Memory Organization Quotes

Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before the big Paris vacation. I was doing Y in the first summer after I learned to drive. Z happened the weekend after I landed my first job. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events.

Apparently there is redundancy in memory: You store the same memory in different parts of your brain for accessing at different speeds. That speed would depend on the frequency of use and the importance of the knowledge.

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.

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

History is organized memory, and the organization is all important!

Your eyes is camera and your brain is a file cabinet.

Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

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

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.

Where past generations had film cameras, scrapbooks, notebooks, and that part of the brain which stores memories, we now have a smartphone app for every conceivable recording need. The thing is, all that time you spend logging and then curating the quotidian aspects of your daily life is time taken away from actually doing things.

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

I did some research on this a couple years ago," Augustus continued. "I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?" "And are there?" "Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about

He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories. -Hazel, Cannery Row

For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.

An educated memory depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the associations; and, second, on their number.

I myself never make any notes. Usually, if I write something down, I can't read it afterwards.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

The artist works with a concentration of his whole personality, and the conscious part of it resolves conflicts, organized memories, and prevents him from trying to walk in two directions at the same time.

Let's get into talking about how autism is similar animal behavior. The thing is I don't think in a language, and animals don't think in a language. It's sensory based thinking, thinking in pictures, thinking in smells, thinking in touches. It's putting these sensory based memories into categories.

Of course, when you remember your life, you never remember anything in a chronological way. You always have pieces of memories, and some of these memories are full of details and very colorful. Some of them you just see the action and it's completely blank.

I think I have a habit of, in my head, taking notes on whatever, you know, whether they're verbal or pictorial or just making a note of things as they're happening.