CHRISTOPHER LANE/CON TOUR
B Y GE T T Y IMAGES
of recall for the kinds of struc-
tured information that could be
crammed into a memory pal-
ace, most of the things I wanted
to remember in my everyday
life were not facts or ;gures or
poems or playing cards or binary
digits. Yes, I could memorize
the names of a couple dozen
people at a cocktail party, and
that was surely useful. And you
could give me a family tree of
English monarchs, or the terms
of the American secretaries
of the interior, or the dates of
every major battle in World
War II, and I could learn that
information relatively quickly,
and even hold on to it awhile.
;ese skills would have been a
godsend in high school. But life,
for better or worse, only
occasionally resembles
high school.
