When We First Hear [a]

If You Were A Medieval Scholar Reading A Book, You Knew That There Was A Reasonable Likelihood You'd Never See That Particular Text Again, And So A High Premium Was Placed On Remembering What You Read. You Couldn't Just Pull A Book Off The Shelf To Consult It For A Quote Or An Idea.

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.

Woodworking Requires A Completely Different Kind Of Thinking And Problem-solving Ability Than Writing. With Writing, You Take A Set Of Facts And Ideas, And You Reason Your Way Forward To A Story That Pulls Them Together. With Woodworking, You Start With An End Product In Mind, And Reason Your Way Backward To The Raw Wood.

Back When I Lived In Brooklyn, I'd Sometimes Take The Q Train All The Way Out To Coney Island And Back, And Work On My Laptop. There's Something About Pushy New Yorkers Looking Over Your Shoulder That Really Makes You Produce Sentences.

Now More Than Ever, As The Role Of Memory In Our Culture Erodes At A Faster Pace Than Ever Before, We Need To Cultivate Our Ability To Remember. Our Memories Make Us Who We Are. They Are The Seat Of Our Values And Source Of Our Character. Competing To See Who Can Memorize More Pages Of Poetry Might Seem Beside The Point, But It's About Taking A Stand Against Forgetfulness, And Embracing Primal Capacities From Which Too Many Of Us Have Became Estrangedmemory Training Is Not Just For The Sake Of Performing Party Tricks; It's About Nurturing Something Profoundly And Essentially Human.