Matthew Walker Quotes

Rather than studying the most complex form of memory in a very complicated animal, we had to take the most simple form - an implicit form of memory - in a very simple animal. So I began to look around for very simple animals. And I focused in on the marine snail Aplysia.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

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

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.

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.

When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.

I do this thing at every party: I go to a party, I stand around for, like, 45 minutes, and then I turn to my wife and say, 'I think we should go home.' And then we leave, and then I wake up the next morning and say to my wife, 'We don't go out anymore.' It's a great trick.

I've always been fascinated by memory and dreams because they are both completely our own. No one else has the same memories. No one has the same dreams.

My brain is like a hard drive. Once you start adding new information, you start cutting off old information.

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.

If it's hard to remember, it'll be difficult to forget.

At the end of the day, I sit down for about five minutes and review all the problems I'm working on, research problems or writing problems, and I go to sleep. Then when I wake up in the morning, I've trained myself to not open my eyes and to just lie there and recall the problems and see if there's anything there.

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

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.

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

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.

You know what it's like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know that if you don't have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning. Sometimes it's important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it.

It is very wrong to sleep in your make-up, but when you wake up the next morning, I think it looks very good.

I have a great memory.

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.

I think that I cannot immediately see the route by which we should really understand memory and the workings of the brain.

Without a functioning hippocampus, names, dates, and other information falls straight through the mind like a sieve.

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.

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?