Joshua Foer Quotes

Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say, Tony Danza. The grand masters associate each card with a person, an action, or an object so that every group of three cards can be converted into a sentence.

What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I learned, is the ability to create lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly. Many competitive mnemonists argue that their skills are less a feat of memory than of creativity.

One trick, known as the journey method or 'memory palace,' is to conjure up a familiar space in the mind's eye, and then populate it with images of whatever it is you want to remember.

Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.

When it comes to memories of that iconic type, memories that are burned into you, I have maybe ten or so from my childhood. I'm a bad rememberer of situations. I forget almost everything as soon as it happens.

In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

It alarms me to think of all that I have read and how little of it has stayed with me.

I would love to have a photographic memory. It would come in handy with the rants I'm given on Scrubs... often on short notice!

All of us roughly know what memory is. I mean, memory is sort of the storage of the past. It's the storage of our personal experiences. It's a very big deal.

People have no memory of phone numbers now because of the cell phone - their address book is in a cell phone.

No one can remember more than three points.

We've forgotten how to remember, and just as importantly, we've forgotten how to pay attention. So, instead of using your smartphone to jot down crucial notes, or Googling an elusive fact, use every opportunity to practice your memory skills. Memory is a muscle, to be exercised and improved.

I do have a really good memory. I mean, like, I can remember all the phone numbers of everybody on the street I grew up on.

I never forget, remember that. Not an action, not a name, not a face.

In terms of long-term durable storage, the human mind, paradoxically, is pretty good, but it's very fragile.

People do not connect with what happened last week, let alone what happened 20 years ago.

Memory is the thing you forget with.

People can remember their childhood, but events from four or five years ago are in a never-never land.

I like to remember phone numbers because it keeps your brain active. If you don't use it, you lose it.

Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of the crowd.

The inhabitants are hardly barbarous, they have a ...marvelous faculty for remembering places, and for describing them to one another. They ...can recall things that a White could not rehearse without writing

Computers have wonderful memories. Human memory is more fuzzy.

Many memory techniques involve creating unforgettable imagery, in your mind's eye. That's an act of imagination. Creating really weird imagery really quickly was the most fun part of my training to compete in the U.S. Memory Competition.

To my mind this is what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training. If you want to bring the stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back.

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