The true art of memory is the art of attention.

Most of what people call a bad memory is a mild absence at the moment of the event. Nothing was stored because nothing was really received; you were half in the room and half in the next thing. Techniques for recall help at the margins, but they cannot retrieve what was never taken in. The bottleneck sits at the front of the process, not the back.

When you meet someone, stay with their name for a beat instead of moving on. When something matters, stop the second task. If you keep losing your keys, it is worth noticing where your mind was when your hand let go of them.