I met a man in Pakistan a few years ago who recited the Koran professionally. When he decided on this career path -- in his late 30s -- he got busy and learned the whole Koran by heart, all 114 chapters of it, even though he didn't know Arabic and was thus memorizing pure sounds, not words. It took him six months.
Six months! How is that even possible? How can someone memorize more than 300 pages of text in a language they don't know?
Apparently, it's not hard if you live in a culture that values memorization. Apparently, if you do a lot of memorizing when you're young, you can do it when you're older.
Our ancestors all lived in cultures like that. In ancient times, feats of memorization were routine. The "Mahabharata," the world's longest poem -- over 90,000 verses -- was passed down orally for centuries before it was written down. The same goes for the "Iliad," the "Odyssey" and many other epics.
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