Quote

Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.

Joshua Foer

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Joshua Foer
Age: 42
Born: 1982
Born: September 23
Journalist
Washington
District of Columbia
Memories
Culture
Externalized
Edifice
Built

More quotes by Joshua Foer

Image
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
Image
Growing up in the days when you still had to punch buttons to make a telephone call, I could recall the numbers of all my close friends and family. Today, I'm not sure if I know more than four phone numbers by heart. And that's probably more than most.
Joshua Foer
Image
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.
Joshua Foer
Image
If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.
Joshua Foer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by … not paying attention?
Joshua Foer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Over the last few millennia we've invented a series of technologies - from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone - that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.
Joshua Foer
Image
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
Image
Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory.
Joshua Foer
Image
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.
Joshua Foer
Image
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
Image
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.
Joshua Foer
Image
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.
Joshua Foer
Image
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