• Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories.

• Motor skill learning takes place largely in the cerebellum, perceptual learning in the neocortex, habit learning in the basal ganglia.

• But in the process, we also transform the memory, and reshape it—sometimes to the point that our memories of events bear only a passing resemblance to what actually happened.

• Sigmund Freud first noted the curious fact that older memories are often remembered as if captured by a third person holding a camera, whereas more recent events tend to be remembered in the first person, as if through one’s own eyes.

• “I believe that they who wish to do easy things without trouble and toil must previously have been trained in more difficult things,” he writes.

• Rod made a small fortune in the 1990s designing computer software, and retired at an early age to a life of leisure and eccentric pursuits. He is a practicing apiarist and gardener and would like to take the Mill Farm off the electrical grid by exercising his ancient water rights and installing a hydroelectric generator in the creek that runs by the house. Teen teaches developmentally disabled kids at a local school and is an avid reader and tennis player. She is mostly tolerant of Ed’s eccentricities, but also cautiously hopeful that Ed might someday direct his considerable talents in a more focused, and perhaps even socially useful, direction.

• It noted that his “unique abilities” include lucid dreaming and tantric sex.

• His plans for after the championship: “Revolutionizing Western Education.”

• Cicero agreed that the best way to memorize a speech is point by point, not word by word, by employing memoria rerum. In his De Oratore, he suggests that an orator delivering a speech should make one image for each major topic he wants to cover, and place each of those images at a locus. Indeed, the word “topic” comes from the Greek word topos, or place. (The phrase “in the first place” is a vestige from the art of memory.)

• It makes sense that our brains would work like that. The brain is a costly organ. Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body’s mass, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and it’s where a quarter of all our glucose gets burned. The brain is the most energetically expensive piece of equipment in our body, and has been ruthlessly honed by natural selection to be efficient at the tasks for which it evolved.

• was that in domain after domain, he’d found a common set of techniques that the most accomplished individuals tend to employ in the process of becoming an expert—general principles of expertise acquisition.

• What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice.”

• Amateur musicians, for example, are more likely to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros are more likely to work through tedious exercises or focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces. The best ice skaters spend more of their practice time trying jumps that they land less often, while lesser skaters work more on jumps they’ve already mastered. Deliberate practice, by its nature, must be hard.

• Regular practice simply isn’t enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.

• The best way to get out of the autonomous stage and off the OK plateau, Ericsson has found, is to actually practice failing.

• What’s changed is the amount and quality of training that athletes must endure to achieve world-class status. The same is true not just of running and swimming, but of javelin throwing, ice skating, and every other athletic pursuit. There is not a single sport in which records don’t regularly fall. If there are plateaus out there, collectively we have not reached them yet.

• Although it sounds silly to say ‘No pain, no gain,’ it’s true. One has to hurt, to go through a period of stress, a period of self-doubt, a period of confusion. And then out of that mess can flow the richest tapestries.”

• “You work now so you can rest later,” he told the student. “You carry your books now so someone else can carry your books later.”

• “Students need to learn how to learn. First you teach them how to learn, then you teach them what to learn.

• What’s more, he seems to cultivate the sense of aloofness and inaccessibility that are a prerequisite for any self-respecting guru.

• Everything about Buzan gives the strong impression of someone wanting to make a strong impression. He never swallows a syllable or slouches. His fingernails are as well cared for as the leather of his Italian shoes. There is always a pocket handkerchief tucked neatly in his breast pocket. He signs his letters “Floreant Dendritae!”—“May Your Brain Cells Flourish!”—and ends his phone messages “Tony Buzan, over and out!”

• He estimates that over his entire career the gross sales of all Buzan products, including books, tapes, television programs, training courses, brain games, and lectures, exceeds $300 million.

• My own impression of Mind Mapping, having tried the technique to outline a few parts of this book, is that much of its usefulness comes from the mindfulness necessary to create the map. Unlike standard note-taking, you can’t Mind Map on autopilot.

• My experience had validated the old saw that practice makes perfect. But only if it’s the right kind of concentrated, self-conscious, deliberate practice. I’d learned firsthand that with focus, motivation, and, above all, time, the mind can be trained to do extraordinary things. This was a tremendously empowering discovery.

• That is: How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory.