Joshua FoerOnce 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.362ThoughtTime
Joshua FoerSequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.363Reading
Joshua FoerPart of being creative is not being super-duper focused. ✨ Memorization Tips: 5 Easy Ways To Ace That Test by Jack Howard, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 21, 2012.352Reflection
Joshua FoerKissing 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.374Reading
Joshua FoerBack 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 ov… ▶341Time
Joshua FoerExperts step outside their comfort zone and study themselves failing.363Reading
Joshua FoerOne 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 procras… ▶345Time
Joshua FoerGrowing 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 m… ▶369Love
Joshua FoerEvolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex - and especially, it seems, jokes about sex. ✨ Joshua… ▶325HumorThought
Joshua FoerWhat 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… ▶337SadnessThought
Joshua FoerMemory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human. ✨ Joshua Foer (2011). Moonwalking with … ▶282Humanity
Joshua FoerThe 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, considere… ▶348Reflection
Joshua Foer'Moonwalking with Einstein' refers to a memory device I used when I memorized a deck of playing cards at the U.S. Memory Championship. When I competed in 2006, I set a new U.S. re… ▶283Thought
Joshua FoerMonotony 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 cub… ▶262LifeReadingTime
Joshua FoerWhen 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.295Love
Joshua FoerIf you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember. ✨ Feats of memory anyone can do. TED Talk, www.ted.com. February 2012.276Life
Joshua FoerJonah 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… ▶298Reading
Joshua FoerTo attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order o… ▶299HumanityTime
Joshua FoerAll 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 no… ▶211Reflection
Joshua FoerTo 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 a… ▶266LifePhilosophy
Joshua FoerAs 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. ✨ Can Any… ▶244Philosophy
Joshua FoerDuring 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 t… ▶212Reading
Joshua FoerWe'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.213Time
Joshua FoerIf 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 reme… ▶2810DeathReadingThought
Joshua FoerMany memory techniques involve creating unforgettable imagery, in your minds eye. Thats an act of imagination. Creating really weird imagery really quickly was the most fun part o… ▶235Thought
Joshua FoerI met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.192Time
Joshua FoerIt is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. To think, Borges writes, is to forget. ✨ Joshua… ▶237HumanityThought
Joshua FoerThe art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between di… ▶226HopeReadingThought
Joshua FoerIf 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 wi… ▶161Time
Joshua FoerWhat makes things memorable is that they are meaningful, significant, colorful.172Philosophy
