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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

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Joshua Foer
Age: 42
Born: 1982
Born: September 23
Journalist
Washington
District of Columbia
Way
Looking
Shoulder
Makes
Island
Back
Islands
Coney
Take
Shoulders
Pushy
Sometimes
Sentences
Yorkers
Work
Train
Laptop
Something
Lived
Laptops
Really
Produce
Brooklyn

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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.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by … not paying attention?
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If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.
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Part of being creative is not being super-duper focused.
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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.
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Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.
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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.
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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.
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