Too busy to read?

Memory is not a dutiful scribe that keeps a complete transcript of our experiences, but a sophisticated editor that clips and saves key elements of an experience and then uses these elements to rewrite the story each time we ask to reread it.

we fail to consider how much imagination fills in, but we also fail to consider how much it leaves out.

The principle underlying all memory techniques is that our brains don't remember all types of information equally well. As exceptional as we are at remembering visual imagery (think of the two-picture recognition test), we're terrible at remembering other kinds of information, like lists of words or numbers. The point of memory techniques is to do what the synasthete S did instinctually: to take the kinds of memories our brains aren't good at holding on to and transform them into the kinds of memories our brains were built for.