Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Joshua Foer
Age: 42
Born: 1982
Born: September 23
Journalist
Washington
District of Columbia
Culture
Memory
Unconnected
Ideas
Depends
Previously
Find
Humor
Notions
Human
Memories
Depend
Humans
Share
Essentially
Make
Create
Acts
World
Ability
Connections
Common
Notion

More quotes by Joshua Foer

Image
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
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
If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.
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
Monotony collapses time. Novelty unfolds it.
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 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
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
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
Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.
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
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
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
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
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
Part of being creative is not being super-duper focused.
Joshua Foer
Image
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
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
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
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