William James Quotes

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

Memory depends very much on the perspicuity, regularity, and order of our thoughts. Many complain of the want of memory, when the defect is in the judgment; and others, by grasping at all, retain nothing.

What it turns out is that we think we're multitasking, but we're not. The brain is sequential tasking: we flit from one thought to the next very, very rapidly, giving us the illusion that what we're doing is doing all these things at once.

I think time is elastic. There are moments in my life that are many, many years ago and yet I can conjure them as though it's a second ago. And there are other things that happened maybe last week that seem like ages ago.

all conscious thought is a process in time; so that to think consciously about Time is like trying to use a foot-rule to measure its own length.

The past is never where you think you left it.

As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.

There is so much information that our ability to focus on any piece of it is interrupted by other information, so that we bathe in information but hardly absorb or analyse it. Data are interrupted by other data before we've thought about the first round, and contemplating three streams of data at once may be a way to think about none of them.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

We think we’re in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.

There’s no denying the benefits of the Internet. But electronic immersion, without a force to balance it, creates the hole in the boat — draining our ability to pay attention, to think clearly, to be productive and creative.

It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.

I think I should understand that better, if I had it written down: but I can't quite follow it as you say it.

The older one becomes the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious technicolour

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously . . .

I'm a thinker; I think too much. So for me to freestyle rap, it's like I'm thinking three, four time steps ahead, and I hate it.

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind , and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections:;; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

I was thinking about how disjointedly time seemed to flow, passing in a blur at times, with single images standing out more clearly than others. And then, at other times, every second was significant, etched in my mind.

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.

We spend the early years feeding our brains with information and the latter half trying not to think about it all.

...forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.

Only the slow reader will notice the odd crowd of images-flier, butcher, seal-which have gathered to comment on the aims and activities of the speeding reader, perhaps like gossips at a wedding.