Joshua Foer Quotes

If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.

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

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.

What makes things memorable is that they are meaningful, significant, colorful.

The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.

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.

...who we are and what we do it is fundamentally a function of what we remember.

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.

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.

Monotony collapses time. Novelty unfolds it.

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.

The way to get better at a skill is to force yourself to practice just beyond your limits.

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

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.

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.

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.

A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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

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

Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.

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.

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.

Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.

Experts step outside their comfort zone and study themselves failing.

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.

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.

To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.

No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can't explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they're happening.

What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence?

learning texts is worth doing not because it's easy but because it's hard.