Top 75 Quotes & Sayings by Joshua Foer - Page 2

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Experts step outside their comfort zone and study themselves failing.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Monotony collapses time. Novelty unfolds it.