Joshua Foer Quotes About Memories

Quotes about: Memories

• Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by … not paying attention?

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Motivation, Short Life

  "Feats of memory anyone can do". TED Talk, www.ted.com. February 2012.

• Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Ideas, World

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.188, Penguin

• Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Information, Bigger

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.147, Penguin

• Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Party, Training

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.188, Penguin

• To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Mean, Knowing

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.15, Penguin

• We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.

  Joshua Foer

  Art, Memories, Habit

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.188, Penguin

• 'Moonwalking with Einstein' refers to a memory device I used when I memorized a deck of playing cards at the U.S. Memory Championship. When I competed in 2006, I set a new U.S. record by memorizing a deck of cards in one minute and 40 seconds. That record has since fallen.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Cards, Records

• The best memorizers in the world - who almost all hail from Europe - can memorize a pack of cards in less than a minute. A few have begun to approach the 30-second mark, considered the 'four-minute mile of memory.'

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Europe, Cards

• Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Culture, Edifice

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.23, Penguin

• We've outsourced our memories to digital devices, and the result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small forgotten thing as evidence that they're failing us.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Forgotten Things, Digital

• Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Motivation, Inspiration

• Truman Capote famously claimed to have nearly absolute recall of dialogue and used his prodigious memory as an excuse never to take notes or use a tape recorder, but I suspect his memory claims were just a useful cover to invent dialogue whole cloth.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Tape, Use

• The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory.

  Joshua Foer

  Art, Memories, Creativity

• With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of always present, ever searchable, unforgetting external memories that only grows as one ages.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Mean, Creating

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.112, Penguin

• I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Trying, Might

• What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I learned, is the ability to create lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly. Many competitive mnemonists argue that their skills are less a feat of memory than of creativity.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Creativity, Skills

• Many memory techniques involve creating unforgettable imagery, in your minds eye. Thats an act of imagination. Creating really weird imagery really quickly was the most fun part of my training to compete in the U.S. Memory Competition.

  Joshua Foer

  Fun, Memories, Eye

• If you want to make information stick, it's best to learn it, go away from it for a while, come back to it later, leave it behind again, and once again return to it - to engage with it deeply across time. Our memories naturally degrade, but each time you return to a memory, you reactivate its neural network and help to lock it in.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Going Away, Locks

  "How I learned a language in 22 hours" by Joshua Foer, www.theguardian.com. November 9, 2012.

• Once I'd reached the point where I could squirrel away more than 30 digits a minute in memory palaces, I still only sporadically used the techniques to memorize the phone numbers of people I actually wanted to call. I found it was just too simple to punch them into my cell phone.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Simple, Squirrels

• One trick, known as the journey method or 'memory palace,' is to conjure up a familiar space in the mind's eye, and then populate it with images of whatever it is you want to remember.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Eye, Journey

• Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before the big Paris vacation. I was doing Y in the first summer after I learned to drive. Z happened the weekend after I landed my first job. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events.

  Joshua Foer

  Summer, Jobs, Memories

• Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it's about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have became estrangedmemory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Party, Character

• Over the last few millennia we've invented a series of technologies - from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone - that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.

  Joshua Foer

  Photography, Memories, Technology

• As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Motivation, Inspiration

  "Can Anyone Learn To Be A Master Memorizer?". "TED Radio Hour" with Guy Raz, www.npr.org. May 24, 2013.

• Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Facts, Life Experience

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.61, Penguin

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