Pete Docter Quotes

I'm always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.

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!

Every time you recall a memory, you're basically making another copy of it and at that same point it is susceptible to new changes and adaptations. So, you know, if you remember from when you were, you know, in second grade and there was Christmas and you got a present from your grandfather and your mom was wearing a red dress, that may or may not all have happened.

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.

How strange are the tricks of memory, which, often hazy as a dream about the most important events of a man's life, religiously preserve the merest trifles.

Recalling a memory is not like playing a tape recorder. It's a creative process.

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.

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.

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.

'Mnemonic' is a play about memory.

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

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

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.

It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.

You can't recover memories of a missing event. That's a fallacy.

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

We know that if memory is destroyed in one part of the brain, it can be sometimes re-created on a different part of the brain. And once we can unravel that amino chain of chemicals that is responsible for memory, I see no reason why we can't unlock it and, essentially, wipe out what's there.

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.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

It's not completely inconceivable that someday you'll be able to download your own memories.

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

Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

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.

As soon as anything is processed by memory, it’s fiction.