Brainpickings:

"A powerful and personally developed structuring of information — an active and selective memory — is as necessary for scientists as it is for poets."

Vera John-Steiner

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"It seems to me that good memory — at least for mathematicians and physicists — forms a large part of their talent. And what we call talent or perhaps genius itself depends to a large extent on the ability to use one’s memory properly to find analogies, past, present and future, which [are] essential to the development of new ideas."

Stan Ulam