Welcome to Litsy!

The author tells his journey of being a reporter and becoming the champion of the US memory competition, through a fluke of chance encounters during research for an article. He tells about the techniques he learned from European competitors and how after one year of training, beat the past US champions and other favorites.

Actually, super interesting. I'm trying to remember all the details...

Check Out Lindsay‘s Book Review on this weeks Manuscript Monday. Are you looking to improve your memory?

https://www.bookinterrupted.com/post/manuscript-monday-moonwalking-with-einstein

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.

It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one... That's why it's so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

but there is something to be said for the value of not merely passing through the world, but also making some effort to capture it—if only because in trying to capture it, one gets in the habit of noticing, and appreciating.

Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.

with focus, motivation, and, above all, time, the mind can be trained to do extraordinary things.

It only takes one person to inspire others.

I feel more comfortable being a human than being an angel.

“Division is just the reverse of multiplication. I see the number and I pull it apart in my head. It‘s like leaves falling from a tree.”

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.

“I want thinkers, not just people who can repeat what I tell them,”

—it takes knowledge to gain knowledge—

When information goes “in one ear and out the other,” it‘s often because it doesn‘t have anything to stick to.

Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas?

‘You told me you were stupid, you proved you were stupid, and then you just got a perfect score on a test.‘

And suddenly, I realized the system that I was in did not know what intelligence was, didn‘t know how to identify smart and not smart. They called me the best, when I knew I wasn‘t, and they called him the worst, when he was the best.

Students need to learn how to learn. First you teach them how to learn, then you teach them what to learn.

You make monkeys memorize, whereas education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can‘t have higher-level learning you can‘t analyze—without retrieving information. And you can‘t retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between learning and memorizing is false. You can‘t learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can‘t memorize without learning.

“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.”

‘No pain, no gain,. One has to hurt, to go through a period of stress, a period of self-doubt, a period of confusion. And then out of that mess can flow the richest tapestries.

The barriers we collectively set are as much psychological as innate. Once a benchmark is deemed breakable, it usually doesn‘t take long before someone breaks it.

The secret to improving at a skill is to retain some degree of conscious control over it while practicing—to force oneself to stay out of autopilot.

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.

The less you have to focus on the repetitive tasks of everyday life, the more you can concentrate on the stuff that really matters, the stuff that you haven‘t seen before.

The king of hearts, for me, was Michael Jackson moonwalking with a white glove.

Did I understand, at the time, how weird I was becoming?

If we‘re bound to have computers that never forget, why bother having brains that remember?

he is trying to fix an elemental human problem: that we forget our lives almost as fast as we live them.

“Each day that passes I forget more and remember less,”

Even in the most highly specialized fields, it can be a Sisyphean task to try to stay on top of the ever-growing mountain of words loosed upon the world each day.

Once upon a time, there was nothing to do with thoughts except remember them.

How did memory, once so essential, end up so marginalized? Why did these techniques disappear? How, I wondered, did our culture end up forgetting how to remember?

People used to labor to furnish their minds. They invested in the acquisition of memories the same way we invest in the acquisition of things. But today, beyond the Oxford examination hall‘s oaken doors, the vast majority of us don‘t trust our memories. We find shortcuts to avoid relying on them. We complain about them endlessly, and see even their smallest lapses as evidence that they‘re starting to fail us entirely.

In a culture dependent on memory, it‘s critical, in the words of Walter Ong, that people “think memorable thoughts.”

One might say that the whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the glob of neurons that interprets it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what will happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way.

“I consider the law to be a zero-sum game, and therefore a pointless use of a life,”

“I believe that they who wish to do easy things without trouble and toil must previously have been trained in more difficult things,”

The ancient and medieval way of reading was totally different from how we read today. One didn‘t just memorize texts; one ruminated on them—chewed them up and regurgitated them like cud—and in the process, became intimate with them in a way that made them one‘s own.

I imagine the horror that would descend upon him, the momentary clarity, the gaping emptiness that would open up in front of him, and close just as quickly. And then the passing car or the singing bird that would snap him back into his oblivious bubble. But of course I don‘t do it.

The impulse strikes me to help him escape, at least for a second. I want to take him by the arm and shake him. “You have a rare and debilitating memory disorder,” I want to tell him. “The last fifty years have been lost to you. In less than a minute, you‘re going to forget that this conversation ever even happened.”

Socrates thought the unexamined life was not worth living.

Like the proverbial tree that falls without anyone hearing it, can an experience that isn‘t remembered be meaningfully said to have happened at all?

“If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human,”

Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.

Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

“Quite the opposite. The more we pack our lives with memories, the slower time seems to fly.”

Without time, there would be no need for a memory. But without a memory, would there be such a thing as time?