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If we’re bound to have computers that never forget, why bother having brains that remember?
I used a technique known as the “Major System,” invented in the seventeenth century by Johann Winkelmann, which is nothing more than a simple code to convert numbers into phonetic sounds.
Amateur musicians, for example, are more likely to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros are more likely to work through tedious exercises or focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces. The best ice skaters spend more of their practice time trying jumps that they land less often, while lesser skaters work more on jumps they’ve already mastered.
When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.
Regular practice simply isn’t enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.
Attention, of course, is a prerequisite to remembering.
All serious mnemonists wear earmuffs. A few of the most serious competitors wear blinders to constrict their field of view and shut out peripheral distractions.
“There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.”
What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus,”
“The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.”
If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, t...
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Matthews takes every opportunity to turn facts into images.
There’s a feedback loop between the two. The more tightly any new piece of information can be embedded into the web of information we already know, the more likely it is to be remembered. People who have more associations to hang their memories on are more likely to remember new things, which in turn means they will know more, and be able to learn more. The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.
