Clive Thompson Quotes

Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.

When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind's collective memory.

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

'The cloud' is effectively an augmentation of our brains' memories.

Because our ancestors lived in social groups that changed slowly, because they encountered the same people throughout their lives, they could keep almost every social detail they needed to know in their heads.

The outsourcing of our memory to machines expands the amount of data to which we have access, but degrades our brain’s own ability to remember things.

We cannot develop and print a memory.

Wouldn't you like to have an augmented memory chip that you could plug into your head so you don't have to look everything up and remember everything?

Our memory is like a shop in the window of which is exposed now one, now another photograph of the same person. And as a rule the most recent exhibit remains for some time the only one to be seen.

Everybody has an image of [princess Margaret], to a certain extent. But I felt it would have been harder if we were playing them as they are now. In a way, I don't know how much of a living memory we as a collective have of them in the '50s, when Margaret was 21 and this sort of Elizabeth Taylor. You don't think of your grandparents as being teenagers. You just can't - your brain just can't go there!

If you could change the neural pathways in your brain so that you could recall everything you've ever heard, taste, smelled or touched, basically from the womb on, and use it at your disposal, that's an interesting concept.

We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library

Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America...

The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.

Historical and public memory is not merely on the side of domination.

Here is a shared memory that we didn't share, forgot to share, for almost ninety years.

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.

Memories aren't stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.

Remember on this one thing, said Badger. The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memories. This is how people care for themselves.

You have a memory chip that small implanted in you,” he verified. I nodded, guessing this was somewhat worse than having cooties.

Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.

(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.

Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that informs the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life.