Gary Wolf Quotes

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

If you want to make information stick, it's best to learn it, go away from it for a while, come back to it later, leave it behind again, and once again return to it - to engage with it deeply across time. Our memories naturally degrade, but each time you return to a memory, you reactivate its neural network and help to lock it in.

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off.

You don't just forget things overnight.

It doesn't matter how long you forget, only how soon you remember!

One thing is having skated five of the best races I've probably could have skated. It was nice to peak at the right time and to do it in an important time in somebody's career.

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.

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.

I don't think forgetting is an important feature of human memory. I think it's important to be able to remember things accurately.

Rather than studying the most complex form of memory in a very complicated animal, we had to take the most simple form - an implicit form of memory - in a very simple animal. So I began to look around for very simple animals. And I focused in on the marine snail Aplysia.

Why can we remember the tiniest detail that has happened to us, and not remember how many times we have told it to the same person.

Short term memory is not good.

As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.

Everywhere I go, I will make a good payday. But we got to choose the right opponent and the right time and the right venue.

I have a great memory.

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

Life teaches you that you need to make decisions in the right time - not too early, not too late.

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.

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.

Computers have wonderful memories. Human memory is more fuzzy.

How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person?

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

Memory is a big one: our ability to use the memory and move things in and out efficiently - that affected what we were able to do more than anything.

I can remember weird things from way back, but not what I had for breakfast.

I've got a short memory span.