William Safire, proud college dropout, PR flack, Nixon speech writer, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, and fastidious language maven, died Sunday of pancreatic cancer. He was 79.

His obituary from the New York Times, where he worked for decades, follows.

Why post on Safire in a blog on informal learning?

Because Safire was an exemplar for all informal learners. Read on to see why.

William Safire, Political Columnist and Oracle of Language, Dies at 79

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times who also wrote novels, books on politics and a Malaprop’s treasury of articles on language, died at a hospice in Rockville, Md., on Sunday. He was 79.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Martin Tolchin, a friend of the family.

There may be many sides in a genteel debate, but in the Safire world of politics and journalism it was simpler: There was his own unambiguous wit and wisdom on one hand and, on the other, the blubber of fools he called “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”

He was a college dropout and proud of it, a public relations go-getter who set up the famous Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen debate” in Moscow, and a White House wordsmith in the tumultuous era of war in Vietnam, Nixon’s visit to China and the gathering storm of the Watergate scandal, which drove the president from office.

Then, from 1973 to 2005, Mr. Safire wrote his twice-weekly “Essay” for the Op-Ed page of The Times, a forceful conservative voice in the liberal chorus. Unlike most Washington columnists who offer judgments with Olympian detachment, Mr. Safire was a pugnacious contrarian who did much of his own reporting, called people liars in print and laced his opinions with outrageous wordplay.

Critics initially dismissed him as an apologist for the disgraced Nixon coterie. But he won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, and for 32 years tenaciously attacked and defended foreign and domestic policies, and the foibles, of seven administrations. Along the way, he incurred enmity and admiration, and made a lot of powerful people squirm.

Mr. Safire also wrote four novels, including “Full Disclosure” (Doubleday, 1977), a best-seller about succession issues after a president is blinded in an assassination attempt, and nonfiction that included “The New Language of Politics” (Random House, 1968), and “Before the Fall” (Doubleday, 1975), a memoir of his White House years.

And from 1979 until earlier this month, he wrote “On Language,” a New York Times Magazine column that explored written and oral trends, plumbed the origins and meanings of words and phrases, and drew a devoted following, including a stable of correspondents he called his Lexicographic Irregulars.

The columns, many collected in books, made him an unofficial arbiter of usage and one of the most widely read writers on language. It also tapped into the lighter side of the dour-looking Mr. Safire: a Pickwickian quibbler who gleefully pounced on gaffes, inexactitudes, neologisms, misnomers, solecisms and perversely peccant puns, like “the president’s populism” and “the first lady’s momulism,” written during the Carter presidency.

There were columns on blogosphere blargon, tarnation-heck euphemisms, dastardly subjunctives and even Barack and Michelle Obama’s fist bumps. And there were Safire “rules for writers”: Remember to never split an infinitive. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. Avoid clichés like the plague. And don’t overuse exclamation marks!!

Behind the fun, readers said, was a talented linguist with an addiction to alliterative allusions. There was a consensus, too, that his Op-Ed essays, mostly written in Washington and syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, were the work of a sophisticated analyst with voluminous contacts and insights into the way things worked in Washington.

Mr. Safire called himself a pundit — the word, with its implication of self-appointed expertise, might have been coined for him — and his politics “libertarian conservative,” which he defined as individual freedom and minimal government. He denounced the Bush administration’s U.S.A. Patriot Act as an intrusion on civil liberties, for example, but supported the war in Iraq.

He was hardly the image of a button-down Times man: The shoes needed a shine, the gray hair a trim. Back in the days of suits, his jacket was rumpled, the shirt collar open, the tie askew. He was tall but bent — a man walking into the wind. He slouched and banged a keyboard, talked as fast as any newyawka and looked a bit gloomy, like a man with a toothache coming on.

His last Op-Ed column was “Never Retire.” He then became chairman of the Dana Foundation, which supports research in neuroscience, immunology and brain disorders. In 2005, he testified at a Senate hearing in favor of a law to shield reporters from prosecutors’ demands to disclose sources and other information. In 2006, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush. From 1995 to 2004, he was a member of the board that awards the Pulitzer Prizes.

William Safir was born on Dec. 17, 1929, in New York City, the youngest of three sons of Oliver C. and Ida Panish Safir. (The “e” was added to clarify pronunciation.) He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and attended Syracuse University, but quit after his second year in 1949 to take a job with Tex McCrary, a columnist for The New York Herald Tribune who hosted radio and television shows; the young legman interviewed Mae West and other celebrities.

In 1951, Mr. Safire was a correspondent for WNBC-TV in Europe and the Middle East, and jumped into politics in 1952 by organizing an Eisenhower-for-President rally at Madison Square Garden. He was in the Army from 1952 to 1954, and for a time was a reporter for the Armed Forces Network in Europe. In Naples he interviewed both Ingrid Bergman and Lucky Luciano within a few hours of each other.

In 1959, working in public relations, he was in Moscow to promote an American products exhibition and managed to steer Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev into the “kitchen debate” on capitalism versus communism. He took a well-known photograph of the encounter. Nixon was delighted, and hired Mr. Safire for his 1960 campaign for the presidency against John F. Kennedy.

Starting his own public relations firm in 1961, Mr. Safire worked in Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller’s 1964 presidential race and on John V. Lindsay’s 1965 campaign for mayor of New York. Mr. Safire also wrote his first book, “The Relations Explosion” (Macmillan, 1963).

In 1962, he married the former Helene Belmar Julius, a model, pianist and jewelry designer. The couple had two children, Mark and Annabel. His wife and children survive him, as does a granddaughter, Lily Safire.

In 1968, he sold his agency, became a special assistant to President Nixon and joined a White House speechwriting team that included Patrick J. Buchanan and Raymond K. Price Jr. Mr. Safire wrote many of Nixon’s speeches on the economy and Vietnam, and in 1970 coined the “nattering nabobs” and “hysterical hypochondriacs” phrases for Vice President Spiro T. Agnew.

After Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher of The Times, hired Mr. Safire, one critic said it was like setting a hawk loose among doves. As Watergate broke, Mr. Safire supported Nixon, but retreated somewhat after learning that he, like others in the White House, had been secretly taped.

Mr. Safire won his Pulitzer Prize for columns that accused President Jimmy Carter’s budget director, Bert Lance, of shady financial dealings. Mr. Lance resigned, but was acquitted in a trial. He then befriended his accuser.

Years later, Mr. Safire called Hillary Clinton a “congenital liar” in print. Mrs. Clinton said she was offended only for her mother’s sake. But a White House aide said that Bill Clinton, “if he were not the president, would have delivered a more forceful response on the bridge of Mr. Safire’s nose.”

Mr. Safire was delighted, especially with the proper use of the conditional.

I saw this wonderful senior project from Bang-yao Liu, a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, and wanted to share it. The title of the video is “Deadline post it stop motion.”

But of course, this blog is about informal learning, not cool stop-motion animation.

So in keeping with the official theme of this blog, my post instead is about the derivation of the word ‘deadline.’

Wait, you say, what does the word deadline have to do with informal learning? Just this. Deadlines have a marvelous capacity to focus the learner’s mind, as I expect young Bang-yao would admit.

Informal learners could do worse than to give themselves deadlines to finish their readings, learnings, writings.

The word deadline comes from one of the darker chapters of American Civil War history, Camp Sumter, aka Andersonville. Andersonville was a Confederate prisoner of war camp, in Macon County, Georgia, about 150 miles from Savannah.

In time some 45,000 prisoners of war were housed at Andersonville over the course of its 14 months of operation. In August 1864, there were 33,000 POWs in the camp. By December 1864 100 prisoners were dying each day, mainly due to disease and malnutrition. All told nearly 13,000 POWs didn’t survive Andersonville.

The prison was set on 16 acres of land, later expanded to 26 acres. The Confederacy, stretched from war expenses, provided the prisoners no barracks or shelter of any kind from the Georgia weather, although a ‘tent city’ did arise self-provided by the prisoners. Food rations were notably meager.

The camp site was bisected by a slow moving stream called Stockade Creek. It served as both a source of fresh water for the prisoners and sanitation purposes. With so many prisoners the creek and the boggy area around it quickly became a fetid, disease-ridden swamp.

Camp Sumter was surrounded by a 15-foot stockade wall. Guards patrolled the inside of the stockade. Between them and the prisoners was a low wooden fence called the ‘dead-line.’ The name came from the rule that was associated with the fence: if a prisoner so much as put his arm over the dead-line, he could be summarily shot. About 15 men were shot and killed for dead-line infractions.

Andersonville was a horror of the highest order. Its commander, Henry Wirz, was tried and executed after the war. During the trial the prosecution and witnesses described the prison, including the malevolent dead-line and its deadly rule. The newspapers of the day ate it up.

In time, a number of personal accounts of Andersonville emerged, some of them highly dramatized (as if surviving the place needed any embellishment). Few failed to mention the dead-line.

By about 1900 or so the term was in use by printers to describe an area on the margins of paper not meant to be printed upon. By the 1920s or so it began to be used to mean a time limit.

That meaning seems to have found its fit with the word. There’s no good synonymy for deadline. ‘Target’ doesn’t convey the right urgency. ‘Zero hour’ has punch, but not much currency. ‘Crunch time’ implies a band of time rather than a terminal moment.

So thank you, Bang-yao Liu, for your clever project and reminder about the power of deadlines.

Eric Hoffer Kept Learner's Journals During his Whole Life as a Public Intellectual

Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman aphorist, seemed to have sprung up from the bare ground able to write penetrating psychological and sociological commentary.

Hoffer was the author of nine books, most of them critically well-received. His first book, the 1951 classic called The True Believer is probably still in 90 percent of all public libraries in the United States.

And yet, it’s hard to imagine a more unlikely public intellectual.

Hoffer was the only child of German immigrant parents. He never attended college and spent 32 years as a migrant worker and longshoreman. Before that he was an itinerant worker, mostly in California. As a young child he was blind from age five until age 15 following an accident wherein he fell down the stairs in the arms of his mother. She died two years later from the resulting injuries. By 1942 when Hoffer registered for the draft, counting the draft registration there were a grand total of two public records with his name on them; the other was his social security application. When the Army declared him 4-F during WWII, he signed up as a San Francisco longshoreman in 1943. He was 45 years old.

He was entirely self-taught, but he owned few books, and not one radio or TV. All his studies were conducted with public library books. What few possessions he owned he left to Lili Osborne, who said that, on Hoffer’s death from emphysema in 1983, it took her all of two hours to clean out his apartment.

So how to explain the uncluttered Eric Hoffer?

After the veil of his blindness parted when he was 15, Hoffer began reading voraciously to sate “a terrific hunger for the printed word.”

More than just a reader, Hoffer was also a punctilious note taker. He copied onto file cards quotations from the books he was reading. He kept file cabinets full of them. And, most notably, he kept record of his thoughts in learner’s journals or notebooks, which he always kept at hand. From 1949 to 1977 he filled 131 notebooks.

He wrote his first manuscript for the immigrant’s magazine Common Ground in 1938. It was not published, but the editor’s assistant, Margaret Anderson, kept encouraging Hoffer over the course of a decades-long correspondence. The True Believer was dedicated to Anderson.

Hoffer wrote, he said, “in railroad yards while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck,” dockside, on busses, and park benches.

Tom Bethell of the Hoover Institution, where Hoffer’s notebooks are archived, writes: “When not on the waterfront, Hoffer would take a regular three-mile walk in Golden Gate Park toward the Pacific Ocean, working out ideas in his head and writing down the completed thoughts in his notebooks. For perhaps 30 years, Hoffer took the same walk, returning to the center of the city by bus. ‘The words, the ideas, come to me in the park,’ he said in a 1967 interview. ‘I shape them in my head there, and I write them in my notebook. Blind people [his sight had returned in adolescence] write full sentences in their head. Sentences they can see. I still do.’ But 10 years later, when he was approaching 80, he wrote: ‘In the past I could carry a train of thought in my head for days, formulating and revising, without writing down a word until the thinking was done. At present I cannot write without pen in hand. . . . The old must break with the past and learn anew.’”

As a result of Hoffer’s thinking in advance, the journal entries “in his workingman’s hand, are polished, with few erasures or corrections, even when written on a park bench,” writes Bethell.

So now to a few of Hoffer’s aphorisms:

“Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”

“An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.”

“In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

“You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.”

And for all you Freudians out there, Hoffer was distinctly anti-Freud:

“The individual on his own is stable only so long as he is possessed of self-esteem. The maintenance of self-esteem is a continuous task which taxes all of the individual’s powers and inner resources. We have to prove our worth and justify our existence anew each day. When, for whatever reason, self-esteem is unattainable, the autonomous individual becomes a highly explosive entity. He turns away from an unpromising self and plunges into the pursuit of pride — the explosive substitute for self-esteem. All social disturbances and upheavals have their roots in crises of individual self-esteem, and the great endeavor in which the masses most readily unite is basically a search for pride.”

In Newsweek magazine’s recent ‘cover package’ on the new Star Trek movie, one of the writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation named Leonard Mlodinow leads his article titled “Vulcans, Never Ever Smile” with a startling confession.

There he was at a chi-chi Hollywood party filled with actors and models and an attorney whose “outfit would have been a fair trade for my car,” Mlodinow writes.

The attorney and a model… both Trekkies, as it turns out… begin to talk about various Star Trek arcana. For a long time he feels out of his depth as the attorney tries to impress the model with his knowledge of Vulcan ‘history’ when like a shot he realizes the attorney is quoting lines from a script Mlodinow himself had written!

“The situation felt surreal,” Mlodinow writes. “Not just because I’d forgotten my own dialogue—you’d be surprised how easy it is to blank on entire scenes—but that they had remembered it and in such detail.”

Mlodinow, let me be clear, wasn’t just another professional Hollywood scribe. He was, in fact, a physics professor at Caltech when he got the call to join the writing staff at Star Trek: The Next Generation and he came aboard thinking that he was there to inject some real science into the show.

What do you make of someone who can write something so unforgettable that another man commits it to memory while the writer himself can only just recall it?

I chalk it up to the ‘Gilligan’s Island Effect.’

You know what I mean. Along with a whole generation of my peers I can remember both versions of the theme to Gilligan’s Island. But for many years every April I’d have to look up my mother’s birthday to ensure I got a card to her on time. I knew her birthday was in April, I just couldn’t remember the exact date.

That is to say, part of the answer is repetition. Unless Mlodinow is a narcissist, I’d bet that he’s seen the episode in question many fewer times than the attorney. And while I’d certainly heard the Gilligan’s Island them hundreds of times, I had only celebrated 30 of my mother’s birthdays.

But part of it has to do with what learning you take pleasure in. There are adults who can recall sports statistics for the athlete-idols of their youth with perfect clarity decades after they committed them to memory. And yet if asked to memorize something they found joyless… the thread-count of the sheets their spouse preferred, say… they would tell you that they were incapable of keeping numbers in their head.

Human memory is so friable. Unless you work at it by keeping a learner’s journal and frequently reviewing it, or using a repetition spacing software like SuperMemo, it crumbles like dust.

The joke goes, writes Robert Stickgold, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, that everyone knew memory and sleep were related except for the people who studied memory and the people who studied sleep.

Writing in the April 27, 2009 issue of Newsweek,  Stickgold says that the relationship is now very clear, even if we don’t know which way all the causation arrows are pointing. Consider this:

• In tests of the different kinds of memory… procedural, declarative, episodic… ‘sleeping on it’ after first learning the task almost always improves performance.
• Sleep deprivation experiments makes memory acquisition harder. And, the tired brain has a harder time still capturing positive memories than negative ones. That could be why sleep deprivation is so often associated with depression.
• The two memory systems, the hippocampus and the neocortex, seem to interact during sleep. Increasingly it looks like that memory between the two systems is consolidated during sleep.
• Not only memory, but connections between stored memories seem to take place during sleep. Dimitri Mendeleev (see above) fell asleep at his desk and dreamed up the Periodic Table of Elements during his slumber, for instance.

The Mendeleev anecdote has been underscored by modern research. German scientists gave game players a puzzle to solve involving seven calculations. Those that slept between game sessions were three times as likely to discover that the second calculation and the seventh gave the same answer.

Why does all this matter? Stickgold writes that some sleep researchers posit that for every two waking hours we need one hour of sleep to sort through what we’ve learned and experienced. For some people who get less than that it seems to lead to conditions like depression and post traumatic stress disorder.

The third of our life we spend  sleeping is rest for the body, but the brain remains active. “And much of that activity helps the brain to learn, to remember and to make connections,” Stickgold writes.

Not so sure? Then sleep on it and comment below.

An 11-session track at the 5th Annual Games for Health Conference coming up June 11-12 in Boston will feature cognitive and brain fitness topics.

The conference takes place at the Hyatt Harborside Hotel in Boston.

The conference costs $379. Register online here.  Include the code ’sharp09′ and get a 15 percent discount.

Farnsworth invented electronic TV as a 14-year-old plowboy

I twice had the pleasure of meeting the widow of Philo Farnsworth, the man who had envisioned electronic television while plowing an Idaho potato field as a boy of 14. No kidding!

His widow’s name was Elma, but she went by ‘Pem.’ When I met her, circa 1990, Pem had completed the first book-length biography of Philo called Distant Vision.

It’s an interesting read, especially the part about Philo programming his first TV station, W3XPF in Philadelphia. Farnsworth… who received precious little formal education after high school… was racing against the ruthless General David Sarnoff, head of RCA, to prove the concept of television by actually programming a station. Farnsworth had conceived of television as a kind of ultimate educator, a technology custom fit to bless the lives of humanity.

The word ‘television’ was invented well before there were any channels to change and Farnsworth’s philosophical determinism on the topic was common among the television pioneers. Several years before he’d founded RCA and decades before the advent of TV, Sarnoff himself circulated a memo to friends in which he wrote: “I believe that television… is the ultimate and greatest step in mass communications.”

Farnsworth began broadcasting on W3XPF in January 1937 in Philadelphia, about six months after RCA started experimental broadcasting in New York City. RCA’s first TV broadcast had singing acts, a dramatic reading from a Broadway actor, and a performance from three ballet dancers. Farnsworth made an abortive attempt at televising educational lectures before following RCA’s lead into entertainment.

Farnsworth’s electronic television, he found to his dismay, seemed to demand something not only livelier but shallower than education for the masses.

In short order W3XPF was producing a mix of orchestral music and singers, variety and novelty acts like ‘Baby Dolores,’ a 4-year-old singer/dancer. RCA demonstrated electronic television at the 1938 World’s Fair in New York. Then WWII broke out and everyone who was once a television specialist was now a radar specialist, Farnsworth included. Television as the great educator of the people fell through the cracks for decades.

In retrospect it’s easy to understand why television as an educator didn’t fly in the earliest days of the medium. Really gifted lecturers are rare. Compelling educational TV can be made today, but producing it can be expensive and requires technology and pedagogical approaches that were decades away in 1937. And then there’s the issue of exactly what to program. Videotape wasn’t invented until the 1950s. Until then all TV aired live. Even in 1937 a university might offer hundreds of different courses. But which one to televise?

You might also blame anti-intellectualism among the American populace, but I reject that argument. Beginning in the 1830s a broad swath of Americans embraced a rising tide of informal adult education. Lecturers would tour the cities and the backcountry talking about the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, philosophy, religion, languages, the evils of liquor and tobacco, and more.

Mark Twain made a good living as a lecturer before enjoying fame as a writer. And in the century before movies and television, people in smaller burgs especially had few of the outside diversions we enjoy today. Back then, education was entertainment.

Consider the Lincoln-Douglas debates. People would watch the debates for several hours, break for lunch then come back, break for dinner, and then come back again for a third session. If there really ever was such a thing as ‘American Exceptionalism,’ some part of the explanation must be owed to our historical propensity for self-improvement.

Now benefiting from the long tail made possible by digital content and inexpensive storage, Farnsworth’s dream has come true. Only the TV is on your computer or even your phone.

Since March 26, 2009 YouTube has offered a broad aggregation of videos from the nation’s accredited 2-year and 4-year colleges and universities, all free. The project was undertaken by a tribe of volunteer YouTubies.

Philo Farsnworth, self-taught  genius, would have loved it.

[Check this sample clip featuring Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, MD from the University of California San Diego. She lectures on the topic of the apparent relationship between obesity and Alzheimer’s disease. As she takes pains to point out, no causation has yet been proven.]

To Get a Job These Days You Gotta Hustle, A Job Journal Could Help

The April 13, 2009 issue of Fortune magazine highlights successful job seekers in what everyone acknowledges is a tough job market.

Although the reporter, Jia Lynn Yang, never uses these words, the job seekers in Fortune got jobs not because they were the most or best qualified, but because they were, to a person, hustlers.

And in a long list of these job hustlers the first profiled is Rob Sparno, a high-level salesman formerly at Oracle.

When the ax fell, Yang writes, Sparno who is “methodical by nature… made a trip to Staples, where be bought a black hard-cover lined notebook. He vowed to record every day what he did, whom he talked to, how he felt, how many miles he ran. He even wrote down what he ate.”

Ten weeks after leaving Oracle Sparno was employed again, by Salesforce.com. To be fair, Sparno was well-connected, competant and hard working. His job journal, by itself, hardly got him his job.

But who can doubt but that Sparno’s job journal kept his feet to the fire? The daily review of activities and progress almost certainly kept him motivated and helped him measure himself.

Likewise, I’m certain that by the time Salesforce.com hired him, Sparno knew more about himself than he did before.

Journals not only help informal learners, but job seekers.

In the April 6, 2009 issue of Business Week, there’s a small item from the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology. Jackie Andrade at the University of Plymouth played a rambling voice mail to 40 people. Half were given shapes to fill in as they listened.

Result: The doodlers recalled 29 percent more of the message than those who just listened.

Money quote from Bob Lutz, retiring GM-vice chair:  “I can look at old sketches done in meetings 40 years ago and experience sudden recall of the room, the table, the voices.”

The Super Memory Woman, Jill Price, Keeps a Detailed Daily Journal

When I was in college taking a class in ‘new journalism’ one assignment was to write about a personal experience.

What a softball, right?

I wrote about an occurrence my senior year in high school when my honors English teacher threw me out of the class and nearly scotched my high school graduation. [That’s a long story for another time].

To protect her anonymity, in my college writing assignment I changed my teacher’s name to ‘Mrs. Rodgers.’ Now, all these years later, I can’t remember her real name without referring to my high school yearbook.

What a muddle the human memory is. It depends so much on context. It’s easily swayed by suggestion. There are memory overlaps and sudden disappearances. Add to that the puzzle of the strangely precise re-memory that happens when people grow aged.

So imagine the astonishment when university researchers University of California-Irvine came across a woman they called JP who could remember with perfect clarity the exact date of Challenger Disaster. She could easily and accurately recall names and conversations from decades before. She knows when the ‘Who Shot JR?’ episode of Dallas aired and what the weather was like on the day of the finale of MASH aired.

In the journal Neurocase, the researchers described JP’s case and gave it a name; hyperthymestic syndrome, meaning exceptional memory.

The school’s PR office sniffed out a story and with JP’s permission they released her real name to the media… Jill Price. Ms. Price quickly became a cause celebre, making the rounds at Oprah, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal.

There was even an awkward (but ultimately vindicating) moment on 20/20 in 2008 Diane Sawyer asked Ms. Price when Princess Grace died. Price replied, ‘Sept 14, 1982.’ Diane Sawyer said no, the date was Sept 10, 1982. But after 60 uncomfortable seconds, someone chimed in from off-camera that, in fact, Jill Price was correct.

How to explain the seemingly inexplicable disparity between the extraordinary quality of Ms. Price’s memory and my rather mediocre one (and, probably, yours, too)?

Into this conundrum comes Gary Marcus, PhD., a cognitive psychologist at New York University, who writes about his personal experience with Ms. Price in the April 2009 issue of Wired magazine.

For their meeting, Marcus brought with him a stack of questionnaires and very quickly discovered that Ms. Price’s memory is rather solipsistic. She remembers not so much things like how to calculate the volume of a cone or what day John Wilkes Booth was killed or even a great recipe for turtle brownies.

Instead, Ms. Price remembers things that happened to her and things she witnessed on television. He also found something that UC Irvine researchers knew about, but didn’t detail in their paper: Ms. Price keeps a meticulous journal of her life, one that she refers to frequently. That’s a sample page from Ms. Price’s journal above.

Marcus concludes with this:

But even if Price’s memory is just the byproduct of obsession, she’s still amazing. I’ve come to think of her as the Michael Jordan of autobiography. Jordan wasn’t born the greatest basketball player of all time; he became the greatest, combining considerable but not unique innate talent with an incredible amount of hard work shooting free throws and practicing jumpers long after most of his peers were out carousing. Whether intentionally or not, Price has shown the same sort of daily dedication to chronicling her own life.

Want a super memory? Do what what the ‘Michael Jordan’ of memory does. Keep a journal and refer to it often.