Joshua Foer Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• Monotony collapses time. Novelty unfolds it.

  Joshua Foer

  Cubicles, Novelty, Monotony

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

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• 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

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• 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

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• One of the great challenges of our age, in which the tools of our productivity are also the tools of our leisure, is to figure out how to make more useful those moments of procrastination when we're idling in front of our computer screens.

  Joshua Foer

  Procrastination, Productive Work, Challenges

  "How I learned a language in 22 hours" by Joshua Foer, www.theguardian.com. November 09, 2012.

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• Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex - and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.

  Joshua Foer

  Sex, Memorable, Two

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.76, Penguin

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• Jonah Lehrer is one of the most talented explainers of science that we’ve got. What a pleasure it is to follow his investigation of creativity and its sources. Imagine is his best book yet.

  Joshua Foer

  Book, Creativity, Imagine

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• It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.

  Joshua Foer

  Writing, Thinking, Essence

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.36, Penguin

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• During the Middle Ages they understood that words accompanied by imagery are much more memorable. By making the margins of a book colorful and beautiful, illuminations help make the text unforgettable. It's unfortunate that we've lost the art of illumination.

  Joshua Foer

  Beautiful, Art, Book

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• 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

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• 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

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• If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.

  Joshua Foer

  Book, Reading, Ideas

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.104, Penguin

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• Experts step outside their comfort zone and study themselves failing.

  Joshua Foer

  Motivational, Comfort, Experts

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• When we first hear [a] word, we start putting these associational hooks into it that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date.

  Joshua Foer

  Hook, Firsts, Easier

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• Kissing could have begun as a way of sniffing out who's who. From a whiff to a kiss was just a short trip across the face.

  Joshua Foer

  Kissing, Way, Faces

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• 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

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• 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

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• Part of being creative is not being super-duper focused.

  Joshua Foer

  Creative, Be Creative, Focused

  "Memorization Tips: 5 Easy Ways To Ace That Test" by Jack Howard, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 21, 2012.

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I'm ashamed to admit that I still can't read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish.

  Joshua Foer

  School, Years, Dozen

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

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• Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like 'knight.'

  Joshua Foer

  Knights, Language, Century

  "Utopian for Beginners" by Joshua Foer, www.newyorker.com. December 24&31, 2012.

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• All across Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, we find cultures that didn't know about mouth kissing until their first contact with European explorers. And the attraction was not always immediately apparent. Most considered the act of exchanging saliva revolting.

  Joshua Foer

  Kissing, Culture, Mouths

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• To attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes. There are 36 grand masters of memory in the world.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, Order, Two

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• Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.

  Joshua Foer

  Book, Essentials, Information

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