Top 95 Joshua Foer Quotes
#1. I believe that they who wish to do easy things without trouble and toil must previously have been trained in more difficult things,
Joshua Foer
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.
Joshua Foer
#5. Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before the big Paris vacation. I was doing Y in the first summer after I learned to drive. Z happened the weekend after I landed my first job. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events.
Joshua Foer
#6. Indeed, one would be hard put to say which was more real for him: the world of imagination in which he lived, or the world of reality in which he was but a temporary guest.
Joshua Foer
#7. 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.
Joshua Foer
#8. 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
#9. Each time we think about a memory, we integrate it more deeply into our web of other memories, and therefore make it more stable and less likely to be dislodged.
Joshua Foer
#10. Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. I can spend half a dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about.
Joshua Foer
#11. Experts step outside their comfort zone and study themselves failing.
Joshua Foer
#12. 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
#13. One of the great challenges of our age, in which the tools of our productivity are also the tools of our leisure, is to figure out how to make more useful those moments of procrastination when we're idling in front of our computer screens.
Joshua Foer
#14. 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
#15. Junk food in: junk brain. Healthy food in: healthy brain, he said.
Joshua Foer
#16. 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
#17. 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.
Joshua Foer
#18. There is a short window at the beginning of one's professional life, when it is comparatively easy to take big risks. Make the most of that time, before circumstances make you risk averse.
Joshua Foer
#19. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we're not willing to process deeply?
Joshua Foer
#20. What we call expertise is really just "vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain." In other words, a great memory isn't just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.
Joshua Foer
#21. What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence?
Joshua Foer
#22. The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized.
Joshua Foer
#23. There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe.
Joshua Foer
#24. 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
#25. Who are you going to be more impressed by, the person who has a litany of his own opinions, or the historian who can draw on the great thinkers who came before him?
Joshua Foer
#26. He'd had no intentions of being at the World Memory Championship. Instead, he had devoted the last six months to memorizing the first 50,000 digits of the mathematical constant pi,
Joshua Foer
#27. Part of being creative is not being super-duper focused.
Joshua Foer
#28. Our subjective experience of time is highly variable. We all know that days can pass like weeks and months can feel like years, and that the opposite can be just as true: A month or year can zoom by in what feels like no time at all.
Joshua Foer
#29. 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
#30. A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.
Joshua Foer
#31. Didn't know what was important and what was trivial. They couldn't remember what mattered. Without a conceptual framework in which to embed what they were learning, they were effectively amnesics.
Joshua Foer
#32. 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.
Joshua Foer
#33. mental athletes said they were consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial journeys.
Joshua Foer
#34. The secret to improving at a skill is to retain some degree of conscious control over it while practicing - to force oneself to stay out of autopilot.
Joshua Foer
#35. paradox - it takes knowledge to gain knowledge - is
Joshua Foer
#36. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we've created is a way of fending off mortality.
Joshua Foer
#37. To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.
Joshua Foer
#38. 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.
Joshua Foer
#39. 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
#40. Many memory techniques involve creating unforgettable imagery, in your mind's eye. That's 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.
Joshua Foer
#41. As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the "OK plateau," the point at which you decide you're OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving.
Joshua Foer
#42. Amateur musicians, for example, are more likely to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros are more likely to work through tedious exercises or focus on specific, difficult parts of pieces.
Joshua Foer
#43. What makes things memorable is that they are meaningful, significant, colorful.
Joshua Foer
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Learning texts is worth doing not because it's easy but because it's hard.
Joshua Foer
#47. What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled deliberate practice.
Joshua Foer
#48. I Came away from the U.S. Memory Championship eager to find out how Ed and Lukas did it. Were these just extraordinary individuals, pridigies from the long tail of humanity's bell curve, or was there something we could all learn from their talents?
Joshua Foer
#49. 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
#50. You work now so you can rest later," he told the student. "You carry your books now so someone else can carry your books later.
Joshua Foer
#51. The best memorizers in the world - who almost all hail from Europe - can memorize a pack of cards in less than a minute. A few have begun to approach the 30-second mark, considered the 'four-minute mile of memory.'
Joshua Foer
#52. 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.
Joshua Foer
#53. 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
#54. We don't remember isolated facts; we remember things in context.
Joshua Foer
#55. I wonder if Socrates would have appreciated the flagrant irony: It's only because his pupils Plato and Xenophon put his disdain for the written word into written words that we have any knowledge of it today
Joshua Foer
#56. The sport of competitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where every year somebody comes up with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly, and then the rest of the field has to play catch-up.
Joshua Foer
#57. We're visual creatures. Probably, when we were hunter gatherers ... that was the kind of thing that mattered. And remembering, say, phone numbers was, like, not that important when you're hunting down a mastodon or whatever.
Joshua Foer
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 'Moonwalking with Einstein' refers to a memory device I used when I memorized a deck of playing cards at the U.S. Memory Championship. When I competed in 2006, I set a new U.S. record by memorizing a deck of cards in one minute and 40 seconds. That record has since fallen.
Joshua Foer
#61. 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.
Joshua Foer
#62. Somewhere in your mind there's a trace from everything you've ever seen.
Joshua Foer
#63. 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.'
Joshua Foer
#64. What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice.
Joshua Foer
#65. The way to get better at a skill is to force yourself to practice just beyond your limits.
Joshua Foer
#66. 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.
Joshua Foer
#67. 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.
Joshua Foer
#68. Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.
Joshua Foer
#69. We all have remarkable capacities asleep inside of us. If only we bothered ourselves to awaken them.
Joshua Foer
#70. Sometimes I'd take off my earmuffs and memory goggles and turn around to discover that my father had been standing in the doorway, just watching me.
Joshua Foer
#71. 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.
Joshua Foer
#72. Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.
Joshua Foer
#73. memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus," says Buzan. "The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas.
Joshua Foer
#74. We reserve the term 'genius' for people who are creative, who are innovators, who think in ways that are entirely new. In the Middle Ages, the term 'genius' was reserved for people with the best memories. That is telling.
Joshua Foer
#75. 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
#76. The fact that books today are mostly a string of words makes it easier to forget the text. With the impact of the iPad and the future of the book being up for re-imagination, I wonder whether we'll rediscover the importance of making texts richer visually.
Joshua Foer
#77. I decided to make memorizing a part of my daily routine. Like flossing. Except I was actually going to do it.
Joshua Foer
#78. Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.
Joshua Foer
#79. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.
Joshua Foer
#80. We've forgotten how to remember, and just as importantly, we've forgotten how to pay attention. So, instead of using your smartphone to jot down crucial notes, or Googling an elusive fact, use every opportunity to practice your memory skills. Memory is a muscle, to be exercised and improved.
Joshua Foer
#81. If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.
Joshua Foer
#82. 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
#83. We often talk about people with great memories as though it were some sort of an innate gift, but that is not the case. Great memories are learned. At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention. We remember when we are deeply engaged.
Joshua Foer
#84. Experts see the world differently. They notice things that nonexperts don't see. They home in on the information that matters most, and have an almost automatic sense of what to do with it.
Joshua Foer
#85. Who we are and what we do it is fundamentally a function of what we remember.
Joshua Foer
#86. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.
Joshua Foer
#87. 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
#88. Students need to learn how to learn. First you teach them how to learn, then you teach them what to learn.
Joshua Foer
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.
Joshua Foer
#92. Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.
Joshua Foer
#93. 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
#94. 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.
Joshua Foer
#95. 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
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