The Way To Get Better

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.

To Attain The Rank Of Grand Master Of Memory, You Must Be Able To Perform Three Seemingly Superhuman Feats. You Have To Memorize 1,000 Digits In Under An Hour, The Precise Order Of 10 Shuffled Decks Of Playing Cards In The Same Amount Of Time, And One Shuffled Deck In Less Than Two Minutes. There Are 36 Grand Masters Of Memory In The World.

I Met With Amnesiacs And Savants, Educators And Scientists, To Try To Understand What Memory Is, Why It Works, Why It Sometimes Doesn't, And What Its Potential Might Be.

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.

Our Culture Is An Edifice Built Of Externalized Memories.