Joshua Foer Quotes

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

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

Memory is the basis of every journey.

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

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

The idea that when you correct a fact, you erase that fact from people's memories is the reverse of the truth. When you correct a fact, what you do is you further lodge that fact into people's minds, and they remember the error.

Memory feeds imagination.

Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing.

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.

believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade.

Memory was such a worthless thing, really. Nothing it dealt with was attainable. It was concerned with phantom acts and feelings, with all that was uncapturable except in thought. It was without satisfaction.

The way real memories work, from what we understand, is really complex. And it's an interconnection of different things and redundancy in the brain. So the idea of a memory existing as a little snow globe - the way we represent it in the film - is actually not scientifically accurate at all.

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.

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

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.

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

The incidence of memory is like light from dead stars whose influence lingers long after the events themselves.

It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.

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.

I've learned that memories can have a physical, almost living presence.

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

Memory is imagination pinned down.

Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.

A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.

Mind is memory, not intelligence.