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“So why bother investing in one's memory in the age of externalized memories? The best answer I can give is the one that I received unwittingly from EP, whose memory had been so completely lost that he could not place himself rin time or space, or relative to other people. 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 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 or our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Or ability to find humour in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values ad source of our character. [...] That's what Ed had been trying to impart to me from the beginning: that memory training is not just fro the sake of performing partyb tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.” — Joshua Foer