Susannah Cahalan 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.

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

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

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

It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.

It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.

Memory feeds imagination.

Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing.

Memory is the basis of every journey.

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

Memory. My poison, my food.

The most important, the longest lasting, the strongest emotional, and the most practiced memories are the ones that are embedded the deepest in the brain, and because we have retrieved them so many times previously, they are the most able to be retrieved. We all hear about people who can remember their youth, their phone number, or street address from 70 years ago, but they cannot recall what they had for breakfast. The memory of this morning's breakfast wasn't rehearsed, and wasn't very important, so it fades away quickly.

Human memory works its own wheel, and stops where it will, entirely without reference to the last stop, and with no connection with the next.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]

All of that is constantly operating when you not only learn, but when you recall. But as you recall in a different light, the weights with which something is more probably going to be or not recalled on the next instance, are going to be changed. So you're constantly changing the way, for instance, synapses are going to fire very easily or not so easily.

We consider ourselves as defective in memory, either because we remember less than we desire, or less than we suppose others to remember.

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

Without a functioning hippocampus, names, dates, and other information falls straight through the mind like a sieve.

If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.

If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.

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.

What business does memory have with time?

Goldfish have no memory, I guess their lives are much like mine. And the little plastic castle is a surprise everytime.

I think it would be just to say the most essential characteristic of mind is memory, using this word in its broadest sense to include every influence of past experience on present reactions.