Memory Limitations Quotes

Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.

I have a horrible memory and I used to consider that a liability, but I've learned along the way that talking to people is really a beautiful thing.

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

People are very good [at] thinking about agents. The mind is set really beautifully to think about agents. Agents have traits. Agents have behaviors. We understand agents. We form global impression of their personalities. We are really not very good at remembering sentences where the subject of the sentence is an abstract notion.

When you get asked hundreds of questions, it's not possible to remember the answer to every one.

...memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously.

My character and personality is today and tomorrow; I do not work well remembering further back.

It's an ethical pact I've made with myself and with the reader - not to invent. And when I can't remember, I say I can't remember. I'm just appalled by the memoirs published by people who regurgitate dialogue, conversations from when they were small children, and they go on for three or four pages. I can't even remember what we said to each other ten minutes ago! How can I remember what was said sixty years ago? It's not possible.

for how can you remember the feel of pleasure or pain or choking emotion? You can remember only that you had them.

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

Memory is like all other human powers, with which no man can be satisfied who measures them by what he can conceive, or by what he can desire.

I just think it's patently absurd for scientists to categorize objects on the basis of the numbers of objects that they can remember.

Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.