Best Joshua Foer Quotes
- 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,… Accompanied
- Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex - and especially, it seems, jokes about sex. Brain
- 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… All
- 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… All
- 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… Book
- 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… Devices
- 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… Across
- Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human. Essentially
- 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… Alien
- Part of being creative is not being super-duper focused. Creative
- Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a… Absolutely
- 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… Across
- 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… Amnesiacs
- If you want to make information stick, it's best to learn it, go away from it for a while, come back to it later, leave… Across
- 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… Centuries
- Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you… Blend
- 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… Actually Wanted
- 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… Conjure
- 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… Big
- 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,… Alphabet
- To attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits… Able
- 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… Absolute
- 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… Ability
- 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… Bigger
- 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… Borges