Gary Wolf Quotes

People can remember their childhood, but events from four or five years ago are in a never-never land.

People are machines of forgetfulness

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.

Short term memory is not good.

We have all forgot more than we remember.

Why do we remember stuff from when we were 5 years old but not important facts that are more recent?

You don't just forget things overnight.

Why is it that we are born remembering, and live forgetting?

Organizing facts in terms of principles and ideas from which they may be inferred is the only known way of reducing the quick rate of loss of human memory.

I would have you imagine, then, that there exists in the mind of man a block of wax... and that we remember and know what is imprinted as long as the image lasts; but when the image is effaced, or cannot be taken, then we forget or do not know.

Human memory is short and terribly fickle.

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.

It alarms me to think of all that I have read and how little of it has stayed with me.

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

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.

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

You don't forget the movies, but you forget the details of them.

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.

A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness.

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.

The process of learning requires not only hearing and applying but also forgetting and then remembering again.

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget.

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?