Memory Training Is Not Just

All Across Africa, The Pacific And The Americas, We Find Cultures That Didn't Know About Mouth Kissing Until Their First Contact With European Explorers. And The Attraction Was Not Always Immediately Apparent. Most Considered The Act Of Exchanging Saliva Revolting.

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.

Languages Are Something Of A Mess. They Evolve Over Centuries Through An Unplanned, Democratic Process That Leaves Them Teeming With Irregularities, Quirks, And Words Like 'knight.'

We're All Just A Bundle Of Habits Shaped By Our Memories. And To The Extent That We Control Our Lives, We Do So By Gradually Altering Those Habits, Which Is To Say The Networks Of Our Memory. No Lasting Joke, Or Invention, Or Insight, Or Work Of Art Was Ever Produced By An External Memory. Not Yet, At Least.

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.