Joshua Foer Quotes

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Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.

Once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.

If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.

As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.

Over the last few millennia we've invented a series of technologies - from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone - that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.

The sport of competitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where every year somebody comes up with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly, and then the rest of the field has to play catch-up.

We often talk about people with great memories as though it were some sort of an innate gift, but that is not the case. Great memories are learned. At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention. We remember when we are deeply engaged.

How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we're not willing to process deeply?

Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.

Back when I lived in Brooklyn, I'd sometimes take the Q train all the way out to Coney Island and back, and work on my laptop. There's something about pushy New Yorkers looking over your shoulder that really makes you produce sentences.

Woodworking requires a completely different kind of thinking and problem-solving ability than writing. With writing, you take a set of facts and ideas, and you reason your way forward to a story that pulls them together. With woodworking, you start with an end product in mind, and reason your way backward to the raw wood.

There is a short window at the beginning of one's professional life, when it is comparatively easy to take big risks. Make the most of that time, before circumstances make you risk averse.

We're visual creatures. Probably, when we were hunter gatherers... that was the kind of thing that mattered. And remembering, say, phone numbers was, like, not that important when you're hunting down a mastodon or whatever.

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like 'knight.'

No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.

Invented languages have often been created in tandem with entire invented universes, and most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction.

One trick, known as the journey method or 'memory palace,' is to conjure up a familiar space in the mind's eye, and then populate it with images of whatever it is you want to remember.

The 'OK Plateau' is that place we all get to where we just stop getting better at something. Take typing, for example. You might type and type and type all day long, but once you reach a certain level, you just don't get appreciably faster. That's because it's become automatic. You've moved it to the back of your mind's filing cabinet.

We've outsourced our memories to digital devices, and the result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small forgotten thing as evidence that they're failing us.

We've forgotten how to remember, and just as importantly, we've forgotten how to pay attention. So, instead of using your smartphone to jot down crucial notes, or Googling an elusive fact, use every opportunity to practice your memory skills. Memory is a muscle, to be exercised and improved.

Part of being creative is not being super-duper focused.

Many memory techniques involve creating unforgettable imagery, in your mind's eye. That's an act of imagination. Creating really weird imagery really quickly was the most fun part of my training to compete in the U.S. Memory Competition.

We reserve the term 'genius' for people who are creative, who are innovators, who think in ways that are entirely new. In the Middle Ages, the term 'genius' was reserved for people with the best memories. That is telling.

During the Middle Ages they understood that words accompanied by imagery are much more memorable. By making the margins of a book colorful and beautiful, illuminations help make the text unforgettable. It's unfortunate that we've lost the art of illumination.

The fact that books today are mostly a string of words makes it easier to forget the text. With the impact of the iPad and the future of the book being up for re-imagination, I wonder whether we'll rediscover the importance of making texts richer visually.

Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.

What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I learned, is the ability to create lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly. Many competitive mnemonists argue that their skills are less a feat of memory than of creativity.

There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe.

All across Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, we find cultures that didn't know about mouth kissing until their first contact with European explorers. And the attraction was not always immediately apparent. Most considered the act of exchanging saliva revolting.

Kissing could have begun as a way of sniffing out who's who. From a whiff to a kiss was just a short trip across the face.

If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.

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