Joshua Foer Quotes

For an average noun or an average verb, an average mind can quickly create reference. Where did they hear it? See it? What does it remind them of? What is its connection? When was it last used in conversation? What has been my experience with it? A host of memories appear when you hear a word you remember.

We do not know where to look, or what to look for, when something is memorized. We do not know what it means, or what change there is in the nervous system, when a fact is learned. This is a very important problem which has not been solved at all.

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.

The mind of a human being is formed only of comparisons made in order to examine analogies, and therefore cannot precede the existence of memory.

I have found that all of my memories seem to need a place and that a good part of what we think of as explicit memory has to do with location.

I have never been able to remember the number of my driver's license, and there have been times when I couldn't even remember my own telephone number, but when I hear a song, sometimes only once, I never forget the melody or the lyric.

It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss.

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

Learning is often spoken of as if we are watching the open pages of all the books which we have ever read, and then, when occasion arises, we select the right page to read aloud to the universe.

Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard. What you’ve really got to do is focus on learning as much about life, and about various aspects of it first.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

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

It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.

Memory is so crazy! It's like we've got these drawers crammed with tons of useless stuff. Meanwhile, all the really important things we just keep forgetting, one after the other.

To the best of my recollection, I must recall on my memory, I cannot remember

First the education of the senses, then the education of the intellect.

You can learn a lesson the first time, when it's presented in a package that is joyous - or at least palatable. But if you don't learn the lesson the first time, then there will be a second time and a third time. And each time it will just get harder and harder.

How do you have a think in pictures? Well, you have to sort the pictures into categories. You know, for example, a dog knows that, you know, there's good people and there's bad people. And I talked to a lady the other day where her dog was afraid of people with white beards because she had adopted him from an animal shelter and somebody with a white beard had abused him. And this dog was now afraid of everybody that had a white beard. That was the bad category.

Memory - the very skin of life.

Memories may escape the action of the will, may sleep a long time, but when stirred by the right influence, though that influence be light as a shadow, they flash into full stature and life with everything in place

Being a bad writer a thousand times first.

La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.

For as long as I can remember, I've had memories.