Loren Eiseley Quotes

When the brain is working to remember something, similar patterns of neurons fire as they did during the perception of the original event. These networks are linked, and each time we revisit them, they become stronger and more associated. But they need the proper retrieval cues--words, smells, images-- for them to be brought back as memories

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

Memory is a gulf that a word can move to its lowest depths.

I love that the idea of examining memory, and the way memory is edited was made more interesting because it was being filtered through a writer.

My memory is coming back. It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere, and most are not important.

Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing.

Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.

It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

The most important, the longest lasting, the strongest emotional, and the most practiced memories are the ones that are embedded the deepest in the brain, and because we have retrieved them so many times previously, they are the most able to be retrieved. We all hear about people who can remember their youth, their phone number, or street address from 70 years ago, but they cannot recall what they had for breakfast. The memory of this morning's breakfast wasn't rehearsed, and wasn't very important, so it fades away quickly.

Memory works like the collection glass in the Camera obscura: it gathers everything together and therewith produces a far more beautiful picture than was present originally.

Why does the brain retain the memory of the hurt from yesterday?

My mother used to say, "Tell your brain you want that piece of information or you want to solve this problem, and then just walk away from it. Just forget about it. Just do something else, completely distract yourself, and you'll see, it's like a computer. Eventually, it will deliver it up." And I find that's really true.

The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

Imagination is merely the exploitation of our memory.

Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past.

Few have wished for memory so much as they have longed for forgetfulness.

Moment by moment throughout our lifetime, our brains hum with the work of making meaning: weaving together many thousands of threads of information into all manner of thoughts, feelings, memories, and ideas.

I think of memory as a game, that is as something one engages in with a very profound kind of "playfulness."

The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

The reactions music evokes are not feelings, but they are the images, memories of feelings.

If you were feeling sad right now and you recall a sad - or, a very happy memory from the past, it will be tinged with more sadness based on your current feeling. So we felt like that was actually on solid scientific ground .

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