Quotes by Joshua Foer

About Joshua Foer:

Joshua Foer is a freelance journalist living in New Haven, Connecticut, with a primary focus on hard sciences. He was the 2006 U.S.A. Memory Champion, which was described in his 2011 book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. He spoke at the TED conference in February 2012.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

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 illu...

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 ...

Joshua Foer

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

Joshua Foer

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.

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 th...

Joshua Foer

Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can't explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they're happening.

Joshua Foer

To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.

Joshua Foer

learning texts is worth doing not because it's easy but because it's hard.

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

Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by … not paying attention?

Joshua Foer

Over the last few millennial, we've invented a series of technologies … that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to outsource this fundamental human capacity.

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

When we first hear [a] word, we start putting these associational hooks into it that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date.

Joshua Foer

A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.

Joshua Foer

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the...

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

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

If you want to make information stick, it's best to learn it, go away from it for a while, come back to it later, leave it behind again, and once again return to it - to engage with it deeply across time. Our memories naturally degrade, but each time...

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

Author Bio

  • NameJoshua Foer
  • DescriptionAmerican freelance journalist
  • BornSeptember 23, 1982
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionJournalist