I couldn't find a source that he said that. Wikipedia says it's not sourced, just a variant of:

> [I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.

I haven't got the book yet but I'm planning to get it soon. As written in Q&A - The techniques I learned, and used in the memory contest, are great for remembering structured information - this might be great for learning languages. I remember grabbing a lot of new vocabulary by studying by heart lyrics of songs, quotes, jokes or whole sequences of dialogs from movies.

Just a head's up, this books reads more like a novel than a How-To. There are other books that are better for actually learning the memory techniques discussed in _Moonwalking_.

I don't mean to imply that _Moonwalking_ isn't worth buying; I think it's a really good book and was a very fun read, but at the same time, it was FAR less instructional than I had expected (though I did learn while reading it).

For a basic primer, I'd recommend this to get started with the memory palace technique: http://www.wikihow.com/Build-a-Memory-Palace

And for a much more comprehensive instruction, Higbee's "Your Memory and How to Train It" was the most referred to me: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001Y35JI0/ref=docs-os-doi_...

This is presumably based on the theory that your mind has a certain amount of "free space" and that you don't want to fill that space up with a bunch of trivia. Anyone know whether cognitive science supports this theory? Bonus points for references.

I generally agree with this, but there are some things that are useful to have in your local cache for easy lookup.

unless you lose your internet connection...