Siri Hustvedt Quotes

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 think that I cannot immediately see the route by which we should really understand memory and the workings of the brain.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

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.

Memory, the warder of the brain.

It is as if one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the Southern Hemisphere of the brain.

Memory works according to meaning, and when something is important to you, the Google in your brain brings it forward all of a sudden.

The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.

My mind sort of works like a search engine. You ask me something, and I start seeing pictures.

Consciousness is the feel of accessing memory.

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

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

There's a place in the brain for knowing what cannot be remembered.

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.

The brain can process two million bits of information per second. It remembers everything you've ever seen, everything you've ever heard.

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

To live (as I understand it) is to exist within a conception of time. But to remember is to vacate the very notion of time. Every memory, no matter how remote its subject, takes place 'Now,' at the moment it's called to the mind. The more something is recalled, the more the brain has a chance to refine the original experience. Because every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.

Memory feeds imagination.

In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

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.

Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

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

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