Joshua Foer Quotes

Photographic memory is often confused with another bizarre - but real - perceptual phenomenon called eidetic memory, which occurs in between 2 and 15 percent of children and very rarely in adults. An eidetic image is essentially a vivid afterimage that lingers in the mind's eye for up to a few minutes before fading away.

I don't think forgetting is an important feature of human memory. I think it's important to be able to remember things accurately.

I have found that all of my memories seem to need a place and that a good part of what we think of as explicit memory has to do with location.

The hippocampus helps record both types of memories initially, and it helps retain them for the medium term. The hippocampus also helps us access old personal memories in long-term storage in other parts of the brain.

My dad thinks I have a photographic memory.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

I have a great memory.

Computers have wonderful memories. Human memory is more fuzzy.

How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person?

Memory is a big one: our ability to use the memory and move things in and out efficiently - that affected what we were able to do more than anything.

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

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.

People's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive.

Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.

I have a photographic memory.

While the hippocampus itself doesn't store memories, it serves to triage our experiences based upon their survival significance.

My memory is basically visual: that's what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

'Mnemonic' is a play about memory.

We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off.

The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn - words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details - don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for.

I have never been able to remember the number of my driver's license, and there have been times when I couldn't even remember my own telephone number, but when I hear a song, sometimes only once, I never forget the melody or the lyric.