Joshua Foer

Jonah Lehrer is one of the most talented explainers of science that we’ve got. What a pleasure it is to follow his…

— Joshua Foer

“I don’t think I’m an exceptionally bad reader. I suspect that many people, maybe even most, are like me. We read and…

— Joshua Foer

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

— Joshua Foer

“We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.”

— Joshua Foer

With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of…

— Joshua Foer

How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not…

— Joshua Foer

“I Came away from the U.S. Memory Championship eager to find out how Ed and Lukas did it. Were these just extraordinary…

— Joshua Foer

The 'OK Plateau' is that place we all get to where we just stop getting better at something. Take typing, for example.…

— Joshua Foer

“One book, printed in the Heart’s own wax / Is worth a thousand in the stacks.”

— Joshua Foer

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks,…

— Joshua Foer

Invented languages have often been created in tandem with entire invented universes, and most conlangers come to their craft by way of…

— Joshua Foer

“Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human.”

— Joshua Foer

Someday in the distant cyborg future, when our internal and external memories fully merge, we may come to possess infinite knowledge. But…

— Joshua Foer

What makes things memorable is that they are meaningful, significant, colorful.

— Joshua Foer

“As the historian Jocelyn Penny Small pointed out, GODISNOWHERE comes out a lot differently when rendered as GOD IS NOW HERE versus…

— Joshua Foer

Photographic memory is often confused with another bizarre - but real - perceptual phenomenon called eidetic memory, which occurs in between 2…

— Joshua Foer

Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem…

— Joshua Foer

There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter,…

— Joshua Foer

“We all have remarkable capacities asleep inside of us. If only we bothered ourselves to awaken them.”

— Joshua Foer

We reserve the term 'genius' for people who are creative, who are innovators, who think in ways that are entirely new. In…

— Joshua Foer

The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the…

— Joshua Foer

All across Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, we find cultures that didn't know about mouth kissing until their first contact with…

— Joshua Foer

What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I learned, is the ability to create lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind…

— Joshua Foer

“How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember...No lasting joke, invention,…

— Joshua Foer

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

— Joshua Foer