Monotony Collapses Time. Novelty Unfolds

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.

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.

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.

Experts Step Outside Their Comfort Zone And Study Themselves Failing.

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.