Negative Lessons

I've been thinking about how I learn and retain information a bit lately. Listening to podcasts with some interesting, smart people who clearly think quite differently from me, I notice that they have a seemingly boundless capacity to recall specific facts in detail—names, places, relations, specific wording. I used to be able to do that, but my abilities have become a lot more limited since childhood. Things just don't stick the way they used to—I take in so much but I'm left more with impressions and feelings, not citeable chapter-and-verse. Something that does reliably fix information in my head is being wrong—not necessarily even publicly, but thinking something is one way and having to correct it always seems to cause that correction to stick. Unfortunately, it's not a particularly scaleable technique.