Joshua Foer Quotes

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.

We often talk about people with great memories as though it were some sort of an innate gift, but that is not the case. Great memories are learned. At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention. We remember when we are deeply engaged.

Memory enhancement self-help programs abound and promise improved memory performance by the utilization of any number of seemingly unique techniques focused on the context of how information is encoded.

My memory seems to be holding on quite well. There is no reason why it shouldn't if you keep training it.

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

My memory's bad!

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.

The best memorizers in the world - who almost all hail from Europe - can memorize a pack of cards in less than a minute. A few have begun to approach the 30-second mark, considered the 'four-minute mile of memory.'

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.

I've actually got quite a good memory. I've good recall. It's often things which other people might not notice.

Once I'd reached the point where I could squirrel away more than 30 digits a minute in memory palaces, I still only sporadically used the techniques to memorize the phone numbers of people I actually wanted to call. I found it was just too simple to punch them into my cell phone.

I'm, like, really bad at remembering names.

Nothing is so retentive as a nation's memory.

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 seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on memory alone.

I'm not good at remembering things, in general.

I have a bad memory - thank God for that!

In all of my films, there is a desire to testify, to interrogate the past.

Our national future does not demand we revise and malign our past.

Every one complains of a poor memory, no one of a weak judgment.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

It is certain that memory contains not only philosophy, but all the arts and all that appertain to the use of life.

For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.

Your memory is your first and best weapon, ladies. Learn to use it.

Every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own threatens to disappear irretrievably.