Joshua Foer Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.

  Joshua Foer

  Important, Want, Amount

  Joshua Foer (2011). “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything”, p.198, Penguin UK

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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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• 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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• 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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• Someday in the distant cyborg future, when our internal and external memories fully merge, we may come to possess infinite knowledge. But that's not the same thing as wisdom.

  Joshua Foer

  Memories, May, Infinite

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• 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

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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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• Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.

  Joshua Foer

  Age, Principles, Philosopher

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

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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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• Invented languages have often been created in tandem with entire invented universes, and most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction.

  Joshua Foer

  Crafts, Way, Fiction

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

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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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• Back when I lived in Brooklyn, I'd sometimes take the Q train all the way out to Coney Island and back, and work on my laptop. There's something about pushy New Yorkers looking over your shoulder that really makes you produce sentences.

  Joshua Foer

  Islands, Brooklyn, Back When

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• The fact that books today are mostly a string of words makes it easier to forget the text. With the impact of the iPad and the future of the book being up for re-imagination, I wonder whether we'll rediscover the importance of making texts richer visually.

  Joshua Foer

  Book, Ipads, Impact

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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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• Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say, Tony Danza. The grand masters associate each card with a person, an action, or an object so that every group of three cards can be converted into a sentence.

  Joshua Foer

  Kings, Groups, Three

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