Joshua Foer Quotes

My brain is like a hard drive. Once you start adding new information, you start cutting off old information.

Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.

Do not trust your memory; it is a net full of holes; the most beautiful prizes slip through it.

My great frustration is that, more and more, my memories come and go, and friends all my life are not recognized. Many of the things I say and do, I can no longer remember even right afterwards.

However, my problems with my memory are further complicated by the fact that while I don't have any recollection of things I have actually done, I have very vivid recollections of loads of things that I haven't done.

His nerve, his memory, and I can't remember the third thing.

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

Our memories are card indexes consulted and then returned in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.

People talk from memory and memory often plays false.

My memory's not too good.

I don't know a great deal about Alzheimer's - just what it does.

I literally can't get anywhere now without the map on my phone. I used to use an A-Z when I first came to London, and now I really struggle because there's no dot to show where I am. And I think that part of my brain doesn't work any more.

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.

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

My grandfather had Alzheimer's. He would eat everything and anything that was around; then he wouldn't remember that he ate it and would demand to be fed again.

I trust anybody's memory more than I trust mine.

My memory is not that good anymore.

Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation.

Remembering. Forgetting. I'm not sure which is worse.

As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.

Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now,the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.

Every time someone forgets, someone else disappears,' my brother wrote.

As for the square at Meknes, where I used to go every day, it's even simpler: I do not see it at all anymore. All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words that are indivisibly bound together: a charming square at Meknes. ... I don't see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.