fiefoe

The un-remembering was the most interesting part of the book:

Indeed, there are only a handful of other individuals in the world in whom both hippocampi and the key adjacent structures have been so precisely notched out of an otherwise intact brain.
A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.
He has no stream of consciousness, just droplets that immediately evaporate.
Our lives are structured by our memories of events.
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it.
Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.
“But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.”
Socrates thought the unexamined life was not worth living. How much more so the unremembered life?

More history:

A trained memory was not just a handy tool, but a fundamental facet of any worldly mind. What’s more, memory training was considered a form of character building, a way of developing the cardinal virtue of prudence and, by extension, ethics.
“...singularly simple-minded to believe that written words can do anything more than remind one of what one already knows.”
It’s no coincidence that the art of memory was supposedly invented by Simonides at exactly the moment when the use of writing was on the rise in ancient Greece.
Since sight-reading scriptio continua was difficult, reciting a text aloud with fluency required a reader to have a degree of familiarity with it.
Bruno imagined a series of concentric wheels, each of which had 150 two-letter pairs around its perimeter, corresponding to all of the combination that could be formed by the thirty letters of the alphabet.
Twain: “If you haven’t ever tried to invent an indoor historical game, don’t.”

"Moonwalking with Einstein" [.]