reveal Information To The Reader - Matters In An Article, But It Is Absolutely Essential To A Book.