Joshua Foer Quotes

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.

— Joshua Foer

“When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.”

— Joshua Foer

How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember ... No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory ... Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it's about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have became estranged ... memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.

— Joshua Foer

“To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.”

— Joshua Foer

“Who we are and what we do it is fundamentally a function of what we remember.”

— Joshua Foer

“Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, studies elderly patients with a relatively common form of brain disease called frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. He's found that in some cases where the FTD is localized on the left side of the brain, people who had never picked up a paintbrush or an instrument can develop extraordinary artistic and musical abilities at the very end of their lives. As their other cognitive skills fade away, they become narrow savants.”

— Joshua Foer

“Learning texts is worth doing not because it's easy but because it's hard.”

— Joshua Foer

“Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read. When I read a book, what do I hope will stay with me a year later? If it's a work of nonfiction, the thesis, maybe, if the book has one. A few savory details, perhaps. If it's fiction, the broadest outline of the plot, something about the main characters (at least their names), and an overall critical judgment about the book. Even these are likely to fade. Looking up at my shelves, at the books that have drained so many of my waking hours, is always a dispiriting experience. One Hundred Years of Solitude: I remember magical realism and that I enjoyed it. But that's about it. I don't even recall when I read it. About Wuthering Heights I remember exactly two things: that I read it in a high school English class and that there was a character named Heathcliff. I couldn't say whether I liked the book or not.”

— Joshua Foer

“There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.”

— Joshua Foer

Growing up in the days when you still had to punch buttons to make a telephone call, I could recall the numbers of all my close friends and family. Today, I'm not sure if I know more than four phone numbers by heart. And that's probably more than most.

— Joshua Foer

“One of the great challenges of our age, in which the tools of our productivity are also the tools of our leisure, is to figure out how to make more useful those moments of procrastination when we're idling in front of our computer screens.”

— Joshua Foer

“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.”

— Joshua Foer

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.

— Joshua Foer

“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.”

— Joshua Foer

“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.”

— Joshua Foer

“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.”

— Joshua Foer

“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.”

— Joshua Foer

“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.”

— Joshua Foer

“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.”

— Joshua Foer

“We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.”

— Joshua Foer

“With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of always present, ever searchable, unforgetting external memories that only grows as one ages.”

— Joshua Foer

Someday in the distant cyborg future, when our internal and external memories fully merge, we may come to possess infinite knowledge. But that's not the same thing as wisdom.

— Joshua Foer

“When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind's collective memory.”

— Joshua Foer

“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.”

— Joshua Foer

“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.”

— Joshua Foer

“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.”

— Joshua Foer

“Our subjective experience of time is highly variable. We all know that days can pass like weeks and months can feel like years, and that the opposite can be just as true: A month or year can zoom by in what feels like no time at all.”

— Joshua Foer

Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.

— Joshua Foer

“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.”

— Joshua Foer

“I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I'm ashamed to admit that I still can't read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish.”

— Joshua Foer

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.

— Joshua Foer

“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.”

— Joshua Foer

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

— Joshua Foer

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

— Joshua Foer

“The best memorizers in the world - who almost all hail from Europe - can memorize a pack of cards in less than a minute. A few have begun to approach the 30-second mark, considered the 'four-minute mile of memory.'”

— Joshua Foer

“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.”

— Joshua Foer

“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.”

— Joshua Foer

“I Came away from the U.S. Memory Championship eager to find out how Ed and Lukas did it. Were these just extraordinary individuals, pridigies from the long tail of humanity's bell curve, or was there something we could all learn from their talents?”

— Joshua Foer

“What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled deliberate practice.”

— Joshua Foer

“What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence?”

— Joshua Foer

“Who are you going to be more impressed by, the person who has a litany of his own opinions, or the historian who can draw on the great thinkers who came before him?”

— Joshua Foer

“I believe that they who wish to do easy things without trouble and toil must previously have been trained in more difficult things,”

— Joshua Foer

“We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.”

— Joshua Foer

“Ben developed a similarly Byzantine system for memorizing binary digits, which enables him to convert any ten-digit-long string of ones and zeros into a unique image. That's 210, or 1,024, images set aside for binaries. When he sees 1101001001, he immediately sees it as a single chunk, an image of a card game. When he sees 0111011010, he instantaneously conjures up an image of a cinema. In international memory competitions, mental athletes are given sheets of 1,200 binary digits, thirty to a row, forty rows to a page. Ben turns each row of thirty digits into a single image. The number 110110100000111011010001011010, for example, is a muscleman putting a fish in a tin. At the time, Ben held the world record for having learned 3,705 random ones and zeroes in half an hour.”

— Joshua Foer

“We read and read and read, and we forget and forget and forget. So why do we bother? Michel de Montaigne expressed the dilemma of extensive reading in the sixteenth century: "I leaf through books, I do not study them," he wrote. "What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else's. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.”

— Joshua Foer

“I wonder if Socrates would have appreciated the flagrant irony: It's only because his pupils Plato and Xenophon put his disdain for the written word into written words that we have any knowledge of it today”

— Joshua Foer

“You work now so you can rest later," he told the student. "You carry your books now so someone else can carry your books later.”

— Joshua Foer

“Education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can't have higher-level learning- you can't analyze-without retrieving information.' And you can't retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between "learning" and "memorizing" is false, Matthews contends. You can't learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can't memorize without learning.”

— Joshua Foer

“Experts step outside their comfort zone and study themselves failing.”

— Joshua Foer

“Jonah Lehrer is one of the most talented explainers of science that we've got. What a pleasure it is to follow his investigation of creativity and its sources. Imagine is his best book yet.”

— Joshua Foer