Cal Newport

You go there to check text messages.

You go there to look things up.

It's not on your person as you do everything else in your house.

And it's a great idea.

It really helps your focus.

Memorizing as a way to get more cognitive fitness is an interesting idea because I talk about it.

In my book, Deep Work, I actually talked about a particular, it's a cool story.

It was a student in Australia who was struggling academically.

He's a university student, struggling academically.

He gets involved in competitive memorizing.

So there's competitions you can go to where you memorize a deck of cards and stuff like this.

It's memory competitions.

The techniques he learned, so he's doing this in his memory competition.

This helps him, right?

This helps his general ability to focus and sustain concentration.

And what happens to his schoolwork?

All of his grades go up.

And when I talked to him, he was on his way to like a prestigious Australian graduate program.

And so I use it as an example of like, hey, you can train your brain to be better at focusing and get all sorts of general benefits.

And memorizing is like the type of thing you can do to in general make your brain stronger, to get more cognitive fitness.