percentage?"

* * * * *

The look he gave me was puzzled but completely tolerant. "You raved to
me about my last play, yet you don't see what I'm getting at?" He
stopped pacing and sat opposite me with his muscular hands knotted into
fists on my desk.

"George," he said with quiet intentness, "I will be the first man since
creation to have the full potential of his brain at his creative
disposal."

"How do you figure that?"

"The brain has three principal functions. It can store information for
recall, it can analyze and correlate this information and finally it can
synthesize creatively. Now the latter two functions are inherently
dependent upon the quality of the first, or memory recall. As a truly
thinking animal, man considers he has reached some acme of perfection
because his brain is so superior to the lower animals. Actually, the
real gulf is between what man _has achieved_ and what he _can achieve_
with his brain.

"The key lies in perfecting his recall. What good does it do to keep
pouring in information when most of us are forgetting old things almost
as rapidly as we are learning new ones? Of course, we don't really ever
forget anything, but our power of exact recall grows fuzzy through
disuse. Then when we need a certain name or factual bit of information
we can't quite dig it up, or it comes up in distorted approximations.

"The same holds for calling on experience to help us with new problems.
We may grasp the general lesson of experience, but most of the specific
incidents of our lives are dulled in time. The lessons we paid dearly to
learn are largely useless. So we go on making the same mistakes, paying
the same penalties over and over again."

I shrugged. "Everybody would like a better memory, I suppose, but I've
never known anyone to go off the deep end over it like you have. What
more can you gain?"

"Can't you visualize what it would be like to have even a short
life-time of knowledge and experience laid out in sharp detail of
recall? Think of the new associations of thoughts and concepts that
would be possible! Consider the potential for creating drama, alone!
Every word ever read or spoken, every emotion ever conveyed, every
gesture of anger, love, jealousy, pain, pleasure--all this raw material
glittering brightly, ready to pour out in new conflicts, dramatic
situations, sharp pungent dialogue--"

He made me sense his enthusiasm, but I couldn't quite fe